Excavations with Connie Chen
Conversations at the margins of faith. Excavations interviews scholars, survivors, and spiritual truth-tellers doing the work of recovering what religion buried: centering marginalized voices, bodies, and the theologies that were never supposed to survive. Hosted by Connie Chen.
Excavations with Connie Chen
Faithful Without God: Marxism, Christianity, and Getting Free
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What does it mean to live by Christian ethics without God at the center? What happens when Marxist theory meets the bars of Rikers Island, the wards of outpatient psychiatric care, and the walls of San Quentin? In this episode of Excavations, Connie sits down with Chris Alfonso (Jean-Paul Fartre), a Marxist scholar, organizer, and abolitionist, to trace the surprising theological architecture inside radical thought.
They explore the structural parallels between Hegel's dialectic and Christian eschatology, why Jesus might be history's most compelling militant communist, the difference between Marxism as critique and Marxism as state religion, and how theory fails the moment it stops meeting people where they are.
This episode is for anyone who has ever felt the gap between what institutions profess and what they practice. And for anyone trying to keep the faith, in whatever language that takes.
Topics include: liberation theology, abolition, Marxist philosophy, Hegel, Paulo Freire, CLR James, prison organizing, sacred encounter, agnosticism, dialectical materialism, embodied pedagogy, No Brooklyn Jails.
I can have all this theory in my head, and I can even be right. And still, the person I'm speaking with that is directly affected by the things that I'm right about just have no like relevance. To me, that is a sacred moment. That is a sacred moment where you realize there is still limits of even being right. God's existence does not inform how I decide to live my life. Because if God didn't exist, I'd live my life in an identical way, in the sense I want everyone to get free, want their lives to flourish. And so in that regard, I would hope if there is a limitless eternal being who's like pure, is is good incarnate, if that's really my goal and he can let him judge. Only God can judge me. We're to Tupac. But like, you know, and if I'm really true in my mission and and God is what I think that God is, then it'll be okay.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Excavations. Today we have Chris with us. This is a podcast that centers marginalized voices, bodies, ideas. And I really admire Chris's work online because there is this desire to translate pedagogy and to translate the idea of theory that feels to me stuck in the intellectual and academic world that isn't accessible to people. And when we started talking about this podcast, I realized there were a lot of intersection in our thinking that Lance is in the same place, but we come at it from different directions. And I think there's interesting Venn diagram right there. But I will ask Chris to introduce himself.
SPEAKER_02Connie, I'm really excited that you had me on. That's really sweet because I'm thinking the exact same thing. Hi, everyone. I'm uh Chris, Chris Alfonso. My Instagram is John Paul Fartra. That's J-E-A-N-P-A-U-L underscore F-A-R-T-R-E underscore. I guess just to introduce myself to your audience, I'm a Marxist scholar. I like to think I'm an organizer, but I always want to be better. Abolitionist. I worked in the New York City criminal courts for a long time, trying to get youth offenders out of Rikers Island and non-incarcerative sentences. And now I work with in outpatient psychiatric, providing psychiatric medical care for New York City's underprivileged. And outside of that, just organizing projects trying to create a future where we can all be free. So thank you. I really appreciate you having me on.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. Thank you for coming and for your time. I wanted to start, you told me, gave me a hint of you being you used to be really religious in a weird way. Let's start there. What does that mean? And where does it still linger in the body, even if you're not anymore?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't know how true this is. I've never been diagnosed, but I'm a big fan of Hegel. My sister refers to it as my uh autistic hyperfixation. Her words, not mine. But when I told you that I was religious in a weird way, I was raised religious. My parents, you know, went to church. I think my dad was Catholic, my mother was Methodist. But I was like really, I really took it seriously from a very, very young age. So like, you know, I think about the time Harry Potter came out, I'm like spending my days reading Harry Potter, and then at night I would read the Bible till I fell asleep till like two o'clock in the morning. And like that was maybe two to three nights a week where I'm just so terrified of going to hell that I'm like, how do I figure out the rules to make sure that I'm operating in the right way? And it was a real, real big fixation of mine. I thought maybe my first major in college was world religions. I just I just thought if we read and we study and we research, we can figure it out, and then we won't be eternally damned.
SPEAKER_00We had very similar childhoods. That was me. I was like, Yeah, yeah. Okay. So what caused the shift? What broke? What crap?
SPEAKER_02So I wasn't sure if I was gonna go to college. Uh I busted out. I was from a pretty poor neighborhood, and I bussed out to a really wealthy one and went to high school out there. And one of my best friend's fathers was kind of like, Chris, you're too smart to not go to college. And I had never really heard an adult call me smart in that way before, or at least it never really resonated. So when he said that, I kind of, you know, scrambled. My mom helped me a little bit, and we just figured out how can I apply to whatever. And I ended up going to Humboldt State for one semester, and I drop out immediately. And then on my way back, I was feeling a little down about myself. It was like not okay to not go to college from the high school I went to, and so the community that I had developed in high school, I was I just felt very ashamed. And I'm not gonna go into too many details, but I started getting into a lot of trouble in this period. And I remember when I started getting out of trouble, coming to this realization that God didn't get me into trouble and he also didn't get me out. I did both of those things. And so now I'm much more agnostic. I wouldn't say it in any way I'm against the idea of religion or spirituality. But there was a period where in order to accept my own responsibility over my own life and both the bad and the good things that happen, I kind of rejected the entire way of looking at the world and the and really all the previous reasons why I thought the world was the way it was. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00It does, it does. It does. That like to accept in order to take your own responsibility, in order to move forward, you needed a material understanding of why you were doing the things you were doing. That sounds like what I'm hearing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, you know, you you start doing illegal things, whether that's partying or messing around with the wrong people, and really maybe I was the wrong person at the time, you know. But there's a way to look at your life that's so kind of fixated that you're not looking at all of the smaller decisions that you've made that make it so you have the opportunity to make some really, really bad decisions. And things at a certain point, I think maybe I was like kind of homeless for a couple of weeks or maybe a month or something. And I'm just sitting there and I'm thinking about things, and and luckily I had some really powerful people in my life that were kind of like, you know, Chris, you gotta get this together, like what's going on? That I just was like kind of hit over the head with it. And I was like, look, either I make the decisions to get out of this and I quit blaming other people, I qu quit blaming God, I quit blaming anyone, and I just start, you know, doing the small steps today to start retransitioning my own personal future.
SPEAKER_00The question I want to ask is did do you think God failed you? But that's not the right question to ask. The right I don't know what how to how to phrase that, but what I'm getting at is you saying that like your moral grounding is still Christian ethics, right? And I'm thinking to myself, so many questions. When did you encounter Marx? How did you encounter Marx? Does Marx actually provide an ethics or just the diagnosis for you? And like what from Christian morality stuck, even though you were like, oh shit, like, you know, I gotta stop doing this thing where I put everything on God and not hold it in here?
SPEAKER_02I love that question. I mean, in terms of like the chronology of my life, it's a little bit further down the line. I needed to mess up a few more times to get to Marx because I had read him, I was like familiar, and I think I liked him. I I learned about the Black Panthers and Malcolm X much, much earlier. I'm from Oakland, California. But at the time when I learned about those people, I really didn't know what Marxism-Leninism was. So to me, the Black Panthers just represented Black Liberation, which I was all the way down for. And it wasn't until later that Marxism became a big piece of how I understood the Panth the Panthers. But directly to your question about like when Marx came into the picture, like I said, I I was interested in, I've always been interested in reading. And I think maybe once I finally got it together to go to college for the the real long haul, I was reading a lot of philosophy. I maybe could have been classified as a philosophy bro to a certain extent. But when I got my hands on Hegel, which was when I went to grad school and maybe even a little bit before, that's when this childhood experience of viciously reading the Bible in order to find out the rules of life kind of returned to me. Because Hegel is very much, it's very biblical in like kind of its aesthetic, I would say. I don't I I don't know if your audience is familiar, but he's known as like one of the hardest people to read. And I really read him in a biblical way. Like I'd wake up every morning, I would read a passage, I'd think about my own life, I'd think about how the maestro, what he would say to me, but in a way where the Bible seemed to get more and more mysterious the more I studied, at least personally, Hegel worked the opposite way. He began very, very mysterious. And as I learned the terminology, as I learned the concepts, as I continued to read and then reread, kind of like waves on a beach, you know, it started to formalize and it actually started to make a lot of sense. And now, you know, at the risk of sounding maybe a little overconfident, I can really read Hegel the way someone could read a newspaper. Like I'll just like, you know, and it's and it's a really, really wonderful experience. So my entry point into serious Marxist philosophy was through Hegel, through CLR James, who loved Hegel, very famous black communists active in America in like the early 20s and 30s. And then like outside of that, I was just like organizing. So I was, I think the first organizing project that I was ever really a part of was I was teaching college courses at San Quentin State Prison. I taught basic accounting, research writing, a little bit of philosophy, sociology, and then I like would show up for office hours. That was a big thing. And then we eventually organized the first ever academic conference held inside a California prison. So the things I was doing were very, very Marxist, very, very centered on how do we uplift and empower oppressed, marginalized working class communities. And then outside of that, I'm trying to think about like how do I get the exact right answers, you know, in the same way as the biblical stuff earlier, but just in terms of making the future a world we all want to live in.
SPEAKER_00I'm thinking, you know, Heigel says the world moves through these like dialectical, dialectical stages, right? You go from thesis, antithesis, synthesis towards this full realization of, I don't know, spirit, freedom, self-consciousness. There is a direction and then a destination for where you're trying to go. And that is structurally rhymes really hard with Christianity, right? Of just this idea of like we are heading somewhere towards the kingdom of God, towards the second coming. There's this resolution that happens, right? And we it both of them say, in a way, we are in a broken present, but there's an arc we're moving, the history bends towards resolution, right? Like that, that is the same. There is this for me, when I hear what you're talking about, I'm like, there's the the both of them is not like, do you feel like Marxism or you know, Heigel has a promise in quotes of the future? It is it a call. For me at least, I'll I'll say, I'll say what I feel. I feel like Marxism's call is, if you can use the word call in here, but call is not like you wait around for deliverance, right? Hence your like when I'm hearing this embodied organizing work, it's not you sitting around waiting for second coming. But actually, the Bible doesn't really say you wait around for it either, you know, or that's not like not what the Bible says, but people make it weaponize it like that. And when you de deconstruct the like weaponization of scripture, it ends up feeling to me like what I said to you, which was Marxism feels like a very faithful reading of the gospels, right? Because you are actually organizing for material change. What do you think of all of that talk in it, around it, through it, no, against it?
SPEAKER_02I I like that reading of it. I mean, I'm a big fan. Maybe I want to p put a pin in this, I want to come back to it later, but I just real quick, I'm a huge fan of whatever is important in whoever we're talking to's life. That's the entry point that I want to get to Marxism through. Whether that's black liberation, whether that's liberation theology, whether that's feminism, whatever it is, abolitionism, whatever's important to you, my belief is not in a sleight of hand way, not in a like I'm trying to trick you. I just think whatever it is that whoever I'm speaking with believes in, I think that the truest element of that, unless you're a capitalist, fascist, is gonna come back around and it's gonna lead to you putting yourself in service, you trying to build a world that's better than the one that you were thrown into, and trying to do it with your fellow, your fellowship, with your people. But to your point, so you're like, does Marxism have this predetermination, right? Is it going somewhere? Hegel does for sure. Absolutely. You said that, I agree. Like there is an end, and that end is good, and you know, everything feeds into that. I never really read this form of like, I don't want to be too dramatic here, but like nihilism in my readings of Hegel. I've heard people read that, and and I even I can see it, but I always thought, I won't be able to like quote the line, but it's something to the effect of for Hegel, the good is knowing what's right and wanting to do it. It's making the actions, the being of the world and the thought, the spirit of the world one thing, right? For Marx, I think unfortunately the problem is, and maybe in some ways the good thing if we decide to do it, is that there is no end. It's socialism or it's barbarism. You can lose, which is why it's so important that we try to win. You get what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So for Marx, there's this agency where if we don't do it, if we don't do it together and we don't do it right now, it might never get done. And then we're all, we're all, you know, SOL, right? Mm-hmm. But for Hegel, that's not the case. For Hegel, there is this constant unfolding. The world is a circle that is its own beginning, right? It's leaning towards something inevitably, and whatever happens was always meant to happen, which in some ways I think can be comforting, but not for me.
SPEAKER_01Why is it not comforting? Because I think that we have to do it.
SPEAKER_02We have to decide. There's something really important about deciding. In the same way, like when we start, we opened with like, I had to realize the problems of my life, but all the things worthy of celebration as well, are because of me and the things that I've done. And also like my life. Like, I want to give credit to my friends and family and comrades and lovers and whatever, all the people, and even like kind of acquaintances and strangers, all the people that are wrapped up in it. It's not to say, when I say it's because of me, it's not to say that no one else deserves credit to my actions or no one else, blame is not warranted, right? Trauma is real, things happen that are real, but it's just to say that if I'm gonna get out of it, I gotta make that decision to do it, you know?
SPEAKER_00No, no, no. I I I I like it. I'm just thinking. I'm thinking, okay, so then, so where does God come in? Like the Christian ethics part. Where does God come in? As in you said that your agnosticism is motivated by Marxism, which some people might find contradictory. I don't, but I think that's worth elaborating on. But also, you know, is it, is this agnosticism a conclusion or a practice? As in, you know, is it, is it that you feel like I looked at the evidence, I thought about it, you know, I landed on the thing that like I don't know if God exists because my responsibility lies with me and the people I am here with, and there we stop, or agnosticism as a discipline in which it's like, I am going to actively practice not knowing because Marxism gives us the framework that says, you know, you don't start with the metaphysical, you start with the foundations of you in front of you. And so then I'm thinking out loud here. Okay. And then so your agnosticism isn't just like I can't figure out if God is real, but it's like I am training myself to not ask the question because that's where not liberation, that's not where liberation comes from. It's like a refusal, not a failure to arrive somewhere.
SPEAKER_02No, I I think I'm following you all the way and I'm rocking with you. I'll say one, I think Jesus might be one of the best examples of a militant communist. Like, no, no joke. I think, you know, I don't want to be too hokey. I know that I've seen your content, you get you get into the real nitty-gritty, but I'll just say up here, you know, the idea of teaching a man to fish as opposed to giving a man a fish, right? Like this idea of like helping people help themselves, empowering them to help themselves, freeing people so that they can go on and live fruitful lives, like this, these are like core tenets of Christianity, at least the way that I it was taught to me. When I say I'm agnostic, I have a short answer and maybe a long-winded answer. We'll figure it out. But the short answer is just to say I'm not concerned. It's not to say that I don't think God is real. It's to say that if God is real and God is just, right, then I hope he'd rock with whatever I'm doing here on this planet. Right. I hope when I get there at the end, like he's gonna be like, wow, you know, we looked at the scoreboard, you messed up a few times over here, and you did this good. So, you know what, come on in. The long-winded answer is the same thing that I that I tell people when I talk to them about Marx and Hegel. Like Hegel is very, very concerned with like the like fundamental processes of reality, right? And and that's what I found so beautiful about it when I first started digging into it. When people talk about Marx turning Hegel on his head, and obviously Marx himself made the comment, but it's like, I don't know if Marx really thinks that there's like this beginning that's like ontologically pushing us forward into these stages that have to happen. What I can tell you for an absolute fact is that at least in his writing, he's just not concerned with it. It's not to say that he has thoughts one way or the other. He might, he might not. But it's to say that what he's using the Hegelian philosophy for is right here, right now, and this is where it can give us like material benefit. So when I think about my own religious commitments, that's how I view it. It's not to say that I God's existence does not inform how I decide to live my life. Because if God didn't exist, I'd live my life in an identical way, in the sense I want everyone to get free. I want their lives to flourish, bear fruit. I want the next generation and the generation after that to have a far easier life than we did. And so in that regard, I would hope if there is a limitless eternal being who's like pure is is good incarnate, if that's really my goal and he can let him judge. Only God can judge me. We're to Tupac. But like, you know, like that's he'll do it. And if I'm really true in my mission and and God is what I think that God is, then it'll be okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna ask a question which sounds like I don't agree with you, but I do. So but but I I am just I am just curious, which is that the the counter-argument to Marx is that it reduces human, one of the counter-arguments, it's reduces human experiences to economic relations, right? Which for me, all that is saying is it reduces human experiences to incarnation, you know. The pin put a pin in that, but you know, one can say that it strips life of his transcendent function, right? That it is if you push it, it's ethics without metaphysics, whatever you want to call it. But is there a ground, do you think, that materialism can't provide? Or, like, did God for me, God chose materialism to provide, right? But like, do you feel the moments where you you I really admire this idea that I would live the same way whether or not there is a God, which is what Jesus did, which is what the prophets did, but put a pin in that. But it feels like, what is the need? Like you, you, you, you call, you, you, you say, you describe it as I am still landing on Christian ethics, right? Is there a need for the transcendent? Is the transcendent in the moments when you, you know, meet the people where they are? Because that in itself, to me, when I when I look at the work that you do, the moments where I identify the sacred, right, is I feel like I'm like projecting onto you, but but it's I I honestly think projection is like the only way we know how to relate to another human. So here we are. But it's like the place where I identify the sacred in your work is where you are choosing very much so Paula Fiori's thing, where it's like the education either liberates or it domesticates, and I am going to live in this moment with you where you're not a passive thing. You said multiple times, I'm I'm like, I want to meet them where they examine their reality, right? So it's like that to me is a moment of presence and a moment of sacred encounter. But I wonder for you, right? You're describing reading Heigel as like a devotional act. And I'm just like, is there is there need for the transcendent for you? Where do you encounter it? Do you encounter it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, okay. I mean, the annoying scholar in me wants to just be like, okay, let's define sacred, let's define transcendent, let's do all this stuff. But I guess I will preface that conversation if you want to have it, with just what's coming to me when you ask. Yeah. I would say anytime I've ever been taught something, and anytime I've ever taught something, right? So both ways. I'm experiencing the sacred. And when I say taught, I don't just mean like someone yells something at you and like whatever. I mean like something resonates. Like I'll give a a quick story. I'm in San Quentin. I'm still very, very close to this person. They got out, but they were locked up 25 years. And you know, when they got out, it was really wonderful. We were able to move them in with a friend of mine. So we got out of the halfway house and we all became very, very close family friends. Spent holidays together, things like that. But while he was in, I remember I'm telling him all this stuff about like white supremacy, about the prison industrial complex, like how the world has been just designed to cheat him, to crush him, right? He kind of turns to me and he says, Chris, like you're a smart guy. Like I generally I agree, but I'm trying to get parole. So we just like shut up about that. Like I don't I'm I'm trying to get out of prison. That stuff is not gonna help. And so, like realizing that I can have all this theory in my head and I can even be right. And still the person I'm speaking with that is directly affected by the things that I'm right about just have no like relevance. Like to me, that is a sacred moment. That is a sacred moment where you realize there is still limits of even being right. And so, like, I I I don't want to just throw a million examples where this has happened, but I guess what I'm saying is that like that is like deep connection. That is like deep connection where someone like really like takes the things in your brain, rearranges them in a way, even the most special things that you would die for, and then they give you another thing, you know. So, like those types of moments, whether I can see it happening in my own educational work, or it's happened to me from my mentors, from my comrades, from people that have really set me straight, at least my boots, you know? That is for me a transcendent moment, a moment where you recognize you are not alone. You're like whatever like weird philosophies people want to like hyperfixate on that, like maybe the whole world is a projection of your own brain. No, my brain's not that it doesn't have the ability to like develop scenarios where someone can just hit me in the head with knowledge like that. Knowledge that I'll act on and live on uh for the rest of my life. So, you know, when I think about it and when I like celebrate those moments privately, very, very sacred. I don't know, I don't normally connect it to God, but I definitely connect it to like a truth, like a capital G good, you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah so yeah.
SPEAKER_02Does that answer you?
SPEAKER_00And I mean, yes, yes. I mean, like it's not, I don't need it to be sacred for you, but I I feel the sacred when you talk about it to me, which is why I am reflecting it back at you, I think. But I definitely think that like, you know, like in that story, right? I went I went to an all-women's liberal arts school for college. And when I went to divinity school, I forgot that there were men in the world. Genuine, genuine forgot. And, you know, I was sitting in the world.
SPEAKER_04Not a bad way to live.
SPEAKER_00No, really, really not. I sit in this class that's mandatory. And I was suddenly struck by how many like white men are saying things to hear themselves speak, right? And and they all sound, they're just using the terms, right? Like, I can ask you the same question, just like as like I can say to you, is dialectical materialism like your replacement eschatology, right? Like I'd say that instead of like rather than saying, hey, is the Christian idea of the end the sec the similar structure for you? But like it was that, right? And then you realize like they really want to hear themselves say dialectic materialism, and they really want to hear themselves say replacement eschatology. And you're just like, what is happening here? But what to me, what was happening here was like in in in echoing your moment of just to me, I was seeing theory functioning the same way as doctrine does in the church, right? And it's like this like accessibility is treated as this like dilution thing, right? Like, you know, us making stupid little like Instagram videos about theory is seen as less than, right? But but it actually mirrors exactly what happened in Christianity, where the institution like hoarded the text and police interpretation and you know, it becomes another form of credentialing, gatekeeping rather than liberation, right? Which is why it's important, I think, like in your story and in what I'm experiencing of just like, yes, we can say dialectal materialism if we want to, but like what does that mean for people like in going through a parole, right? Like, what does that mean? Are we seeing people or do we need to say this because we like the sound of our voice?
SPEAKER_02No, this is this is exactly why I love I mean this conversation I knew it was going to be so great. Because I think that that's exactly right. Like, TikTok and Instagram are huge components of our lives. And they can be stupid. Everyone knows that, but they don't have to be stupid. I mean, if anything, they have to be state sponsored to a certain degree because of the censorship and things like that. But outside of that, you work around it, you know, whatever. I love what you're saying because it was one of the most important lessons I ever learned. I mean, my favorite text, it's funny, you're talking about dialectical materialism, notes on dialectics by C. LR James, basically a love letter to Hegel. But he literally says in this book, he goes, What is philosophic cognition? Is philosophic cognition when we say, we are Hegelians, we don't believe in Kant, we believe in dialectical material or dialectical absolute idealism, and we commit to this school, and this is correct for all of these dialectical reasons. Or is a philosophic cognition when you analyze the world correctly in a structure that elicits a either accurate or at least helpful answer. And I think that that's exactly what you're touching on here in this example, where it's like you're saying they like to hear themselves talk. I think that's true, but I also think people get bogged down in the terminology. Like they they want to, I mean, I guess you said this, so I'm agreeing all the way, but it's like they want to weaponize this stuff in order to uphold this exclusiveness.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But my belief is like everyone in their heart already knows Marxism. The problem is it's just buried under all these layers. In the same way, I bet you would imagine that most people have learned at least all of the goodness of Christianity at some point, right? Like, like you would is that right? I don't want to put words in now.
SPEAKER_00No, no, I think I think that's true. Like, nobody is really walking around being like, these are new ideas, you know, in our world. Yeah. To be a good human and to serve and like, you know. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02I mean, and I think that one time I was teaching, or it wasn't even teaching. We I was working with a coworker who was really, really close to me. He had served seven years upstate in the Fed. And we used to talk just all the time. He told me about his childhood, he told me about his drug dealing before he went in and you know, his time in prison, and then when he got out. And I remember one day after days and days, weeks, maybe, maybe even months, of just chatting all the time, he goes, Chris, you're always on this capitalism stuff. I knew what that was before I knew the word. And that is the experience that I think we all we all want. We all want to like make people recognize because if people say that, they'll carry it with them because they had it their whole life.
SPEAKER_00What did they call it before we gave them the word capitalism?
SPEAKER_02Uh I don't know. Maybe just called called it the hood, the, you know, like, I don't know, the man keeping me down. Like, I let me think. What did he call it?
SPEAKER_00What is a better word for capitalism?
SPEAKER_02This things are shitty, I guess. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Like, like, because we're all aware.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Like, especially when it comes to things like politics or even economics, like people know when things get more expensive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Like, you know, you go outside, you know that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02People know. I used to think about this all the time. Like, there was a period where, you know, I think certain elite liberals would kind of look down on the working class and they'd say, they don't care about politics. They're not showing up to the ballots, or, you know, this, that, and the third. But the thing is, they do know. They're doing it because they know. They're doing it because it does not matter.
SPEAKER_04Right?
SPEAKER_02It doesn't matter if we got someone on the left, the left, or the right. My life does not change. So why would I show up? Because I want to have, you know, someone who's black or a woman or whatever, or someone that, like, I don't know, likes gay marriage or like just like very, very superficial to my own life, right?
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I know that I don't want to like it is important that we see figures in our lives, role models that resemble us, so that we can maybe envision what if. Yeah. But under a capitalist system, I don't want people to envision themselves as the president, the primary war criminal that, you know, they're all war criminals, and they've and they've always been since the first war criminal. And so it's like, I guess what I'm trying to say is growing up, but also in the jails, in the prisons, in the courts, in public housing, in all the places that I've ever worked in, you could say that people don't care about politics, but I think more reasonably they care a lot. They just recognize that this high level of politics, right, does not affect them one way or the other. And and that's you know, that's a problem with the politicians. That's a problem with the world that we're in. That's not a problem with these people.
SPEAKER_00When you say, you know, I think about when Jesus says, you know, I was in prison and you did not visit me, you know, like and I ask and and I'm ask I'm throwing this to you because I'm like, I wonder it's easy for me here to sit here outside and say God is behind bars, right? Like God puts himself behind bars. I what what I'm hearing you say is a lot of what I genuinely believe and am willing to die for. And I'm hearing you say these things, but in a different language, right? Of just like, I think that we want the same, we want a politician as a figurehead because we are used to wanting one God and we are used to wanting one savior. And the savior then holds all the responsibility and all the projections. It's it's just a lightning rod of meaning that we associate with it and then can then devoid ourselves of our personal responsibility. Who gets elected, right? It's like who gets elected, the power is still among us. And if we don't take that responsibility, it doesn't matter who is in office. And so, like, yes, I can support a politician, I can support their policies, but that's not where salvation, quote unquote, lies, right? But I wonder what you think of the idea of God behind bars.
SPEAKER_02Well, can you open that up a little bit more to me? Yeah. Yeah. God behind bars.
SPEAKER_00Like the idea that if incarnation is true, right? The idea of the incarnation is true, then God chose to be fully dependent on a bunch of idiots. You know, God chose to be fully dependent to be nourished by people who are completely unreliable, given the Old Testament, right? Like these are not reliable people. They're very forgetful. They don't remember that they're his God and they don't remember anything. And so God says, you know, when I was, when I was sick, you did not feed me. When I was, you know, like this idea of God is with the most marginalized. And I'm I think I'm I'm I am perhaps hearing you say we are skirting along it, but where do you encounter? You've named a couple of examples where you you you have encountered this capital T truth or capital T good through this part of society that is that they feel so below this, you know, based on what the politicians do, so below the the the access of politics that they can't change anything from the inside. Where is, I don't know how to ask this without my own language, but my question is where is God in that? Not like theodicy, so to speak, but like where do you encounter the incarnational human in there?
SPEAKER_02I'm trying to think about how I would answer this. There's like an academic way studied in grad school. I studied black studies, and there's like a very, very good but very specific example here that I think we could use. I don't know if you're familiar with the term social death, Orlando Patterson Jr., right? So like social death is a very contentious concept within black studies because some people think that social death is literal, and then some people think that social like in the sense that people are literally removed from historic action, from effects on history. Enslaved people, specifically during the antebellum slave period, were removed from history in terms of like how they participated in the flow and development of progress. Some people read social death in that way. My mentors, my advisors taught me a more materialist way where social death is not necessarily a literal or ontological description of people, but instead a description of how terrible, racist, dominating, even pre-fascist, but like slave owners saw people, right? So, like that's a very, very big distinction. So I don't really, I mean, I care so much that I want to understand the period, but in terms of like what I think about the world and how I would think about the world, I could give two shits what a slave master thinks about another human being. Like, you know what I'm saying? So if we take the second example, in which it's social death is the way that the slave master views enslaved people, then despite the destruction of slavery, and despite the ways with all the the ways that the people with all the resources and all the power and all the political execution and and all the militaries, right? Despite all of that, you could not crush the human spirit. You could not crush the ability for these people to participate in history, right? So you tell me God behind bars, I think, yeah, anytime we are in in we are subjugated to domination, guess what? We still have beauty inside us, we still have a a both a legacy, but also a history that we project forward. We still have effects on history. Like we could be down, you know, sports metaphor, I guess, but we could be down 40 points in the la in the final quarter, and like, guess what? I'd still think we could win. And I'm not gonna quit until we lose. So me, that is that could be sacred, that could be a a divinity, even in like the darkest night, you know. And I think theoretically, and at least in the things that I've come up with or come across, it's pretty consistent. Definitely in Marxism.
SPEAKER_00You know, what is really interesting about your story versus mine is that I spend a part of my childhood in communist China. Right.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00Where Marxism is a religion, right? It is not it's not Marxism as critique, it's mock Marxism as legitimization, right? It's the story the state tells about itself to justify its own authority, right? It's very much like you get the trappings of religion without the liberate liberatory content, right? You have the orthodoxy, you have the correct Marxist thought you need to profess, you have the liturgy, you have like rituals, political like recitations, you have slogans, you have heresy, you have, you know, being on the wrong side of the party, you know, line, and you have saints, you have Mao, right? You have scripture, you have the little red book and all the things on the wall. And you get everything that like institutional religion eventually produces, which to me is like the gap between what is professed and what is practiced. You get this, you people mouth the words because the words are required, you know, you know, our father who art in heaven, and then but the the words don't describe their live reality. And I I was surprised and then immediately not so surprised by by Marxism as a reading of Christianity, because it feels at the core idea that the thing that I had to deconstruct was that that was a religion, right? Like that I that was really practice as a religion, and that's what happens to Christianity under Empire 2. And I just I wonder because you also have this devotion to it, right? And and and it's a devotional practice, and I understand that. And I'm not saying those two are the same things. I'm not saying that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it feels I like the tension. I like the tension of these paths, and I wonder what you think about all of that.
SPEAKER_02Sure. No, I mean, I guess are you asking me specifically about like actually existing socialism or projects that either are or claim to be communist? Is that the question? Or is the question about like a how we reconcile some of the tragedies, mistakes of communist and Marxist lineages? Like what what do you what do you how do you envision the question?
SPEAKER_00It's it's more it's more like you're right that I don't have a question. I'm more saying that it's a curiosity, I think, of like someone who grew up in the failure, inside the failure of Marxism as religion, and then encountered Christianity and found something real in Christianity, but in a way kept its Marxism, right? And I think I I wonder, is there like if there is tension in your practice, where is it? And how does it manifest? Yeah. Because I think the atrocities of Marxism feels like it's a it's a you can use anything to justify pretty much anything that you want in a way.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think that this is actually I'm gonna rearrange this just for one second. I recently read a conversation between Fidel Castro and I want, I'm gonna butcher his name, so please forgive me, but I think it's Frey Beto. And he is a church, I don't know if church figure is the right terminology, but he was in the church and he's kind of talking to Castro about liberation theology, right? And he kind of up front says, Fidel, like, why are the communists so harsh about religion? The people love it. Like you're missing out on a huge segment of people because you guys are so like strict about being atheists. And Castro says, if we are losing out on people, we're losing out on the ability to recruit people because what you're saying is true, then we are doing a strategic disservice to our movement, right? That's the first thing he says. But then he goes into a long history, a long material history of how the church was used to subjugate these very people, or at least their their ancestors, right to the point in which they felt like. Like they had to be recruited using liberation theology. And so I guess to answer your question about like the tensions between, you know, a Marxist reality or realities and a Marxist ethic or a Marxist ideal, it's to say that all of these frameworks and all of these ideologies have histories that are conflicted.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02That are con I mean, Hegel will teach us, and Marx will take this on, that the world is a contradiction, and there is no exception to that. Everything exists in attention. And it's only when we decide to fit these things together and really see it for what it is that we recognize these things are constantly evolving, they're constantly developing. If you take in and I think Marxist lexicon, they say if you know you take a one-sided view as opposed to the dialectical or many-sided, whatever, it's like a little bit condescending. But if you take a snapshot and then say this is what it is, then of course you're going to be able to use that to legitimize or support any type of interpretation you want to come up with. So I think that on like a world historic level, both in Mao's China, in Castro's Cuba, you know, in projects today that people do and do not support. I think that everything has its place within this larger historical movement. And I think that it's our jobs to utilize those histories towards building a world founded on collective freedom, collective freedom. And then I guess personally, it's the tension of both regretting my past mistakes and also deciding to learn from them and recognizing that if I don't learn from them, then those mistakes stay regrets. So it's like in the same way that we've all committed maybe personal tragedies, maybe personal mistakes that were were horrific, that we feel like, oh, this doesn't, this is not who we are or whatever, right? Everyone's done that. You either decide to learn from those moments and then live with them. It's not that you throw them away. You actually turn them into something that you can use to inform your life, and then you live with them forever, right? You embrace these moments. And so, like, that's I hope it's I'm not being too diplomatic, but that's the way that I both say Marxist and communist history as well as my own personal growth.
SPEAKER_00Was Christianity a mistake for you? No.
SPEAKER_02I mean, it's a it was a mistake in the sense that, like, you know, when I'm the kid, and like, you know, you're I just remember one time I'm in Sunday school and the person is like teaching me, and they're like, you can't have any non-Christian friends. And I'm a little kid, right? And I'm like, I'm almost crying because my best friend at the time was like a, I don't know, he was a little bit of a jerk, but he was he was like a self, self-professed atheist. And I remember we've really been out of shape about it because I'm like, my God doesn't want me to be best friends with my childhood best friend. Dang, what do I do? And so, like in those kind of silly regards, like because I don't think a person that says that actually takes their own religion seriously. I don't think they could. In the same way that I don't think that if you really believe that your God is a God of love, I don't know how you could use your religion to justify harming people, you know, stripping away people's rights, like especially if it's upholding capital. Like it just it's too on the nose, you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, too clear what your God is. Exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So if I do I think Christianity is a mistake for me, no. Would I have wished I had been introduced to Christianity by people maybe like you, like Colton Barnaby or something, right? Like in in like these fully full developed forms where someone is going to be really honest about like kind of some of the sticky parts, but also kind of help you see some of the good parts. Yeah, that would that would be wonder wonderful. But you know, that wasn't the world I was born into. I was born into a world of hell and damnation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Do you still fear hell? Or are we in it now?
SPEAKER_02I think I'm too too concerned with my projects to have any time to think about hell anymore. I used to think about it a lot. Even after I what the sad part is I I was terrified of hell way after I lost God in that period. The fear of hell stuck around.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02But now I just don't think about it because it's like, you know, I just want to be of service. So you just like think about the stuff you got going on. No time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. No, that's I think I mean, uh hell is a construct, etc. etc. But there is the the the fear of a good image is palpable, you know? Like a fear of the good image sticks. Where do you see your work going? What is your what excites you about the work that you're doing now? How do you feel like it's an it would would young what would young Chris think about all of this now?
SPEAKER_02I think he'd be he'd be a little surprised, maybe. I don't know. Here's what I'll tell you. There's an organization out there called No Brooklyn Jails. They're doing really incredible work. They're trying to stop the construction of a $3 billion jail developed in downtown Brooklyn. They're calling it the woke jail because it's supposed to have trauma-informed architecture. There's supposed to be a community center on the bottom level in a mall or something. And it's really, really disgusting. Yeah, it's really, it's really gross. And obviously, the reality is that more prisons, more jails, more cops do not make our community safer. And so we want to reorient this project. We don't want it to exist. We want to spend that money on literally anything else. And hopefully we can get a smart people involved that really, really, and there probably already is, but I just don't know. But like that know what to do with that money, but we know for sure that we don't want to jail there. Those people are absolutely incredible. I'm excited about that project happening now. I have personal projects with education, trying to create this like safe space. I used to think that term was kind of lame, but it's so real. People need a safe place to mess up. And I always say you've got to risk being wrong to get right. And I want people to be able to kind of swim around in hard theory and recognize it's not that scary. As long as someone that's teaching you to your your example earlier does not care about proven how smart they are. If it's more important that you get it, then someone will explain something simply and let you kind of mess around with the big words and whatever. So I really am interested in developing educational spaces where people feel comfortable to kind of tackle these big ideas, but also hold themselves accountable to I keep using this word, I keep using fascism, I keep using institution, I keep using Marxism or whatever, right? Uh false consciousness, whatever the term is. Do you really know what that means? Ask yourself. I keep using it, I keep blaming the state of the world on X, Y, and Z. Do I really know what that means? Or am I participating in the same action? So I'm I'm doing some educational spaces soon that are trying to kind of both teach people the content itself, but also embody those kinds of values and then just keep staying committed. It's uh what do I say? It's a marathon, you know? So you just keep trying to push, push, push, and and and commit more and more and more.
SPEAKER_00Is there rest in your practice?
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I don't know.
SPEAKER_02Like uh yeah, anytime you get to hang out with friends, anytime you get to chop it up on the phone, you get to go out to dinner, you know, watch a movie, see someone special. Like it's un I mean, I wouldn't say it's unfortunate. It's just the reality that all the people in my life for the best and for sometimes the most frustrating are committed to those same things. So we're always talking about politics, we're always talking about love, we're always talking about how we can build a better world. And uh, you know, everyone in my life inspires me so much to try more and try harder.
SPEAKER_00How does, if people are listening and want to help with this project or stopping this prison from getting built, what is what is something that they can do? And like how do people get involved with something like this with who have the heart to help?
SPEAKER_02Totally. Uh, Instagram page is as no Brooklyn jail. They have all the information, they can train you on on how to participate. They really, really know what they're doing. They're so wonderful. And it's just about here's the real thing, though. This is the bit, as my friend always says. We think that we have to have these perfect ideas, and then we can participate. Then we know the right organization, then we know the right project, then the right people will like us and we'll get to have the good role, right? But that's not the way it works. The most important thing that anyone can bring to any organizing project is a thing that they already got, which is showing up, showing up consistently, trying to be helpful. And guess what? If you do that, eventually someone's gonna be like, Well, what do you think about this? And take care of that. And it's the showing up, that's when you're learning. That's when you're developing, that's when you're getting the right ideas, that's when you're recognizing this is for me or this isn't for me. You don't make the you know, like you don't learn to swim in the library, you learn to swim in water, you know?
SPEAKER_00Learn by doing, learn by failing, learn by committing.
SPEAKER_02And obviously reading the whole time, but you know.
SPEAKER_00I want to ask a question that sounds really cheesy. How do you keep the faith? Massive quotes. I hate myself for asking this question, but how do you keep the faith, right? Like, how do you keep the faith in a secular world? What keeps you going?
SPEAKER_02Here's what I'll say. I don't know if it'll be a state or a nation or a people or whatever, but there will be a future because we will win. And uh, I think about every single one of those people every day. And I think I want them to have the easiest life that they could ever have. And that life is dependent on whatever I decide to give today, you know? A friend of mine, and this is all personal, but it's kind of like a larger version of this, he said, we are the parents of our future selves.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02So whatever you decide to do today is what you're gonna be given, you know, in the future. And that's how I think about it. I think that like, man, like I meet so many people that I absolutely adore and love. And if there's gonna be more people in the future, just like humans multiplying, then that means that if I was alive then, there'd be even more people that I adored and loved. So I better I better give now. Take care of that.
SPEAKER_00I think of it's make it reminds me of the this Yamian idea of like becoming an ancestor. And for like becoming your ancestor, right? And then there's this book about grief called The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and it talks about, you know, the practice of becoming an ancestor. And for a lot of people with trauma, I'm thinking about the people that you work with, incarcerated folks, and just me with a shitload of trauma. But like, you know, th the word future is really difficult. You know, the word future is a foreign word to me. I don't quite know what it means because it has been dictated to me what that means, you know. So it's fascinating to think of, you know, like living for for me, what I'm what I'm understanding, what I'm learning, the capital T truth in this moment is of like if I am to become my own ancestor, which is the parent, right? But but you know, even if you don't have children, you're becoming an ancestor of the world. And to live for people who don't know what the word future means or cannot imagine faith, right? Faith has lost all its meaning because of Christianity or just living under this fucked up world. Like when when faith and future feel so difficult, perhaps the word to pick up is this idea of parenting as this idea of becoming ancestor where you don't need to know. You don't need to know if we are going to win. Another perspective, perhaps, on this, that that you don't need to know what it might look like. And that that that you will keep becoming this figure, parent, ancestor, however, however you shape it, right? And then and that like in actuality, I'm speaking to myself right now, but just that not that not knowing is where the sacred lives, because we are trying to define the sacred all the fucking time, right? We're trying to make it a thing. Like if there's anything I learned from Divinity School is that we don't agree on, we don't know what the word religion means. We also don't know what the word God means. We don't know what anything means, you know, like to it it but it you can have 10,000 definitions, but like the idea of letting it remain unknown feels to me at this point in my life at least the most honest thing of being with myself, of like, you know, what we where we started of like is what I'm offering, is that meeting the person, right? And and for me, that meeting me right now is knowing that becoming an ancestor doesn't have to describe the world. And that actually lets me quote unquote keep the faith. Keep the faith is so icky, but you know, here we are.
SPEAKER_02I like it. I like keeping the faith. I don't know. You so here's the thing, I love cheese. I think like the separation between, and I'm this is not an accusation of you, I'm not throwing this your way, but the difference between someone being cheesy and slick is just how they sell it, you know. So because I've heard some stuff that's really, really cheesy, and then you but you hear it from the right person at the right time, and you're like, what dang? So keep the faith is is right. We should and we need to.
SPEAKER_00Where does it hurt the most right now? Where do things hurt the most? Where is it where is your heart most tender?
SPEAKER_02Um you know, I got some people I love in my personal life that are very frustrating in a great way. But I think I think uh I guess what I mean to say is where does it hurt the most? We have to keep giving, we have to keep moving, we gotta keep building forward more and more. And it just always seems like there's not enough time for everything to give everything the time and the effort that it deserves. And then it also seems like sometimes there's this big weight or this big like satchel that you're carrying. And as you keep pushing forward, you keep throwing a little extra in there, and then it gets bigger as you know you have to keep pushing further. I'm being really abstract, but that's the that's the tension, I think, is that like the more committed we get to these projects, to the projects of building a better future, the projects of becoming someone said this to me yesterday, because it's like 70 degrees here in New York, but I was like, damn, it's hot. He goes, Yeah, you better get right with God, right? So if if that's our mission, getting right with God, or it's building this better future, you know that you gotta push forward more now. You gotta do it now, right? And if you don't do it now, maybe you'll never do it. And so, like, at least that's the mentality that I have. And so I think that's the toughest thing is that like the better or more committed or more engaged or more expansive I become, the less time I have for each one individual thing, and the more I feel like I have to keep going. So it's like, you know, it's a time bond.
SPEAKER_00It's a yeah. What does receiving look like in the philosophies that you work with? How do you receive? Is there a philosophy for receiving? Because I I, you know, I come from I'm I'm hearing, I I agree with you. I'm like, yes, man, like I'm on, I'm on board. And I find, you know, I think earlier in the in this podcast you said something that was like, people really said some. I I don't, I don't remember how how you phrase it, but it led me to thinking of this idea of how how little in scripture we are praised by God, right? That that we learn to receive goodness, other than just like you were created and you're good. You're good job. I did good job, you know. But like, how do we receive? I think both in Christianity and from like I can't immediately pick up from Marxism from Heigel where the idea of receiving comes in. What do you think of that?
SPEAKER_02Where do I receive? I will tell you, I receive all the time. I mean, it's because it's not one or the other. That's not the way that I envision it. I can tell you a work example. This happened today. I got a client, a patient, I don't know, whatever you want to call him. Um he's got schizophrenia. And when I first met him, he had just gotten out of rehab for crack cocaine. That he got hospitalized very soon after that. I've known him about a year, you know, for having a psychotic episode. And I put the work in. I met him at the hospital, I talked with him, I was with him while he's like freaking out and telling me all of these numbers and secrets and mind's eye and spiritual warfare, whatever. And I've been with him while he's done that a lot. And I also perform case management for him. We also got him his ID, we got him food stamps, we got him. I mediated problems between him and his roommate that he has through supportive housing. And so now when I'm talking to him, right, I don't have to be so careful because that's my guy and I'm his guy, right? So I can be like, hey, I'm not gonna use names, but hey, guy, when you're having these spiritual warfare fits, and this is how I'm saying it to him, right? He's a big guy. What do you want me to do as a person that loves you, as a person that loves you and cares about you, doesn't want you, you know, talking to yourself around all these white people. Like, what do you want me to do? I don't want them to lock you up. I don't want them to, right? And he can tell me in his own language, straight up, like what he thinks he wants, which is he told me, he goes, Chris, you got to let it ride through, right? Like that's what that's how he said it. So it's like because of all the work I get to receive in this moment where I'm not at work in this one moment, even though it's so important to my job. I just get to talk to my guy like he's a regular person because we put the work in, right? We develop that. It's the same thing with close friends of mine, same thing with partners, same thing with whatever. Is like the more work that we put in, we get to have these moments where it's like, damn, it's all coming together. Hegel will call it, it's like divine providence. That's the little language he uses for. He's like, as the world develops, we got no idea what's going on, and then something happens, and you're like, oh my god, every single thing needed to happen for this to happen. And he's like, That's those two things are happening, this like explosion of chaos as well as the order simultaneously all the time, not one than the other.
SPEAKER_04Does that make sense? Yes.
SPEAKER_02So that's I mean, I I I know it sounds like I'm like dodging your question, but I I swear I'm not. Like it's it's like that's really how I feel. It's like so much service, so much work, but it's also like there's never a moment where I'm not receiving. That's really how I feel about it.
SPEAKER_00I love how divine this practice is for you. I am sorry if I'm using these words, but it's go ahead. It feels right, like I'm thinking like this is a moment right now that feeds me. And this is a moment in which I'm receiving. Yes, I'm giving, I'm speaking on a thing that it's going to be edited, etc. But what I'm hearing, divine providence, means then is noticing the moments when you're at work, the moments when at work your work stops being work. And that that is what keeps you going. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02It's just like seeing it come together and seeing like a moment where like not only do you see all the past efforts dissolving into something that's happening and real and and beneficial, but also you're like, my guy's got a moment of peace. Right? Like, it's not just me, it's our shared moment. It's not just me, it's also my man who I've been working with for so long, who was addicted to crack cocaine, who we could never find, who had to I had to hunt in the streets of New York to find him and bring him in and make sure that he was showing up. Like, I'm seeing in this moment, obviously I'm Asian, right? I'm Bruce Lee. I'm Jackie Chan, right? Like, no, that's what they call me, but like they call me that on the island, Bruce Lee. Anyway, but I'm seeing him and I'm being up front with this man and I'm talking to him, right? This guy was born in Harlem, Harlem, Harlem. And I'm talking crazy to him, kinda. I'm like, yo, you're talking to yourself sometimes, man. I gotta check you. What's going on? What do you want me to do? Like, right? And I'm seeing him be able to take that, and there's no, there's no like animosity. He he He's hearing it like we are friends because we are. Like you get what I'm saying? Like I and I I don't want to be like, you know, obviously there needs to be forms of professionalism and things like that, but I just mean to say that like there's genuine care that exists.
SPEAKER_04Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02And then we both get to experience this moment of ease.
SPEAKER_04Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02Right?
SPEAKER_04Truth, care, joy.
SPEAKER_00Joy. Yeah. True truth, care, joy, and ease. I feel like that's a good that's a that's a that's a good landing place. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Did you have fun?
SPEAKER_00I had I had a lot of fun. Did you have fun?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, me too. I had a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_00Is there any projects you want to tell our audience where they can participate in what you're doing directly? I know you are thinking of teaching a class deciding your stories today.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But tell us all about that if they want to follow your work.
SPEAKER_02Please, John Paul underscore fartra underscore J-E-A-N-P-A-U-L underscore F-A-R, T-R-E underscore. I'm hoping either late March, early April, four weeks, four chapters of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Friere, maybe one of the greatest Marxist educational thinkers, like the 60s, 70s, 80s. I don't know. Just like so incredible, so loving. And, you know, talking about the historic vocation of us to become more fully human. I'll plug this last, I'll all really quote Apollo Friere right now. Please do. We are incompleted beings, conscious of our incompletion. That's what it means to be human, you know? So, like, and another way to say that is we are always in the mode of becoming, you know? You're always growing, you're always moving forward, you're always progressing, even if it feels like it's a step back. So we're gonna go over that one session a week. It's gonna be a lot of fun. I promise, promise, promise it's a safe environment. You don't have to have any experience, or you have a lot of experience, and we're gonna find a place for all of you guys.
SPEAKER_00And this is a free class.
SPEAKER_02Free class, absolutely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00If you're listening, no, I have no idea why you're not going there, but yes, please join free, a free class. Okay.
SPEAKER_04Free class.
SPEAKER_00Free class, free instruction, truth, care, ease, joy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we're gonna have all those. That's four, two, right there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. All right. Thank you so much, Chris, for today.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Connie. This was so much fun.