WEBVTT 1 00:00:14.940 --> 00:00:22.470 Maggie Monteverde: Good morning i'd like to welcome all of you briefly, I mean i'm not welcoming you briefly but i'm making this brief welcome. 2 00:00:23.400 --> 00:00:34.770 Maggie Monteverde: To the 20th annual humanities symposium this year subject is reading as a radical act, I hope, if you didn't pick up a program that you'll do so. 3 00:00:35.430 --> 00:00:46.980 Maggie Monteverde: We have them on both sides of the room, because we have 27 programs scheduled, all of them in this room, this week, I also want to welcome those of you who may be watching online. 4 00:00:48.270 --> 00:00:55.650 Maggie Monteverde: I need to explain a little bit about how well core those of you who have tuned in for well core credit how this will work. 5 00:00:56.880 --> 00:01:11.850 Maggie Monteverde: If you are in this room for well core credit you'll see there are four boards around the room, this gives you an opportunity to quickly scan your qr code I think most of you are used to doing this by now, but if not. 6 00:01:14.340 --> 00:01:27.330 Maggie Monteverde: i'm not good at telling you how to scan a qr code, I had to finally load one onto my phone last night so anyway, each of the boards that that qr code will change for each section. 7 00:01:28.590 --> 00:01:38.880 Maggie Monteverde: For those of you who are online what will happen is that within 24 hours probably faster than that of the end of this session a. 8 00:01:39.450 --> 00:02:01.980 Maggie Monteverde: brief quiz will be posted online and you will be able to take it, so we are also recording this session and that should mean also that shortly we will be able to access this online as well, so, with no further ado i'd like to introduce my Dean. 9 00:02:03.720 --> 00:02:10.560 Maggie Monteverde: bryce Sullivan, who has been a huge supporter of the symposium for the entire time he has been Thank you. 10 00:02:15.630 --> 00:02:26.850 Maggie Monteverde: Thank you Maggie it's pleasure to be here it's always a wonderful experience this week of the vanity symposium, and this is the 20th anniversary, and this my 14th one and. 11 00:02:27.510 --> 00:02:41.670 Maggie Monteverde: Each and every one of them are always exciting events it's also my pleasure today to introduce l Gregory Jones, who is the President of belmont he inverse city and has been since June one. 12 00:02:42.210 --> 00:02:50.820 Maggie Monteverde: it's been an exciting four months for the students, the Faculty the staff our Community partners and all the constituents of belmont university. 13 00:02:51.270 --> 00:02:56.850 Maggie Monteverde: And we certainly look forward to many years of President Jones leadership of belmont. 14 00:02:57.330 --> 00:03:04.650 Maggie Monteverde: President Jones graduated with a bachelor of arts in communications and a master of public administration, from the University of Denver. 15 00:03:05.370 --> 00:03:20.460 Maggie Monteverde: He also received a master of divinity from Duke divinity school and a PhD in theology from Duke university he served as the dean of Duke divinity school from 1997 through 2010 and then again from. 16 00:03:22.230 --> 00:03:22.380 Maggie Monteverde: To. 17 00:03:23.670 --> 00:03:25.470 Maggie Monteverde: Immediately before coming to belmont. 18 00:03:26.520 --> 00:03:35.070 Maggie Monteverde: he's a strategic and visionary leader who is breathing new life in our work at belmont university where the entire community is embracing. 19 00:03:35.520 --> 00:03:50.460 Maggie Monteverde: The inaugural year theme of let hope abound he's authored or edited 19 books and he's published over 200 articles, please join me in welcoming President Greg Jones is our first speaker of the 20th Annie annual humanity symposium. 20 00:03:56.880 --> 00:04:06.750 Maggie Monteverde: Thank you bryce it's a great joy to be with you and to have an opportunity to jumpstart some brain cells that I used to spend more time focused on. 21 00:04:07.500 --> 00:04:26.850 Maggie Monteverde: Reading i've always loved the act of reading now I am reading emails and memos and those sorts of things that reminds me of the story told about a an elderly rabbi who was retiring from a large congregation there was a big reception form and the young rabbi who was going to be. 22 00:04:27.930 --> 00:04:32.250 Maggie Monteverde: succeeding and came up to him and said tell me elderly rabbi what are you going to do in retirement and. 23 00:04:32.850 --> 00:04:40.350 Maggie Monteverde: The elderly rabbi said i'm going to finish my book, and the young rabbi said oh I didn't know you're writing a book he said writing i'm going to finish reading my book. 24 00:04:41.070 --> 00:04:49.230 Maggie Monteverde: And there are days when it feels like that is where my life is taken up these days it's great joy to be with you. 25 00:04:50.040 --> 00:04:59.730 Maggie Monteverde: The focus of my talk today is taking read cultivating imagination through traditions, innovation and i'm going to spend some time on each of those. 26 00:05:00.390 --> 00:05:13.560 Maggie Monteverde: phrases want to begin though by casting a larger frame actually going back to the Book of the Bible, one that you probably spend a lot of time with, especially if you're a humanities major it's called numbers. 27 00:05:14.550 --> 00:05:21.210 Maggie Monteverde: Not many people want to read it, because it tends to evoke images of when you decided math wasn't going to be your major. 28 00:05:22.080 --> 00:05:37.050 Maggie Monteverde: In the Jewish tradition it's often been called in the wilderness, and if that was the name of the book we actually would be reading it a lot of the time because of the experiences that we we have in that i'm not going to do is I sometimes do a longer horizon of. 29 00:05:38.640 --> 00:05:47.580 Maggie Monteverde: chapters 10 through 21 of the book of numbers, I just want to focus on Chapter 13 and 14 where Moses sends out the 12 spies and they come back. 30 00:05:48.120 --> 00:05:57.000 Maggie Monteverde: they're the first Americans in the Bible, they have a majority report on minority report, the majority report says, we got to go back to Egypt it's. 31 00:05:58.020 --> 00:06:07.260 Maggie Monteverde: There are too many obstacles up ahead of us, only to have the Spice joshua and caleb say it's a land flowing with milk and honey of god's calling us here, we have to go there. 32 00:06:08.610 --> 00:06:13.680 Maggie Monteverde: And so they present that to the Israelites and the Israelites say let's go back to Egypt. 33 00:06:14.730 --> 00:06:30.360 Maggie Monteverde: Egypt to suffering a little slavery Egypt was oppression, but Egypt was familiar, and this is a temptation that exists for lots of people lots of the time, my father who used to tell this story has said, every church, he was ever a part of had a back to Egypt committee and. 34 00:06:31.410 --> 00:06:49.230 Maggie Monteverde: The truth of the matter is, we all have a back to Egypt part of our souls that we see the possibilities for the future, and yet we get caught up and want to rely on what's been in the past, even if the past was painful, we like to scratch those old wounds and want to go back to Egypt. 35 00:06:50.760 --> 00:07:02.250 Maggie Monteverde: The point I want to emphasize here is actually a line from a philosopher and psychoanalyst Jewish scholar named vivas thornburg who wrote a book about the Book of numbers, called the wilderness. 36 00:07:04.080 --> 00:07:15.810 Maggie Monteverde: And she said when the Israelites decide they want to go back to Egypt she says they suffer a death worse than physical death, it was the death of their imagination. 37 00:07:18.060 --> 00:07:20.970 Maggie Monteverde: When I read those words I just was called up short. 38 00:07:22.470 --> 00:07:28.890 Maggie Monteverde: A death worse than physical death, the death of their imagination they'd lost a sense of the future. 39 00:07:29.970 --> 00:07:41.100 Maggie Monteverde: And so they were no longer able to cultivate that same sense of imagination and the depth of their imagination, that is haunting to us because you see we've been. 40 00:07:41.670 --> 00:07:46.500 Maggie Monteverde: going through periods of time or not just the last 18 months, but over a longer period of time. 41 00:07:46.920 --> 00:07:54.840 Maggie Monteverde: Where we have been on our heels and wanting to often to go back to Egypt and we've been caught in divisive kinds of patterns in ways. 42 00:07:55.680 --> 00:08:05.850 Maggie Monteverde: That have stultified our imagination, indeed I think you might say that we're currently suffering in our culture from an imagination deficit disorder. 43 00:08:06.750 --> 00:08:14.520 Maggie Monteverde: And we're struggling because we're so reactive we've been experiencing days we call blurs day where everything seems to just kind of blur together. 44 00:08:15.060 --> 00:08:28.320 Maggie Monteverde: And we're wondering what the hope is where that orientation part of the reason why, as bryce was suggesting this let hope abound is to focus on the future in a way that's rooted in who God is rather than in who we are. 45 00:08:29.220 --> 00:08:37.320 Maggie Monteverde: we're in a time of divisiveness and fracturing of relationships, where it's challenging to think about whether the social fabric can hold. 46 00:08:37.830 --> 00:08:53.310 Maggie Monteverde: And how we can practice the kind of imagination that can actually hold things together and practice, the sorts of interpretive charity that extend hospitality and grace and relationship with one another to hold that together well how might that be done. 47 00:08:54.480 --> 00:09:09.360 Maggie Monteverde: I want to suggest this through a phrase that I coined a number of years ago called tradition, innovation, now the root of that goes back to the philosopher Alistair mcintyre who wrote in 1981 book that took the intellectual world by storm called after virtue. 48 00:09:10.440 --> 00:09:16.350 Maggie Monteverde: It was actually a book and moral philosophy trying to suggest that the conventional ways in which Ethics have been taught. 49 00:09:16.920 --> 00:09:26.820 Maggie Monteverde: In modernity are a problem because they tend to focus on cases out there and the choice was between D ontology a kind of content rule based ethic. 50 00:09:27.390 --> 00:09:37.350 Maggie Monteverde: or utilitarianism attributed to john Stuart Mill and a kind of consequentialist based ethic so whether you follow principles, all the time, are you follow. 51 00:09:38.910 --> 00:09:45.540 Maggie Monteverde: The greatest good for the greatest number kind of principle was always focused on decisions out there mcintyre actually said. 52 00:09:46.110 --> 00:09:54.270 Maggie Monteverde: that's a mistake it's a problem because the deepest questions that human beings face are really about what kind of people we are. 53 00:09:54.870 --> 00:10:01.140 Maggie Monteverde: And rooted in virtue is going all the way back in mcintyre's case he wants to argue that aristotle's ethics were at the heart of that. 54 00:10:02.100 --> 00:10:14.700 Maggie Monteverde: Plato and Aristotle have alternative versions of virtues and the cultivation of wisdom so mcintyre argues that we need to get back to a virtue based ethic along the way he argues. 55 00:10:16.080 --> 00:10:30.090 Maggie Monteverde: That it's also rooted in who we are, as people the human beings are fundamentally storytelling animals and that we find our bearing and our orientation, first by asking what story or stories, am I a part of. 56 00:10:31.260 --> 00:10:42.930 Maggie Monteverde: He developed this in very nuanced and complicated ways in terms of how you think about action and intelligible action but, at the heart of it, he says we're all ears of traditions. 57 00:10:44.100 --> 00:10:50.220 Maggie Monteverde: And what a tradition is as mcintyre suggest is an extended argument about the goods that constitute the tradition. 58 00:10:50.820 --> 00:10:57.330 Maggie Monteverde: So, once you say what of what traditions of my a part of what stories, am I apart, that are shaping my life. 59 00:10:58.140 --> 00:11:08.670 Maggie Monteverde: You begin to ask a different sort of question along the way, and that became compelling to me and that's all suggesting a few minutes part of the problem is the tradition of modernity. 60 00:11:09.300 --> 00:11:19.350 Maggie Monteverde: is a tradition that says there is no tradition it's a paradox in an iron, but those of us who say i'm just going to be myself i'm going to make up my own identity. 61 00:11:19.920 --> 00:11:30.360 Maggie Monteverde: or just deceiving ourselves about all the things that have actually shaped who we are, whether we continue to affirm them revise them reject them and all sorts of complicated ways we are traditional people. 62 00:11:32.130 --> 00:11:38.280 Maggie Monteverde: So I was thinking about hall of those dynamics about of what traditions, what stories do I find myself apart. 63 00:11:39.000 --> 00:11:47.580 Maggie Monteverde: mcintyre's arguments, seem to me compelling it actually caused him to move from being an atheist back to a return to being a Catholic Christian. 64 00:11:48.120 --> 00:11:56.520 Maggie Monteverde: Because he realized that that was the story of which he had been apart as an Irishman, and of what he wanted to continue to affirm going forward. 65 00:11:56.850 --> 00:12:10.800 Maggie Monteverde: As he discovered that he was part of an Aristotelian tradition that was connected to a gustin and to Thomas Aquinas, and so that's been the part of his project i'll come back to that in terms of my own understanding of these. 66 00:12:11.580 --> 00:12:27.390 Maggie Monteverde: issues but it's that sense of the significance of tradition and of tradition in and of arrival traditions and how you understand that as a way of understanding, your own life your intellectual growth and ways of engaging the act of reading as we'll talk about. 67 00:12:28.680 --> 00:12:39.510 Maggie Monteverde: As I began to think about that I was also struck by how often people in late modernity, the 80s and 90s were talking about innovation as if it was just making stuff up. 68 00:12:40.260 --> 00:12:43.860 Maggie Monteverde: You know, throw spaghetti at the wall see what sticks and I thought this is a problem. 69 00:12:44.610 --> 00:12:54.780 Maggie Monteverde: Because that doesn't sound to me very life, giving I was thinking of it in musical terms that you know, making stuff up is more like a middle school band concert, nobody wants to go to that, including the parents. 70 00:12:55.590 --> 00:13:05.130 Maggie Monteverde: That what you really want are people who are practiced in a tradition who've done the rehearsals and we've learned all sorts of things, the kind of innovation that you think of like with jazz improvisation. 71 00:13:05.700 --> 00:13:18.930 Maggie Monteverde: is actually rooted in a past it's rooted in familiar tunes it's rooted in those skills and orientation of learning scales and it's a really a complex moral development that enables that. 72 00:13:19.800 --> 00:13:27.030 Maggie Monteverde: to happen along the way, I was asked, wants to give a lecture on tradition to innovation i'll come back to that phrase. 73 00:13:28.290 --> 00:13:35.490 Maggie Monteverde: And they said, would you be willing to do it with a jazz combo and I said break that sounds like so much fun well my plane was delayed getting. 74 00:13:35.970 --> 00:13:43.650 Maggie Monteverde: To the place where I was going to talk who's going to be in front of 1200 people and I got there about 20 minutes before I supposed to go up. 75 00:13:44.130 --> 00:13:52.410 Maggie Monteverde: I met the jazz combo for the first time 20 minutes before we were going live and then I discovered they'd never played together before. 76 00:13:53.250 --> 00:14:05.760 Maggie Monteverde: There were five of them there been three of them who knew each other, two of them, they were meeting, for the first time and I thought this is going to be a train wreck i'm going live with people i've never met some of them have never met. 77 00:14:07.020 --> 00:14:11.730 Maggie Monteverde: But then we actually realized that we shared a Christian tradition. 78 00:14:12.840 --> 00:14:22.770 Maggie Monteverde: We shared some musical understandings and very quickly, they were able to come to an agreement on the way they would riff off me, and I would rip off them, it was a magical hour. 79 00:14:24.090 --> 00:14:36.360 Maggie Monteverde: And the reason was we shared traditions that met we weren't, even though we were physical strangers meeting each other for the first time we actually had things in common that we could draw on. 80 00:14:37.350 --> 00:14:50.040 Maggie Monteverde: The phrase traditions innovation was that the best way to innovate and to be oriented toward the future is the deeper your orientation to the tradition and tradition and traditions. 81 00:14:51.750 --> 00:15:04.590 Maggie Monteverde: When I coined the phrase, it was to say there's something at the intersection of traditions and innovation they're often seen as opposites conservative like the rely on tradition Liberals like to rely on innovation. 82 00:15:05.130 --> 00:15:13.680 Maggie Monteverde: And so you have this kind of contrast, rather than seeing them at their intersections, and this is where I believe imagination comes to life. 83 00:15:14.040 --> 00:15:24.840 Maggie Monteverde: Is when the richer the traditional process meets the possibilities of innovation or improvisation that's where you see the vitality, now the phrase tradition to innovation. 84 00:15:25.560 --> 00:15:41.970 Maggie Monteverde: was first drawn for me by a lecture by the Yale historian Jaroslav pelican in a little book called the vindication of tradition pelican says tradition is the living faith of the dead traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. 85 00:15:43.500 --> 00:15:49.260 Maggie Monteverde: tradition is the living faith of the dead traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. 86 00:15:50.580 --> 00:16:01.650 Maggie Monteverde: We all know examples of traditionalism where things are still hanging on, even though they were sinful more no longer relevant or just they just continue on. 87 00:16:02.730 --> 00:16:13.320 Maggie Monteverde: You can find in any organization my wife served a parish church in baltimore where when we got there, there was the most bizarre thanksgiving service we asked everybody, we met. 88 00:16:14.730 --> 00:16:20.280 Maggie Monteverde: What why they did it the way they did it not a single soul could explain what they were doing. 89 00:16:21.510 --> 00:16:30.600 Maggie Monteverde: And I said, you know if nobody can understand why you're doing it it's probably no longer living there's nothing being passed on in that life, giving way. 90 00:16:31.890 --> 00:16:43.200 Maggie Monteverde: So it's that sense of the living faith of the dead, that is so significant and pelicans formulation, so I thought bumping tradition and innovation together was important RON heifetz the. 91 00:16:44.100 --> 00:16:48.750 Maggie Monteverde: great leadership thinker, a Harvard who wrote leadership without easy answers and leadership on the line. 92 00:16:49.860 --> 00:16:57.270 Maggie Monteverde: Once was he became well known in the 90s, in the early 2000s for his notion of adaptive leadership and adaptive change. 93 00:16:58.200 --> 00:17:09.780 Maggie Monteverde: and his argument was that too often we think of leadership is about technology techniques and just fixing this or fixing that rather than the larger horizons and the larger questions have a trajectory over the long term. 94 00:17:10.620 --> 00:17:17.580 Maggie Monteverde: I was talking to him and he said what most people haven't noticed is that notion of adaptive is drawn from evolutionary biology. 95 00:17:18.780 --> 00:17:28.860 Maggie Monteverde: And that what you really want to emphasize in evolution is how much you need to preserve of the DNA, in order to see the transformational change you're not changing everything. 96 00:17:29.850 --> 00:17:38.970 Maggie Monteverde: you're actually only changing 123 percent of the DNA to produce evolutionary change, so you need to be as careful about what you present serve as what you innovate. 97 00:17:40.050 --> 00:17:52.890 Maggie Monteverde: And that's what you begin to see in the notion of traditions innovation if you want to know what I mean by tradition to innovation and musical sense, I invite you to go on to YouTube and type in john coltrane my favorite things. 98 00:17:54.030 --> 00:18:01.380 Maggie Monteverde: And there you'll see john coltrane playing the song from the sound of music and you got ya know that song i've watched the sound of music, it sounds familiar. 99 00:18:02.010 --> 00:18:10.290 Maggie Monteverde: And then he'll take you on riffs on a saxophone and you'll be gone whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa where where where where we have my fish and he comes back. 100 00:18:11.370 --> 00:18:21.630 Maggie Monteverde: And you're at the familiar again the tradition that you know and then he takes you on another riff and it's in that intersection that exciting transformational things happen. 101 00:18:22.770 --> 00:18:28.860 Maggie Monteverde: Was I began to think about traditions innovation as a way of reading as a way of interpreting as a way of making sense of my own life. 102 00:18:29.550 --> 00:18:36.570 Maggie Monteverde: asked a friend of mine named Kevin Rome teachers New Testament at Duke what came to his mind when he heard the phrase tradition to innovation. 103 00:18:37.470 --> 00:18:42.510 Maggie Monteverde: And he said well the Book of acts and I thought well that's encouraging since he writes on the Book of acts and. 104 00:18:43.020 --> 00:18:49.440 Maggie Monteverde: They said, look at, so I thought that's even better, and he said actually the Gospels in acts thinking this is progress. 105 00:18:50.310 --> 00:19:04.230 Maggie Monteverde: And he said, actually, you can interpret the entire Bible as a practice of traditions, innovation, because actually only God creates out of nothing God creates X nilo the rest of us are always adapting and learning and creating and revising. 106 00:19:05.700 --> 00:19:10.110 Maggie Monteverde: So Kevin wrote some pieces called traditions innovation as a biblical way of thinking. 107 00:19:11.040 --> 00:19:18.600 Maggie Monteverde: And that struck me is really significant now i've lectured on traditions, innovation and business schools and before corporations, it turns out. 108 00:19:18.900 --> 00:19:28.560 Maggie Monteverde: It translates pretty well to how they think about their work turns out, I think you could give a talk about Steve Jobs as a practitioner of tradition to innovation, even in technology. 109 00:19:29.610 --> 00:19:40.140 Maggie Monteverde: The best ways to think about where you find transformative innovation is in some way engaging the past creatively well at heart for me that's an act of reading. 110 00:19:40.830 --> 00:19:52.410 Maggie Monteverde: And the sense of radical action in the sense of rootedness is connected there and what I want to do in our time that remains is suggest to you how. 111 00:19:53.820 --> 00:20:02.520 Maggie Monteverde: Tradition innovation works within my own tradition, I don't presume it's yours, but it's within one particular tradition, the Christian tradition. 112 00:20:03.210 --> 00:20:10.020 Maggie Monteverde: And a particular take on that tradition that has a lot to do with St Augusta and augustinian framework that's. 113 00:20:10.590 --> 00:20:23.460 Maggie Monteverde: shared across Western Christianity, we could have a conversation about the differences between Eastern orthodoxy and Western Christianity, but, at the heart of this is an understanding of how St a gustin interpreted this. 114 00:20:24.630 --> 00:20:33.270 Maggie Monteverde: This vocation of an imaginative engagement with the past in a rooted tradition sort of way. 115 00:20:34.320 --> 00:20:45.090 Maggie Monteverde: I said the Kevin rose suggested the tradition to innovation is a biblical way of thinking and what I would suggest is that for the Christian tradition, a scriptural imagination, has been at the heart. 116 00:20:45.750 --> 00:21:00.480 Maggie Monteverde: Of who we are, as a people that is to say the notion of reading the Bible as a collection of rules or as a collection of stories or anything like that in a kind of random way is a distinctly modern phenomenon. 117 00:21:01.320 --> 00:21:11.430 Maggie Monteverde: it's a 20th century phenomenon there wasn't such a thing as fundamentalism prior to modernity and so it's actually a very bizarre thing that we're caught up in these fights. 118 00:21:12.150 --> 00:21:20.340 Maggie Monteverde: That actually lack any sense of rootedness in the broader Christian tradition in the in for most of the history of the Christian tradition. 119 00:21:20.730 --> 00:21:28.200 Maggie Monteverde: Reading was a multi layer dynamic with what often was characterized as the fourfold sense of interpretation, so there was a. 120 00:21:28.590 --> 00:21:38.760 Maggie Monteverde: literal sense the way the story would go and then there are three other senses and, if you read the history of commentators on scripture sometimes it gets pretty doggone fun and weird. 121 00:21:39.450 --> 00:21:50.520 Maggie Monteverde: And you're kind of going where where did we get to from here along the way, but that's part of the scriptural imagination, it means you start with genesis one and end with revelation 22. 122 00:21:51.090 --> 00:21:57.270 Maggie Monteverde: And you begin to see the world and the framework and God, in the context of that overarching story. 123 00:21:57.960 --> 00:22:12.840 Maggie Monteverde: And part of our predicament in modernity is we've eclipse that to take a famous book by hands free called the eclipse of biblical narrative that in modernity, we went from locating our lives within this much larger complicated story. 124 00:22:14.100 --> 00:22:16.770 Maggie Monteverde: And started just interpreting it on our own. 125 00:22:17.970 --> 00:22:27.090 Maggie Monteverde: If we did if we even read it at all, more often than not, we cite the Bible in the abstract, based on rumors of having read it, rather than actually. 126 00:22:28.170 --> 00:22:33.630 Maggie Monteverde: Having immersed ourselves in an imaginative way interpretation. 127 00:22:35.040 --> 00:22:40.710 Maggie Monteverde: So that, for example, you see now that even in English literature. 128 00:22:41.490 --> 00:22:51.720 Maggie Monteverde: In a lot of universities, they will have somebody from the religion department or the Bible faculty come over to teach classes, just to give people enough familiarity so that you can read. 129 00:22:52.410 --> 00:23:03.180 Maggie Monteverde: moby Dick or paradise lost and understand the biblical illusions, because the truth of the matter is it'd be very difficult to understand much of the western tradition of reading. 130 00:23:03.600 --> 00:23:12.210 Maggie Monteverde: Apart from knowing the core biblical stories, as well as some of those of the ancient Greeks, but there's a tradition experience in that process. 131 00:23:13.440 --> 00:23:15.930 Maggie Monteverde: and St Agustin understood that, at the heart. 132 00:23:16.950 --> 00:23:21.870 Maggie Monteverde: St augustine's confessions was one of the great works in the history of the world. 133 00:23:22.650 --> 00:23:30.030 Maggie Monteverde: and much of that journey is about him not being sure how to locate himself in a tradition, as he himself describes it. 134 00:23:30.570 --> 00:23:36.540 Maggie Monteverde: He goes in the experiments with all sorts of options and he's a very smart guy and so he's studying philosophies. 135 00:23:36.990 --> 00:23:47.310 Maggie Monteverde: Yet he starts to get attracted to masochism a philosophy, where there's a dualism between good and evil and he goes down all sorts of roads he's invades engaged in various kinds of. 136 00:23:48.540 --> 00:23:54.210 Maggie Monteverde: libertine life has he's going along and then a pivotal moment. 137 00:23:55.590 --> 00:23:56.490 Maggie Monteverde: he's in a garden. 138 00:23:57.930 --> 00:24:04.080 Maggie Monteverde: And he hears the voice, the voice says take and read tall a leg. 139 00:24:05.580 --> 00:24:15.720 Maggie Monteverde: And he picks up the Bible, and he reads and he sees his life in a fundamentally different way now located in relation to God. 140 00:24:16.620 --> 00:24:30.330 Maggie Monteverde: And what he's reading is from the Book of Romans and you can actually chart in the history of the West that whether it's Martin Luther john Wesley many pivotal moments happen around paul's letter to the Romans. 141 00:24:31.470 --> 00:24:53.340 Maggie Monteverde: So you see a gustin all of a sudden now relocating his life within a tradition, after he's had all kinds of wayward experiences and when he does he discovers an orientation which says now in connection to Plato, especially that his life has been marked by chaos and fragmentation. 142 00:24:54.900 --> 00:25:07.590 Maggie Monteverde: Because of the disunity of the vices that when you pursue vices whether those are the traditional kind of moralistic things sexual and alcohol and other sorts of things that lead you astray or. 143 00:25:08.610 --> 00:25:22.290 Maggie Monteverde: Bad philosophy or being defined more by what you hate them what you love and being characterized by taking potshots all those sorts of things, the disunity the vices he says, with tearing them apart. 144 00:25:24.000 --> 00:25:43.230 Maggie Monteverde: And he becomes reoriented by taking and reading into cultivating a scriptural imagination and begins to see his life now in relation to God and god's Providence now what's interesting is that a gustin that's confessions is often interpreted as the first auto biography. 145 00:25:44.460 --> 00:25:48.060 Maggie Monteverde: But that's actually somewhat mistaken because. 146 00:25:49.110 --> 00:25:57.810 Maggie Monteverde: A gustin confessions isn't really an autobiography it's actually a more like a memoir whose main character is God. 147 00:25:59.040 --> 00:26:05.010 Maggie Monteverde: Because he's relocating his life in God displacing himself. 148 00:26:06.870 --> 00:26:22.230 Maggie Monteverde: The reason I mentioned, this is a very important contrast between what a gustin is doing in the confessions and what Russo does at the beginning of modernity and hardell has a wonderful book called the modern self in russo's confessions. 149 00:26:23.280 --> 00:26:30.390 Maggie Monteverde: Because what Russo does and what becomes characteristic of modernity is to write an autobiography where i'm the Center of the story. 150 00:26:32.190 --> 00:26:48.960 Maggie Monteverde: For a gustin God is at the Center of the story for Russo he's the Center of the story, and much of modern auto biography is actually that attempt that I was just describing earlier of modernity, to have a tradition that says there is no tradition, except what I make of it myself. 151 00:26:49.980 --> 00:27:05.010 Maggie Monteverde: And so I become the Center of the story, I think the reductive to have a Russo Ian approach to auto biography was actually when the former basketball player Dennis rodman actually quoted actually complained that he had been misquoted in his autobiography. 152 00:27:07.080 --> 00:27:08.670 Maggie Monteverde: Just think about that for a moment. 153 00:27:10.260 --> 00:27:19.650 Maggie Monteverde: But we try to make ourselves it's a celebrity culture that's drawing attention to myself, rather, what a gustin hears in the garden take and read. 154 00:27:20.730 --> 00:27:32.970 Maggie Monteverde: becomes an invitation to reinterpret his life within a larger story a scriptural imagination, that has god's love and god's grace at the beginning and the promise of god's reign at the end of the story. 155 00:27:34.140 --> 00:27:54.480 Maggie Monteverde: What a gustin then does he's been tutored by Bishop Ambrose of Milan and others who begin to help him learn how to read his life and to read texts in a more powerful way and then down through the centuries we've had lots of interpreters augustine's confessions the city of God. 156 00:27:56.100 --> 00:28:02.130 Maggie Monteverde: On Christian doctrine and down through the centuries, because their framework state. 157 00:28:03.660 --> 00:28:15.390 Maggie Monteverde: Now I want to suggest that remember I said, this is about cultivating imagination, because once you begin to see is rather than saying there are these old texts and they're stifling. 158 00:28:16.110 --> 00:28:23.280 Maggie Monteverde: They actually provide a framework for vigorous engagement dissent creativity and new exploration. 159 00:28:24.150 --> 00:28:35.370 Maggie Monteverde: Through a gustin in spite of August and beyond the guston in all sorts of ways that we begin to see that whether it's commenting directly on scripture whether it's commenting on. 160 00:28:35.850 --> 00:28:46.740 Maggie Monteverde: Others who've gone before us, you see that tradition in process it's still more coherent, if any of you have been familiar with traditions within the Orthodox Judaism. 161 00:28:47.460 --> 00:28:57.240 Maggie Monteverde: Where there is this kind of sense that your life is shaped not only by the Hebrew scriptures by the rabbi's interpretation of those. 162 00:28:57.840 --> 00:29:07.020 Maggie Monteverde: you've ever seen a red time pathak novel the chosen it's about how people get initiated into a way of life by interpreting. 163 00:29:07.770 --> 00:29:16.080 Maggie Monteverde: The rabbi's as well as the scriptures Christians that's been our practice and how we would read widely and engagingly. 164 00:29:16.560 --> 00:29:24.450 Maggie Monteverde: In all sorts of ways we've just tended to ignore that increasingly in modernity and so we end up having fights about all sorts of stuff. 165 00:29:24.870 --> 00:29:33.690 Maggie Monteverde: That are actually lots of wisdom to be found if we were engaging the texts more deeply, I want to highlight just a few of those along the way. 166 00:29:34.530 --> 00:29:39.810 Maggie Monteverde: Most significantly for literature and we can talk about a whole philosophical tradition. 167 00:29:40.380 --> 00:29:50.640 Maggie Monteverde: But there's also literature like john milton's paradise lost in Paradise regained or dante's Divine Comedy where you can't make sense of them apart from this broader. 168 00:29:51.180 --> 00:30:10.500 Maggie Monteverde: theological framework and a scriptural imagination, they go on to all sorts of creative interpretation and debates and there's a kind of immersion in that that's born out of that deep immersion in taking and reading. 169 00:30:11.670 --> 00:30:21.000 Maggie Monteverde: If you want to understand the musician Johann Sebastian Bach you really need to understand Luther and Aquinas, and the tradition back to a gustin. 170 00:30:21.360 --> 00:30:33.870 Maggie Monteverde: To understand how his music is rooted in a vision of God, what Christ work was, as well as how he understands his various musical compositions my son just finished. 171 00:30:34.320 --> 00:30:45.300 Maggie Monteverde: A dissertation called Bach in the beauty of Christ, and I can tell you that it's a practice of traditions, innovation and he long since left me behind i'll take his word for what he says. 172 00:30:46.050 --> 00:30:54.390 Maggie Monteverde: But it's a process of interpreting and what's interesting is that secular music colleges, have had to take note of what my son has been arguing. 173 00:30:55.050 --> 00:31:09.540 Maggie Monteverde: But they thought that Bach was irrelevant reading Luther or Aquinas, or a gustin was irrelevant to bark they just forgot that at the end of everything back ever wrote he wrote to the glory of God in land. 174 00:31:10.860 --> 00:31:24.600 Maggie Monteverde: But that was because of him, being a part of an imaginative exercise rooted in a tradition of thinking and reading and engaging so you begin to see how this works across disciplines in really significant ways. 175 00:31:25.890 --> 00:31:31.920 Maggie Monteverde: want to suggest a 19th century conversation about this and that's Theodore Dostoevsky. 176 00:31:34.020 --> 00:31:39.240 Maggie Monteverde: Often in modernity we've ripped out in philosophy his. 177 00:31:40.560 --> 00:31:51.450 Maggie Monteverde: legend of the Grand Inquisitor and ivan's rebellion and we take the problem of evil, as if it's this abstract problem over here with largely a domestic understanding of God from maternity. 178 00:31:52.260 --> 00:32:01.650 Maggie Monteverde: And we have these debates over here dostoyevsky's brothers karamazov unfortunately is 900 pages so it's hard to assign in a class I did it once. 179 00:32:02.100 --> 00:32:15.810 Maggie Monteverde: and gave the students three weeks off to read it, and they came to me and said, even if we took every minute of class time to read, we still wouldn't have gotten through it, I said that gets I take your point so it'd be better if it was a lot shorter, but the point is this. 180 00:32:16.860 --> 00:32:32.010 Maggie Monteverde: So stay hamsters brothers karamazov, which is a great piece of literature is actually looking at a gustin is understanding of evil and offering a response to what is taken as the problem of evil in contemporary secular philosophies. 181 00:32:33.120 --> 00:32:50.430 Maggie Monteverde: ivan's rebellion is a powerful critique of the understanding of God and the evils that he was seeing happening, I mean dose the fd in the novel is just drawing out of stuff that Russian soldiers were doing and things that he was seeing the kind of horrifying evil. 182 00:32:51.990 --> 00:33:01.080 Maggie Monteverde: And then he offers a response, and the response through the entire book of the brothers karamazov first comes from father's oshima. 183 00:33:02.130 --> 00:33:04.260 Maggie Monteverde: Who is a Russian Orthodox priest. 184 00:33:05.400 --> 00:33:07.800 Maggie Monteverde: And then alley OSHA who becomes. 185 00:33:09.300 --> 00:33:15.960 Maggie Monteverde: A follower of fathers Osama and thus of Christ and it's ultimately at the end of the story. 186 00:33:17.010 --> 00:33:26.490 Maggie Monteverde: alley osha's Holiness, which seems the most compelling alternative to the ivan's protest by the end of the story Ivan has been driven mad. 187 00:33:27.570 --> 00:33:39.960 Maggie Monteverde: Because he's become so focused on destructiveness that he no longer knows how to live for anything, whereas Ali osha's patient forgiving gracious spirit. 188 00:33:40.740 --> 00:33:50.550 Maggie Monteverde: becomes something that others are drawn to, and so you begin to see how the brothers Carol meazza is actually a philosophical work in the form of fiction. 189 00:33:51.630 --> 00:34:07.710 Maggie Monteverde: i'll, be it in the context of a commentary on how you think about the god who creates in genesis one and the promise of the new creation, with all of the complexity of sin and evil and the horrifying events. 190 00:34:08.520 --> 00:34:19.710 Maggie Monteverde: that the Russian soldiers were doing you know it's it's gruesome to even talk about, but it was a it was based in newspaper reports that Ivan is talking about soldiers who would throw babies up in the air to spear them. 191 00:34:20.160 --> 00:34:31.170 Maggie Monteverde: On their swords it was horrifying and what do you do with that reality, but what do you do with contemporary realities of those sorts of gruesome gruesome things. 192 00:34:32.250 --> 00:34:39.000 Maggie Monteverde: Two examples from the 20th century of continuing this practice and I want to broaden it back out the first. 193 00:34:40.110 --> 00:34:44.010 Maggie Monteverde: Is from Wendell berry a wonderful novel called Jaber crow. 194 00:34:45.030 --> 00:34:52.860 Maggie Monteverde: which has setting in rural Tennessee I mean rural Kentucky i'm sorry and, at the heart of it there's some stories about. 195 00:34:53.490 --> 00:35:01.080 Maggie Monteverde: How you engage the complexity of what it means to love one's enemies, is a great story where Jaber hates. 196 00:35:01.980 --> 00:35:14.820 Maggie Monteverde: has really disliked the guy named Troy Troy is an agribusiness man and Jaber as is Wendell berry and an agora cultural person, so he doesn't like an agribusiness man who's doing factory for commercial farming. 197 00:35:16.110 --> 00:35:16.830 Maggie Monteverde: And besides. 198 00:35:18.030 --> 00:35:32.820 Maggie Monteverde: Troy had married the girl that Jaber had his heart set on except he couldn't bring up the courage to ask her out so he's got lots of reasons to be bitter toward Troy but you know if you're in a small town chambers, the only Barbara in town so Troy would have to go to get. 199 00:35:34.440 --> 00:35:38.520 Maggie Monteverde: His haircut from Jaber what's in the mid 1960s and. 200 00:35:39.630 --> 00:35:43.740 Maggie Monteverde: Troy sitting in the Barber chair chambers cutting his hair there's some men sitting along the. 201 00:35:44.820 --> 00:35:55.710 Maggie Monteverde: window sill and Troy says well as far as i'm concerned, you can take the Vietnam War protesters on one side and the commies, on the other side in heaven start shooting at each other, and the more of the day, the better. 202 00:35:58.770 --> 00:36:08.670 Maggie Monteverde: there's broad silence then Jaber I mean then Jay baer says love your enemies bless those who hate you pray for those who persecute you. 203 00:36:10.260 --> 00:36:12.450 Maggie Monteverde: Choices were that crap come from. 204 00:36:14.370 --> 00:36:16.170 Maggie Monteverde: And Jaber says Jesus. 205 00:36:18.510 --> 00:36:25.230 Maggie Monteverde: And then Jaber reflects, it would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I didn't love Troy. 206 00:36:27.150 --> 00:36:39.120 Maggie Monteverde: And you begin to see how a scriptural imagination take shape in the complexity of human life, where you begin to realize the brokenness and the fragility and the ways in which it's easy to. 207 00:36:40.200 --> 00:36:41.370 Maggie Monteverde: Go after people. 208 00:36:42.510 --> 00:36:47.010 Maggie Monteverde: were to say as Linus would say in peanuts I love humanity it's people I can't stand. 209 00:36:49.320 --> 00:36:54.180 Maggie Monteverde: People have said that the reason Jesus says to love your neighbor and to love your enemies there so often the same people. 210 00:36:54.840 --> 00:37:10.290 Maggie Monteverde: Jaber crows of incredibly powerful and Poignant exploration of that with lots more that I could I could go to, but I want to spend a little more time and another piece of fiction, one of the great books of the 20th century by toni morrison called beloved. 211 00:37:11.820 --> 00:37:14.580 Maggie Monteverde: it's a haunting story like Dostoevsky. 212 00:37:15.600 --> 00:37:24.120 Maggie Monteverde: It is haunting about the ravages of slavery and the story is set in the late 1800s sethi is a freed slave woman. 213 00:37:25.200 --> 00:37:32.340 Maggie Monteverde: who had horrific stories of her life in slavery and then, when she was freed she sees for men coming. 214 00:37:33.450 --> 00:37:43.260 Maggie Monteverde: With that goes from revelation the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who are coming to take her back to slavery and when she sees them coming she kills her own baby. 215 00:37:44.610 --> 00:37:48.150 Maggie Monteverde: So they think she's mad and no longer valuable as a slave. 216 00:37:50.100 --> 00:37:55.830 Maggie Monteverde: And the haunting of that what had been done to her as a slave what she did to her own child becomes the dramatic. 217 00:37:56.850 --> 00:38:06.300 Maggie Monteverde: heart of the of the story it's just incredibly painful and Poignant to read there's some of the best sentences ever written in the history of. 218 00:38:07.830 --> 00:38:21.240 Maggie Monteverde: It any fiction, that is at the heart of that novel the narrator says, at one point, it was never too early to start the day's work of beating back the past you begin to realize that haunting. 219 00:38:22.830 --> 00:38:43.020 Maggie Monteverde: there's all sorts of poignant reflections and images that you can only understand if you have a scriptural imagination, because a stump like the stump of Jesse that's from the prophets and come through to Jesus and on into the tradition that plays a significant role in beloved. 220 00:38:45.060 --> 00:38:54.240 Maggie Monteverde: here's the real heart of it that's often not commented by secular literary critics, if you read the epigraph to the novel. 221 00:38:55.290 --> 00:38:57.210 Maggie Monteverde: it's from Romans 11. 222 00:38:58.650 --> 00:39:02.790 Maggie Monteverde: comment i'm sorry Romans nine commenting on Hebrews and hosea 11. 223 00:39:04.710 --> 00:39:09.990 Maggie Monteverde: Those who are not my people I will call my people, those who are not beloved I will call the love. 224 00:39:12.090 --> 00:39:20.040 Maggie Monteverde: And then you begin to say what's going on here well a scriptural imagination means you kind of become a really attentive reader of literature. 225 00:39:20.910 --> 00:39:31.350 Maggie Monteverde: there's poetry, and there are twists and turns and there are places where you're going say what you know you just think of all the different ways in which canaanites are described in scripture. 226 00:39:32.580 --> 00:39:42.120 Maggie Monteverde: From the Old Testament all the way through Jesus and the canaanite woman in the Gospels you see all these complexities and what toni morrison is pointing to. 227 00:39:43.140 --> 00:39:48.660 Maggie Monteverde: Is a passage in probably one of the most complicated passages of the Bible Romans nine to 11. 228 00:39:49.950 --> 00:39:57.060 Maggie Monteverde: what's God doing how's God can can God be trusted if the God of Israel also the God of Jesus, how do you make sense of that. 229 00:39:58.290 --> 00:40:10.710 Maggie Monteverde: But not just Romans nine to 11, which is a hard enough section of scripture to interpret well it's citing a passage in hosea which is its own kind of complicated piece of literature. 230 00:40:11.700 --> 00:40:33.720 Maggie Monteverde: And what morrison is suggesting, I believe, is that the only way like dose ESP, the only way to really understand and interpret and ultimately find meaning and some sense of redemptive hope in the midst of the ravages of slavery is the COMP X context of a scriptural imagination. 231 00:40:34.770 --> 00:40:42.330 Maggie Monteverde: And so it's by being immersed in the stories of scripture, the more you know of a gustin, the more you know of those DST. 232 00:40:43.050 --> 00:40:52.350 Maggie Monteverde: The more you know of the history of slavery, the more you know the history of the United States, the more beloved comes alive as a work of fiction. 233 00:40:53.100 --> 00:41:11.490 Maggie Monteverde: And the power of that becomes illuminated and transformative to think about how do we live better in to the future it's being immersed in this larger story that you see the traditional being at work in ways that open us up to innovation. 234 00:41:12.720 --> 00:41:18.960 Maggie Monteverde: I want to take two steps back now or step back and take make to further comments before we conclude. 235 00:41:20.070 --> 00:41:25.890 Maggie Monteverde: The first is that the notion of radical in the sense of rootedness. 236 00:41:27.180 --> 00:41:29.580 Maggie Monteverde: is a way of breaking bread, with the dead. 237 00:41:30.870 --> 00:41:42.840 Maggie Monteverde: web odd and the great poet said that that art is the primary way in which we can break bread, with the dead we enter into a conversation with them. 238 00:41:43.530 --> 00:41:53.580 Maggie Monteverde: In this radical act of reading of trying to understand the context the circumstances, the questions it's like having dinner with them. 239 00:41:54.480 --> 00:42:01.500 Maggie Monteverde: it's a way of becoming friends with that thinking and part of that friendship that breaking bread. 240 00:42:02.040 --> 00:42:11.370 Maggie Monteverde: If you break bread with somebody on a regular basis you'll find you begin to think a bit more like them, sometimes i've noticed people even begin to develop mannerisms. 241 00:42:11.880 --> 00:42:29.820 Maggie Monteverde: Like them, because there's something in that connection of breaking bread, that is powerful Alan Jacobs, has a recent book that I commend to you called breaking bread, with the dead that's a reflection on how this act of reading how the music how the poetry how the arts more generally. 242 00:42:30.930 --> 00:42:37.440 Maggie Monteverde: Have a way of opening up our horizons to think bigger thoughts and to be shaped more deeply. 243 00:42:38.700 --> 00:42:46.170 Maggie Monteverde: The second thing to say, though, is that by breaking bread, with the dead you're not presuming that because it was in the past, or because it's written in a book it's right. 244 00:42:47.340 --> 00:42:55.350 Maggie Monteverde: All of these people were fallible human beings and there's plenty we can find wrong with those who are dead. 245 00:42:56.760 --> 00:43:07.650 Maggie Monteverde: And yet, if we dismiss them because of their fallibility or they're wrong headedness on lots of issues, then we're pretending to be more arrogant than we ought to be. 246 00:43:08.430 --> 00:43:18.210 Maggie Monteverde: Because we ought to have the humility to recognize that our descendants will probably look back at us and say how could they have thought this or that. 247 00:43:19.230 --> 00:43:31.290 Maggie Monteverde: One of my best teachers, who was a historian and had all sorts of wonderful insights just would talk about what he talked about the of the arrogance condescension of the present. 248 00:43:32.550 --> 00:43:45.570 Maggie Monteverde: When we think that we've got all the right answers and we're going to impose that and those who've gone before us, we lose sight of that radical openness to learning from even as we critique. 249 00:43:46.710 --> 00:43:55.380 Maggie Monteverde: A gustin has some weird views about sexuality, that I think are just wrongheaded i've tried to understand why he had those views to interpret them as charitably. 250 00:43:56.040 --> 00:44:05.850 Maggie Monteverde: as possible, but once we do that we change the context by breaking bread, with the dead in the same way, and when I break bread, with some of my relatives. 251 00:44:06.360 --> 00:44:23.460 Maggie Monteverde: There are times, where I think where'd you get that crazy idea, they usually say that back to me only they usually paralyze the ideas that they think of mine they're crazy but it's that conversational approach the tradition is not just to say, because it was in the past it's right. 252 00:44:25.230 --> 00:44:32.520 Maggie Monteverde: But it is to enter into that listening and learning environment so two final constructive suggestions, the first. 253 00:44:33.120 --> 00:44:52.440 Maggie Monteverde: Is that cultivating imagination through traditions Innovation involves reading regularly and with a practice of interpretive charity take whatever the text says and say how might I interpret this as charitably as possible what might be going on in that writers view. 254 00:44:53.880 --> 00:45:04.050 Maggie Monteverde: That I need to listen to and learn from interpretive charity, whether you're engaged with other people, or whether you're engaged with text is to start by saying Oh, we have a disagreement. 255 00:45:05.130 --> 00:45:12.630 Maggie Monteverde: How can I interpret that as charitably as possible, but secondly by opening ourselves up. 256 00:45:13.830 --> 00:45:26.610 Maggie Monteverde: To tradition to innovation, at least for me and for anyone who is a Jew or Christian, it is to give us a larger canvas to live with questions the great writers have lived with. 257 00:45:27.720 --> 00:45:32.100 Maggie Monteverde: They don't always provide satisfactory answers they're powerful. 258 00:45:33.180 --> 00:45:40.080 Maggie Monteverde: they'll say excuse brothers care of myself I try to reread every couple of years, because in the process of reading that. 259 00:45:40.770 --> 00:45:48.630 Maggie Monteverde: It poses really sharp questions to me not just about the world and about God poses sharp questions to be about my own life. 260 00:45:49.530 --> 00:46:04.980 Maggie Monteverde: Am I going to become like Ali ocean become a Russian monk, not on your life are there lessons to be learned about what that might look like that might inform how I live and engage on a daily basis, I sure hope so. 261 00:46:06.000 --> 00:46:07.620 Maggie Monteverde: Reading widely. 262 00:46:08.970 --> 00:46:19.650 Maggie Monteverde: Asking big questions having that North star is a way of continually going back so that hopefully we can go forward even more powerfully. 263 00:46:20.490 --> 00:46:29.760 Maggie Monteverde: When I think about the theme for this inaugural year let hope abound there's a whole tradition of wisdom about what it means to hope. 264 00:46:30.720 --> 00:46:38.100 Maggie Monteverde: it's embedded in fiction it's embedded in philosophy it's embedded in scripture it's embedded in music it's embedded in poetry. 265 00:46:38.940 --> 00:46:59.310 Maggie Monteverde: it's embedded in the large questions that shape our lives, so it is my hope that all of us here at belmont and beyond would be practicing tradition to innovation in a way that cultivates the imagination to be faithful and effective in all we do take and read thanks very much. 266 00:47:33.780 --> 00:47:34.200 Thank you. 267 00:47:41.820 --> 00:47:43.440 Maggie Monteverde: for giving our opening talk. 268 00:47:47.040 --> 00:47:48.360 Maggie Monteverde: Thank you all for being here. 269 00:48:08.160 --> 00:48:08.400 Maggie Monteverde: For.