Copeland: The water we swim in is, this is the way things things are. This is reality. You need to learn how to navigate it, but it's just the way things are. You have to accept it, but to call it sin from a Christian perspective, is to say this is the way things are, but it is not the way things are supposed to be, and therefore you don't learn how to navigate it, you fix it, you address it. I am Rebecca Copeland. I am Associate Professor of Theology at Boston University, School of Theology and affiliated with the Institute of global sustainability. Stump: Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. When we engage with the hard problems in the world today we run into an astounding complexity. In the 1970s a couple of public planning experts coined the label “wicked problems” to describe a problem with this level of complexity, and the term has become a popular way to describe the tangled nature of some of the biggest problems we face. Climate change, racial and economic inequality, mistrust in science, are all wicked problems. Much of the traditional theological idea of sin isn’t very helpful when it comes to thinking about problems like these, because it has so often been conceived as an individual problem, one that is simply one person’s moral failure and solved by repentance, confession, and forgiveness, which can happen between an individual and God. On the other hand, the tradition thinks of original sin as a condition, one that is inherited and universal, and (depending on which theologians you read), not much to do about it in the here and now. Both ways of thinking about sin get at something true and real about the world but Rebecca Copeland wants to uncover another layer that helps us to understand that we are both complicit and have a role to play in repentance and healing, even if we are not individually responsible for the problem. This is an episode that explores some deep theology but it also stays grounded in the practical, asking how can we move forward in this broken world with a view toward something better. Let’s get to the conversation. Interview Part One Stump: Rebecca Copeland, welcome to the podcast. I'm glad to be talking to you. Copeland: I am so glad to be here with you. Stump: So I really like talking to professional theologians. I guess all of us are theologians to some degree, but you do this much more systematically, which is different than brain surgeons where I hope none of us just dabble. But I'm curious how you got into the profession. When you were a little girl, did you say, "When I grow up I want to be a theologian?" Tell us how this happened. Copeland: Definitely not. Actually, when I was in college, I wanted to be either a high school English teacher or a geneticist. Stump: You're on the right podcast here then. Copeland: Well, I somehow ended up being a lawyer instead of either of those. So I have a degree in English with a minor in biology and then went on to law school and did trial work for about nine years. I worked for the government when I had a call to ministry, did not know what form that ministry was going to take, have had to tell my call story many times and some of the language I think that has been most helpful for describing mine comes from Margaret Ann Crain's book on The United Methodist Deacon and in it she talks about sometimes a call is very clear and laid out, but sometimes it's simply a conviction about where you can no longer stay. And that's how it came for me was I was called away from law reading a book by Coleman McCarthy called" I'd Rather Teach Peace". There's a line in that book that says, "Law is the failure of love." And I spent a really long time thinking about that and could not come up with a single instance where that wouldn't be accurate. And I still think law and lawyers are very important because love fails in this world all the time, but what did I want to spend the rest of my life doing? Patching up where love has failed or trying to build more love in the world? And that led me to seminary. Stump: How long had you been a lawyer when all this happened? Copeland: Nine years. Stump: Wow. That's quite a career shift. Copeland: It was very interesting because this call had to come in the middle of the Great Recession and the housing market crash, at which point I quit my secure government job and left my house on the market to move to Atlanta to go to seminary. But things worked out. The week after I got there, I got a part-time job, my house rented and it rented the entire time I was in seminary and PhD work and sold when I started my job up in Boston. Stump: Calls don't typically come out of the blue to people that have had no background or context for such things. Can you go back even a little further? How did you grow up in terms of your own religious tradition or faith commitments and what role do you think that played in the call that came to you to take up this profession? Copeland: I am a cradle Methodist, so I grew up in the United Methodist Church, was very active in my United Methodist Youth Fellowship, UMYF at the time. I, as many people do in college, started questioning and actually left the church for several years and I had come back about four years, no, about two years before the discomfort with where I was began. So I came back actually to an Episcopalian church arguing with the tradition every step of the way. So I had done, as they say in seminary, a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction of my faith and knew that I was standing on solid footing. When I came back to the church, I got involved with an adult bible study called Disciple Bible Study. I don't know if you or your listeners are familiar with it, but it is a nine month long Bible study, so you only undertake it if you're really serious. And that was the first time I felt an urge to go to seminary, but I thought you are someone who has just returned to the faith, you could not possibly be called to go to seminary. And so I just began exploring my discomfort with where I was and what were other possibilities. And that went on for several years actually before it just became untenable for me to stay any longer. And there wasn't anything wrong with my job. I was doing public service, I was serving in a way, but it just trial work was not very compatible with what I wanted to be doing with my life. Stump: And because we're BioLogos, I'm contractually obligated to ask you whether science played any role in maybe the deconstruction or the reconstruction of your faith. You said you were interested in genetics as well. Was there any interesting interaction between science and your faith at the time then or since then? Copeland: It was interesting because I was both an English major and a biology major for quite some time. I earned enough credits for biology major, but you had to have another science minor for it to be a major, so it ended up being a minor. And I think part of the interaction of those two very different fields of study made it to where science wasn't--I never had issues that some people have with science contradicts scripture because I've always understood scripture to be a collection of different genres of literature of writing. I never didn't see that there were some contradictions between Genesis one and Genesis two and I could see that I was reading a poem that was written in a very beautiful way and what you could imagine to be a story that had been passed down orally for generations and generations before it was written down, that they weren't either one trying to be an accurate scientific description. So that had never really been an issue for me. I think the biggest issue for me was when I was in organic chemistry and thinking about how much different molecules influence the way we behave, but that was going against my humanities side and I had to wrestle with that. And it's been really fascinating since I came back because I did study, I took some classes on things like natural science and the doctrine of creation and Bible and care of the earth. And it's been great learning how much we do not know and how much we cannot know actually learning about epigenetics because when I was younger I thought that base pairs of your DNA were going to determine in some way almost everything about your personality. And now I know about the folding of chromosomes and the expression of genes and just how much more marvelous and interesting our world is when we look at it through lenses of science and faith together. Stump: Well good. That's interesting background and context and I appreciate hearing something of your life in that regard. But our main event here to talk about is that you had a book that was published last year, Entangled Being: Unoriginal Sin and Wicked Problems. We'll spend some time digging into those ideas, but maybe first give us something of the origin story of the book. How did this project get started? Copeland: I suppose I started wrestling with these issues when I was taking a class called Sin and Salvation right before I started the PhD program. And the professor and most of the students came from the reform tradition, so the discussion of sin was all focused on original sin and depravity and our incapacity to do anything. But I was one of three Methodists in this class who believe in prevenient grace and cooperative grace and were interested in actual sin and the problems in this world and what we can actually do about them. And so some of our, well, for an entire semester, it was three against eight I think, talking about these issues. And that's where I started wrestling with questions about sin and actual sin and original sin and whatever it is that falls somewhere in between that comes under the rubric often of systematic or social sin. The book itself started as a conference paper on climate change. So I started breaking down this idea of intergenerational, unintentional, and communal sin forming us in certain ways and creating problems that no one intends but that we're all involved in in conversation with climate change. And then after that, it was several years I thought I might turn it into an article and move on with my life. But in 2020 when it was time for me to start working on my second book, we were in the midst of 2020. COVID, Black Lives Matter, and it was a series of things. February of 2020 when Ahmaud Arbery was killed, and then right following that in March, Breonna Taylor, and then in May, George Floyd. And as a white Christian I was wrestling as so many of us were with how do we relate to the systems of racism and white supremacy that are allowing these deaths to keep happening? And that was when I said, "We have issues with moral responsibility, with understanding what it means to repent, with not sitting around and saying, 'We should be filled with shame at being white,' but we should be involved in combating systems that are devaluing the lives of our siblings." And that is where this book came from. Stump: All right, well let's dig into it a little bit and want to start with the subtitle, Unoriginal Sin and Wicked Problems. So I'm a Boston University alum myself, and so heard wicked being used as part of the regional dialect there quite often, but that's not what you're doing here. What are wicked problems in this more technical sense? Copeland: Yes. So wicked problems is actually a term of art in public policy planning that I came across while I was doing, when I started working in eco-theology and environmental ethics. And the term was, as far as I can tell, coined in the 1970s by two public policy people, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. And it was to try to distinguish public planning problems from what they call tame or benign problems that are like a math problem. A math problem, you know the rules, you get an answer, it's right or it's wrong, but there's an end point at which you've solved the problem or an engineering problem where you're supposed to achieve a certain thing and when you have achieved it you are done. But wicked problems are ones where there's not really even agreement as to what the problem is. So there's certainly no end point at which the problem is solved. And they say in the article where they were discussing this that wicked problems simply have to be resolved or resolved over and over again. And so when you work on a wicked problem, you achieve always a temporary solution from which point you see further issues that need to be addressed as well. And it was interesting because they started talking about this in the 1970s and they said it's because they had once thought public policy planning was tame, that it was easy to get a consensus on what the problem was and what a solution looked like. But all of a sudden it seemed they had become so much more complex because in the 1970s people started realizing that not everyone agreed that building a highway through a certain neighborhood to relieve traffic pressures in another neighborhood was universally approved of. They started realizing they did not actually have consensus because not all of the population were being consulted on this. And they also began to understand more how interconnected ecologically our world is, that when you solve the problem of where are we going to put our toxic waste somewhere away from our population center, it doesn't necessarily stay there and it can come back and it can come into other communities. And so the ecological interconnectedness and the increasingly recognized heterogeneity of our society made these problems seems to be of a completely different order than they had been assumed to be in the past. Stump: So in the book you dive deeper into three of these wicked problems, environmental injustice, globalization and the exploitation that so often goes along with that, and health disparities, all of those, at least in your exposition of them have a pretty strong racial dimension to the problems. Is that typical of wicked problems or is that just a facet of the ones that you picked or is there something about race in particular that lends itself to problems being wicked in this sense? Copeland: My selection probably was colored by how I came to this book that it was during a period of very acute racial reckoning in this country and in my communities and in myself. It also had to do with the theologians and ethicists that I found most helpful as conversation partners. If I'm going to use Eda Maria Isasi-Diaz, I should be addressing something that relates to the Latino, Latina communities, the Latinx. And so that was part of it. In this country race is such an issue that many of our wicked problems do carry an aspect of it, but not all of them. All urban planning that results in disparities can be understood as wicked problems. Food access, which again because of this country's history, frequently has a racial dimension but also has an economic dimension. Rural versus urban resource distribution, how do we take care of rural communities, doesn't necessarily have a racial dimension and are other problems that certainly are wicked. So these were taken up as examples but not supposed to be in any way exhaustive or comprehensive look at what are wicked problems. Stump: Okay. Let's move to the other half of the subtitle, unoriginal sin. So another aspect of these problems is that we are not, none of us is individually or in that sense directly responsible for these problems, but we are complicit and these are systems that fall short or we might say miss the mark of what they should be. And so you want to say they're instances of sin and that's not the most popular word to use these days, but I'd like to get you talking a little bit about why you think that's the right broad category for talking about wicked problems, but then why you think you need a different subcategory of unoriginal sin to talk about them. Copeland: Well, I think the sin language is vitally important to push against our assumptions that, and I don't know that we all consciously assume it, I don't know that we all accept it, but there is the water we swim in is this is the way things are, this is reality. You need to learn how to navigate it, but it's just the way things are. You have to accept it. But to call it sin from a Christian perspective is to say this is the way things are, but it is not the way things are supposed to be and therefore you don't learn how to navigate it, you fix it, you address it. I think that's vitally important and it comes from my very deep commitment. This entire project was driven towards helping Christians who don't like the way things are to see we are not powerless, that we can cooperate with what the spirit is trying to do in the world and we can work against these systems. They're not inevitable. And so that's where I think sin language is vitally important for Christians to be using this to give us grounds to resist it. Stump: Before you move on to the subcategory then, just in response to that, I'd like you to unpack a little bit the notion of the fantastic hegemonic imagination that you bring up as often our response to these problems. Explain a little bit even where that came from because I gather it wasn't original to you and how that factors into the typical responses we hear to wicked problems like this. Copeland: So fantastic hegemonic imagination is a phrase that Emilie Townes uses in her book Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. And it was just such a useful way to think about it for me is that this is not an evil that I produced or that any individual produced. It is something we're born into, it's culturally produced and we are culturally shaped by it, but that doesn't mean it's inevitable. And the fantastic hegemonic imagination is this not single embodied force that insists, that keeps whispering to us throughout our lives, "This is the way things are. This is the only way things can be." It is a deformation of human imagination where we're supposed to be able to imagine better possibilities, it's saying, "This is the only possibility." And it's fantastic because it's simply untrue. It's not the way things have to be, it is the way things benefit certain people. And so there are vested interests in promoting that there's no alternative possible, but it is what Walter Wink would refer to as the powers that be and what he's alluding to, Language and Pauline Letters and other writings about the powers and principalities of this world and what some would refer to as the demonic, but it is also what shapes the world that we are born into and a lot of the systems that we have to inhabit and live in in some way. So how do we do that? And I found Townes so very helpful because she talks about dismantling cultural evil and that this is a group project because I think so many times we say, "But what can I do? I can't fix this." Well, it's a group project, you have a part to play. And so we're going to see how can I start playing my part so that our group project moves forward because I think a lot of us have not earned a passing grade on the group project yet. Stump: Okay. So now apply this to sin and this group project, not individual, and why you want to call this unoriginal sin and distinguishing that from individual acts of sin that we may commit and from original sin. What's unoriginal sin in this regard? Copeland: So original sin is about the human condition. It's about what all humans share, it's about that which guarantees that we all stand in need of salvation. None of us can think that we are okay apart from God. And that's an important and valid part of Christian theology, but it is not all of Christian theology. And so a lot of times talking about these kinds of problems gets lumped under original sin. And for original sin, there's nothing you can do. You just have to wait to be redeemed from it. You have to trust that you are redeemed from it. It's accomplished apart from you. And so my Methodist background, my Wesleyan theology helps me with this because Wesley thought that prevenient grace addresses original sin, that sure, if you met a human being apart from grace, they would be utterly depraved. They would be incapable of imagining an alternative. They would be incapable of doing anything in cooperation with the coming of the Kingdom. But you don't meet a person like that because God's already there before. God's already at work. And so God has already empowered us to at sometimes catch a glimpse that this is not the way it's supposed to be, to at sometimes be able to stand up and say no to it. And so I was looking for something that's outside of the category of original sin to talk about this. Now on the other side when we talk about actual sin, most people are thinking about things I've done and usually things I did on purpose. And so for those, this doesn't fall under that necessarily. And so for this in between, there's been a lot of work by liberation theologians talking about systemic sin, that the poor aren't poor because they're sinful and there's not necessarily a person saying, ""I will keep them poor. But there is a system that operates in such a way as to create poverty for some and wealth for others. And I think it's a good analysis frequently done from the underside of this power disparity, but it doesn't really tell us what to do about it. And so I was looking again for another way of talking and thinking about this that would give grounds for what do we precisely do. And I think another part of this project was I've learned a lot from reading liberation theologians and I was trying to think about what does liberation theology mean for the privileged? What does it mean for those of us who have benefited from these systems? We have been told by those who are being harmed that they're being harmed. Now how do we respond? And I think there's a lot for us to learn there. And that was a lot of what this project was trying to do was learn from these theologians, these other voices to shape my most particular community in more positive ways moving forward. Stump: It struck me in reading your book that one of the difficulties with assessing our own moral culpability for these wicked problems for unoriginal sin is we have these traditions of morality that are very individual, even atomistic you say, and primarily backward looking. You cite the religious scholar, Willis Jenkins on this saying, "Those systems are inadequate for assessing these problems that have developed over many generations. And instead we need something more collective and forward looking." What does that look like? Start to walk us through the assessment of our own moral culpability when we weren't doing it directly. We are involved in these systems and again, as you say, many of us that have been privileged to benefit from these systems, how do we start to even think about our own moral culpability for them for these problems? Copeland: I think one of the most important things that I learned in this project is we need to stop thinking about how much am I to blame for this. And I think that's the tradition that Jenkins is referring to, this backward looking is trying to assess how much responsibility do you hold for the current state of affairs? And what I found is when you stop reading, I don't know how else to say it, when you stop reading Western, American, and European male philosophers and start reading people who have not lived in a world that they could imagine they were in control of everything, that's not the ethical tradition. I found feminist theologians who were--I loved it--Margaret Urban Walker wrote that, "Our perfectly predictable entanglement in a complex world with imperfectly predictable results is part of the normal and required self-understanding of human agents." That people have to understand you can't control the outcome and you can't simply divvy out blame and know what are going to be the outcomes of your actions before you act. That's not how we work. And so I found Claudia Card was talking about when you talk about populations who are suffering from unjust systems, they don't talk about who is responsible. They talk about how do I take responsibility for my life? How do I take responsibility for putting my life together? And then when I moved to womanist theologians and Mujerista theologians writing from Hispanic Latinx communities or African-American communities, they were talking about how they care for community in a world where they don't control the outcome. And they're already doing the work so we don't have to build it. We can learn from communities that are already doing it where they can't control the outcome, where they didn't make the system, where they don't have the power and yet they're taking responsibility for their community's survival and betterment and we can join in that work. And that's all forward looking. It's not about how much blame do I bear for the past that brought us here, it's how do I take responsibility for the future? How do I become somebody I can be happy with living in the world of tomorrow? How can I take responsibility for the future? [musical interlude] Interview Part Two Stump: One of the things I've been interested in for some of my own work is the development of moral maturity in our species over time and how this came to be that we, I think alone of the species on earth do have moral responsibility for the kinds of things that we do. And I've thought about that primarily in terms of a fairly gradual increase of that over time. But I was struck by your claim that in relation to these wicked problems, when we fail to take responsibility, as you were just saying, we actually harm our moral agency. And I think you mean by that, I want to hear you respond to this, but I think you mean by that that we are less able to act morally in the future as the result of failing to take responsibility like that. You had a line about those who would make us moral invalids in the book. Unpack that a little more for me and what our complicity in these systems and our failure to act perhaps are going along with the fantastic hegemonic imagination in thinking, well, there's nothing we can do about it anyway, that that actually makes me a moral invalid. Copeland: It can eventually. Stump: Those are strong words. Copeland: It can eventually. Going through all of this, I've been thinking a lot about how do you gain leverage to see it because I didn't always see the things I see now. And it's mainly through relationships, it's mainly through forming relationships across different life experiences that you even come to see and understand a lot of the problems that we're complicit in. And I think the vast majority of human beings are not engineering this and trying to make us into moral invalids, but I think there's some that are, because it benefits them for us not to question the way things are. It benefits them for us to think we're powerless to do anything about it. And we can go along to maintain comfort. And if we're going along to maintain comfort, we lose the ability really to stand up and say, "No." I don't think we ever lose it entirely. I don't know. But we weaken it and it gets weaker and weaker and harder and harder for us too to see things that are wrong and say that things are wrong or do anything about it with every time we say, "I could have done something but I'm not going to because that would make me uncomfortable." Or "I could do something about it, but that would reduce my bottom line." "I could do something about it, but..." Each time we go down that path, it gets harder to do it. But each time you say, "This is not going to fix everything, but this is a stand I'm going to take." You get a little stronger, you see a little further, and you can do a little more. And I came to this a lot through reading about psychological development. And there's a lot... People talk about the age of moral responsibility, like what is the age at which a human being is suddenly a moral agent? As though an infant has no morality, a child has no morality, and at a certain age all of a sudden you're a fully capable, qualified moral agent. There's no more development to be had. But that's not how things work. We hold a 12-year-old responsible for things that we wouldn't hold a 6-year-old responsible for. And once you hit 18 or 25 or whatever age, there's still more you can develop. And we know that. I mean we all know people who are more moral than we are, and we all know people who are not making choices that seem obvious to us. And we can see that there's development that happens throughout our lives in all of our experiences. And I think, I mean we've had enough examples in the 20th century of where people didn't object at the beginning of a problem and they didn't object at the next step and they didn't object at the next step and it just becomes harder and harder to see or stand up. Stump: I'm interested particularly in that and without getting too specific in terms of current political situations, but I'm interested in that again, in the relationship between the individual and the collective moral responsibility. It's so hard for me to see some of the collective moral irresponsibility that has gone on in our culture while knowing individually, many of the people that I would put into that group that I believe are blind to moral implications. Individually, they're good people, they're nice people, and yet somehow as a collect, is there a difference there between the collective moral responsibility of the communities that I've chosen to be part of or that I've allowed to shape my own imagine and thinking versus my own individual moral responsibility for things or is one just a function of the other? Copeland: So I use climate change, actually we hadn't talked about that as the wicked problem that I discussed developing all of these ideas. And partially this is because climate change discourse and climate change denial, but not necessarily denial language takes up this. Corporations have told us it's your responsibility as an individual. You need to install solar, you need to use less energy as though you can individually cut your emissions enough that we're going to save the earth. Environmentalists have told us it's a systemic problem, we need to change the system. Systems are made up of individuals, so there is nothing an individual can do, but there is no collective apart from individuals. And so this is what an original sin, this is what this book is trying to get at. And this is what I think Emilie Townes was getting at with her cultural production of evil and the group project is this is something that we as individuals are involved in and therefore we as individuals can make a difference. That's the hope that comes in this, is, no, I can't fix any of this, but if I can be part of a community that is working towards it and build a larger community that's working towards fixing these problems and we can start building an alternative imagination that can see different ways to live in the world, then we can fix this. I mean, 20th century just everybody was wrestling with these issues and two brothers, Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr very famously were approaching this in different ways. And Reinhold Niebuhr said, "You can have very moral people, but as a collective you're never going to have a moral society." And H. Richard Niebuhr was very focused on how do we respond to the world around us in love as individuals? And I'm trying to thread something in between that we can respond to the world in ways that will build more moral societies and it's only by giving up that we end up with this collectively less moral society. We can exercise consumer pressure on corporations, we can exercise social pressure on each other, not shaming people, but building communities that look at things differently. Really, really silly tiny example, the seminary I went to is at a... I went to Candler at Emory University and they have a very big sustainability program. And so they took all the trash cans out of the school and instead you have a whole system of waste disposal and there's a place for white paper, there's a place for colored paper, there's a place for cardboard, there's a place for aluminum, there's a place for plastic, and then there's this one little tiny thing for things that won't go anywhere else. And the whole system is set up simply to make you think about what you're throwing away and it can reform. I was there, I mean I did my seminary and PhD at this school and it formed me in a way that doesn't really fit into polite society all that well anymore because I was standing talking to someone and he threw an apple core into the trash can and while we're still talking, I reached into the trash can and took the apple core out and he just looked at me and I said, "I'm going to take it to the compost bin." And he was like, "I'm sorry, there wasn't one right here." I said, "I know, but there's one right over there." It had formed me in a way that that was not a thought out process, and I continued to be friends with this person for many years and he never threw anything compostable away in front of me again. And so it's things like that. I wasn't trying to shame him. It wasn't something done on purpose. I didn't lecture him, I didn't break the conversation, but I had been formed differently and because I did that in a way that disrupted normal societal conventions, he started acting differently as well. And who knows how many people he influenced. Stump: I want to get to some more of those sorts of practical ways of responding to these. But before we do more of that, I want to not skip a step that we haven't used the theological term yet of repentance. That is the proper response to sin, right? So you've articulated this category of unoriginal sin and I want to hear a little bit about how we repent to unoriginal sin. Does that look different somehow? Copeland: It is exactly the same model as you would of actual sin. If you commit an actual sin, what we would consider an individual actual sin. If you broke into your neighbor's house and stole something from them and you wanted to repent of that, you would acknowledge that you had done it. They would no longer be wondering who broke into their house afraid all of the time. You would give them back what you had taken, and you would try to do something extra to make amends. And that is taking responsibility for the harm you've caused and working to repair the harm. And I think that's the model of what repentance means, and it's a model we get in the Old Testament and the New Testament. It is the foundation of the sacrificial code where if you sin against someone, you're supposed to return what you've taken plus something extra. Plus you have to acknowledge it publicly and bring a sacrifice to be made whole. There is a public acknowledgement of the harm done, there's individual acknowledgement, there's repair of the harm, and there's something extra to try to establish a tenable relationship in the future. We see this with Zacchaeus in Luke when he says, "Not just if I've taken anything I'll repay it." He says, "I'll repay it plus this, and I'm giving my wealth to the poor and this." And Jesus says, "Today, you see a son of Abraham." We see this over and over. So it's a biblical paradigm. It's the paradigm of restorative justice. It's what you know in ordinary stuff. If you- Stump: And it's not just feeling sorry for what you've done. Copeland: Right. There are some really tiny harms that apologies are enough. I'm sorry I stepped on your foot. An apology is fine. But if you've done genuine harm to someone, you need to take an act towards genuine repair. And that's what I think is important for us to pay attention to is if we call this sin, then it is something of which we need to repent. And that is not just between your own individual conscience in God. It is that, but it's not only that because this has to do also with how we live in beloved community. And I think that one of the things that had people so confused talking about moral responsibility in the past is that they missed that all of morality is really somewhat future oriented, focused on how do we go about living together even after harm has been done. Stump: But apply this now to these wicked problems where the fix, even the oven beyond the harm that has been done is not going to be some quick, easy, easy thing. So this is a very long, a long game here of trying to dismantle these problems. What does repentance in that sense that you just described there, how does that apply particularly to these kinds of problems and harms? Copeland: It's a life's work, and I think that's one reason we're reticent to begin it because we want to see it achieved. And wicked problems are never solved. We are always going to be negotiating how do we go on living together. And as long as we have the wonderful variety and plurality and diversity that God has put in this creation, then we're going to rub up against each other. Even if we are all doing the very, very best we can, there's going to be harms. And so there's always going to be room for us to resolve the problems and think about how we're going to live into the future. But it's a lifelong project. And so I think a lot of times we're reticent to begin it, but I can't think of anything that is more gospel-filled and rich and rewarding than to say, "I'm dedicating my life to living into the Kingdom." And that's what it is. It's living into the way things should be. And that's I think everything. Stump: I want to do two more things here in the short time we have left in this. I had like to bring science back into the conversation if we could. One of the initiatives that BioLogos has recently begun has been called Science is Good, which is an attempt to counter some of the negative cultural narratives around science and its application. So I'm curious about whether you see any immediate or direct application for ways that science might be involved in the work of repentance particularly for these unoriginal sins. And secondly, and I'll let you decide how to negotiate between these two, I want to hear some more from you personally. You started this book in a really engaging way of giving some detailed ways that your daily life makes you complicit in unoriginal sins simply by drinking your tap water in Boston or eating oats for breakfast or consuming any energy. This is a really effective and powerful way of drawing us in to seeing our complicity, but maybe there's a bookend to that in this conversation, at least with similarly specific ways that you yourself have been involved in these acts of repentance that are the long game that we might not ultimately see. And I know it might be more comfortable to publicly admit our sins than it is to brag about our attempts to right the wrongs and do good in the world, but I think it'd be really helpful to our audience and to me to hear some specifics of you who have thought a long time about these and that it's not just this abstract idea, but that this is life. So you mentioned picking an apple core out of the trash and putting it where it belongs. So those two things. What are some specific sorts of things, ways that your daily life has changed as a result of engaging in this project? And are there any ways, particularly those of us who are on the science-y side of things that we can look particularly towards science as ways of helping to do this, to amplify what we're doing maybe? Go ahead and give a little speech about any of that if you would. Copeland: Well, one thing is you're not going to get perfect trying to live in this world, but there's a lot of things, little things that you can do, and I like... Joanna Macy talks about three different categories of things to do to try to live into the world we want, and some are about education and learning. Some are about direct action, she calls them holding actions in defense of life, and some are about building community that's going to live differently. And so, I mean, I'm a professor, so one of the ways that I engage in repentance is through education, education of myself, and then education of others about the impacts of the ways we're living right now, about the impact... I teach a class called environmental justice. There are so many people who don't understand that our waste is disposed of in ways that disproportionately harm impoverished or minoritized communities. And so just educating about those things. To tie it, I mean, people like to think that science is all technology and the most cutting edge thing, but composting is science and composting. One of the things I do is try to reduce the amount that gets thrown away from my household in every way that I can. Yes, through recycling. I look for ways to engage in single stream recycling because things get recycled more efficiently that... Or not single stream, multi stream. So you put aluminum cans with aluminum cans, they're more likely to turn into a new aluminum can. I compost what I can. Those are some of the things in my house. Another thing I started off by talking about the sources of my energy. I mean, I have installed solar and I have when my car had to be replaced, I didn't do it before the end of the life cycle of my car. It was replaced with a plug-in hybrid. Now this is an example of a wicked problem because I know that the minerals involved in our current iterations of solar batteries and such things are contributing to conflict around the world. So that means I have a new responsibility to repent off. I'm doing the best I can for the preservation of life on earth right now, but I have a new responsibility. So I'm educating myself and others about the impacts of these technologies on areas like the Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Most people probably didn't think a lot about the mineral rights our administration was asking for in exchange for defense of Ukraine, but it has to do with our electronics that we all use. And a lot of people probably don't know that the conflict in the Congo with Rwanda backing some of the militants has to do with coltan, which is a mineral that goes into the computer I'm using to talk to you right now and my cell phone that I carry around in my pocket. And so I have learned about that and I've participated at my school with a group that has planned the first Machozi Colloquium that's going to happen in February. And we are focused on environmental justice and peacemaking with specific attention to African and Latin American contexts. And so we're trying to educate others about that. We can contact representatives and if we happen to live in areas where our representatives are already fighting for these things, we can also talk to our friends and family in other areas to contact their representatives because politicians can actually get voted out of office if they don't respond to their constituencies. I grow more of my own food. I share the food that I grow, but that's an individual trying to have clean hands. I also joined a food co-op that had been working for food justice in my area for years and years and years and years and years. And so by changing where I buy part of my groceries each month, I'm supporting having local affordable food and other grocery options that match my morality available in a community that didn't have a lot of options. Buying less clothes and paying more for them because you pay attention to the supply chain of the companies that you're buying it from. And I have the very distinct privilege of running a program at the school where I get to plan some programming and we do different things for ecological justice, and we hosted a mending workshop, which drew students from outside of our school who wanted to come and learn how to repair rather than throwing away or donating their not so gently used items, but we can actually make things last longer so we consume less because you know what? If you buy from the grocery store and from a discount store right now, we are complicit in human trafficking and all of these things that I've been writing about. And so the less that we can consume until these systems are fixed, the better we're doing. Stump: Thanks for that. That's a great list of examples of things we might be doing. Maybe just end by giving some advice. I think that most of our audience is on board and desires to do better in this way, but for many for whom this is fairly new, to think about actual things we could do, what's a good first step? What would you say to somebody who says, "Okay, you've convinced me. What do I start doing tomorrow in this very long game? What's the first step?" Copeland: I would say one small concrete thing that you do regularly plus learning about it. So it might be using less water or it might be starting to recycle if you don't, or it might be using cloth napkins instead of paper napkins. Any concrete step you can take, whatever it is that has captured your imagination and then start learning about it. Look in your community, there will be organizations working on something related to the issue you have now become interested in, and you can learn more and join that organization. You can just start by maybe supporting them a little financially. You can maybe start by going to a meeting or reading their website, but it's going to be a process of learning to see what we have been conditioned not to see and learning more about what's going on and paying attention to who's already at work because that can overcome so much of our reticence is that there are people already working on this all over the world, everywhere. There's somebody working on food justice, there's somebody working on dealing with our waste. There's somebody concerned about your water quality. There is a group that is already working on that, and you can go and learn more and become involved in a community that is already engaged in building new structures and new imaginations of what's possible. Stump: Well, thanks so much, Becky. Thanks for shining a light on these wicked problems, and thank you for holding a mirror up to our own complicity and how we might respond- Credits