Okay, hi everybody. Welcome back to this Next Hand Books podcast. And I'm really excited today to have Noel Merring, who has written the book Awake Not Woke, which the moment that I heard of the title, I said, this is fantastic. I got to get the book, got to get her on the show. And the subtitle is equally good. A Christian response to the cult of progressive ideology and terrific endorsements on the back, everybody from Patrick Coffin to Michael Miller, Matthew Peterson, Kerry Gress, our good friend Kerry Gress. Noel's good friend Kerry Gress. And she was, we had her in a podcast talking, I guess, I guess a couple months ago. So Noel, welcome. Good to have you with us. It's fun to be here. Thanks for having me. Sure. So the way that we typically do this, I often ask the guests to talk a little bit about herself, himself, a little bit of the background. And then we'll talk about the book. And I've got so many notes here. I mean, I probably, I want to be careful not to not to do too much of a long intro. But I'm always most interested in the stories of the authors, our authors, where they come from. Tan Books is all about making people saints. It's of course, a Catholic publishing house. And so, you know, kind of like me, you're, you're not a convert, but a revert, although I sort of consider myself a convert because I didn't know nothing when I was growing up raised Catholic. Tell us, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where you're from? Sure. I'm from the Central Valley of California. I was like, you raised Catholic. And I went through the public school system. And then I just, I think I just never really fully embraced the faith just through my own, you know, absorption into the culture. And then wound up at an evangelical college in Santa Barbara called Westmont College. And there I, I basically, that's when I kind of stopped going to Mass really. And, but I encountered Protestants in a way that I hadn't before, just as they had a lot of passion and zeal, and it was very affecting. And it made me kind of want to understand, you know, I didn't realize that there's this divide between the Catholic Church and the Protestants. And it made me want to kind of explore that and try to figure out what, what was, what Christ really intended, you know, when they sort of got me to think seriously about these things again. And then once I start thinking seriously about them, I think my father realized that what was happening, and he started taking me to conferences with like Ralph McInerney and Father Fesio and all these things. And those, that was hugely influential. Anyway, in the course of all of that, I met my husband. He was raised evangelical, evangelical Episcopalian actually, which is kind of a funny combo. Yeah. And we started having conversations about it. And I remember he, he thought the rosary was so bizarre and so foreign. And, but he realized at one point, I'm a Protestant, but I don't know what I'm protesting. So I need to understand what it is that I'm protesting in order to actually line myself with that protest. And he started meeting with Priest and through the course of that, he became Catholic.  He's just laughed me quite quickly. He's just an amazing human being. But so that's our story. We have six children now in our living in Southern California still. So he was an evangelical Episcopalian. I didn't even know there was such a thing. And I've heard pretty much everything in Protestantism. But, but that, so, and it's interesting because a lot of Catholics consider Episcopal, Episcopal church kind of Catholic lights, right? And a lot of, a lot of people come into the Catholic church, come through the Episcopal church. But, but you also get a lot who come through the Presbyterian church. That's what I did. I mean, I guess I was evangelical Presbyterian. So I teach a Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania, which is a lot of our Grove City College students consider Westmont, especially the ones who were who were on the West Coast. So for a while, Westmont was considered kind of like a Presbyterian West Coast alternative for would be Grove City College students. Although I think it's, it's more liberal now than probably ever was ever before. Correct? Yeah, I think that they're having some growing pains where the student body has become a lot more liberal. And there's a mix among the faculty, some of whom I still enjoy and see every once in a while. But the there's the board, I think, is still pretty conservative. So they're trying to navigate all that. And they haven't invited you to speak yet on a way to outwoke? They have not. I don't know. Now, if they, if they invited you, would you go? Oh, I would go and harpy. I just don't know. I think it's because they've had such woke spasms over the past couple of years. I'm sure that it's such a delicate issue now that I can imagine they would want to steer clear of that. But I would certainly be open to that for sure. Oh, it'd be a meltdown. It'd be like as soon as a Pacific, which is one of the first things I want to ask you about when we get to the book. But, but they, yeah, I mean, they would, you'd probably unfortunately get protested. I, you know, I, I got, I got protested at my oldest son's college, which I was there to talk about my book of hope and a president on the feast day of John Paul II. You think it would be all fine, all good, but a group of a handful of students who were LGBTQ activists came. First question that was given to me, a guy came up with a stack of papers that thick, you know, took over the Q and a session and, you know, and, and there it went. So, you know, that's, that's what happens at these places. But, but so, okay. So your husband was an evangelical, he converted.  But I guess they made you aware of these pretty quickly when you were there. Well, within about 10 days of my freshman year, somebody found out I was Catholic. I was in some common area of the college. And in my, maybe I'm exaggerating my memory, but it seemed as suddenly there were about 15 students surrounding me telling me why I shouldn't be Catholic. I was just sitting down looking, but, you know, and in some ways this is why I wanted to write the book is because, you know, that experience of having to see that there are differences and feel that I was, I was so other than everyone else. And not to analogize that to, you know, someone who has a more, you know, other experience. But, but I did have that experience of thinking I am different and but having it's a maturation process of just having to think, well, okay, you know, I have to trust that people still be my friend. And I have to not think that they're, you know, not approach them with suspicion or distrust and enter into real community here, but still kind of engage in these questions and these differences and separate them from personal relationships, you know, just have an intellectual pursuit as I navigate through all this. But yeah, it's a great experience. Well, and two, and often what happens is your husband realized, right, is that they define themselves by ironically, I mean, the word Protestant is perfect because the only thing that the 30,000 plus different Protestant denominations and countless more non-denominational independent evangelical churches, the only thing that they really can say that they have in common is that they're not Catholic. Yeah, they're protesting Rome, basically. And, and I mean, with my wonderful friends and faculty at Grove City College, and I get along the best with the Calvinists, it's very interesting. But, you know, but, but all the time we'll say, well, you know, the Calvinist or the OPC Church, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the non-denominational independent church, they've got way more in common with the Roman Catholic Church on cultural, sexual, social issues than they do with the Methodists, then they do with the Lutherans, right? Then they do with the Episcopalians and, and, and really doctrinally on a lot of other things as well. There's not, not a lot of big difference. So what happened to me, and I guess maybe it happened to you too, was my reversion was a matter of eventually seeing this chaos all through Protestant churches. And frankly, it's why a lot of my students, when they leave Grove City College, they end up converting to Catholicism. I'm sometimes surprised by the ones who do. But it's this sort of religious relative, relativism all over the place. They don't know what to believe after a while. Yeah, I found that a lot of students at Westmont, especially the ones that were more philosophically oriented, either left the Christian faith altogether or became Catholic. That's very common. I wonder if given that it's become as liberal as it has, if, if today a Catholic kid came forth and said that she was Catholic, if there'd be blowback like there was when you were there, right? I mean, at this point, they might be so diverse, right? That they might not even care. Yeah, I think it's more the latter. You know, in a way that you almost want them to carry. You want to go to college that there's an important difference here. But I think that they are, there's a priest friend I know in Santa Barbara, and he would, he goes there and does mass every once in a while in this little chapel, which would not have happened when I was there. And people were, the professors were very open to me being Catholic. You know, it was certainly not ultra antagonistic. It was more just, you know, among, among fellow students that those conversations would really bubble up. And a lot of times my students get this, they'll come to my office, my Catholic students, and they'll say, I can't believe what professor so-and-so said about the Catholic Church as well.  So what would you think he was going to say? And it gives, and it gives you a chance, a lot of them, they think what they often think is antagonistic behavior by students is oftentimes students just asking them, hey, why do you Catholics worship Mary, right? And if that's the case, you stop and say, well, we don't worship Mary. This is what we actually believe. So some students get annoyed by it. They're constantly getting asked these questions all the time. I had one student who left that she just got tired of questions all the time, but I found that most students see it as an opportunity and end up learning way more about their faith. Yeah, I absolutely loved it. I loved that people were taking it seriously and giving and asking me those questions. And it really is the thing that was the catalyst that made me try to figure it out and want to go in my own, you know, exploration of all these important questions. So yeah, I think that that's such a bad trend in society when we are offended by just a sincere question. Right, right. Discuss these things. Yeah, and that's really a lot of the whole woke snowflake problem that we're dealing with, right? People just melt down. They say they want diversity and dialogue. And the moment that you disagree with them, they just throw a hissy fit. Yeah, and it's such a disservice to students, you know, that the fact that that culture is becoming so imbued into the student body, it's doing them a disservice, you know. Yeah, absolutely. So all right, then you went to Westmont and then after that, where did you go after that? Did you go to Franciscan? Yeah, I went for the master's program philosophy at Franciscan. That's where I met Kerry Grass, Michael Miller, Matt Leonard, you know, all that.  It was a good year to be there. That's an impressive group. Were you all in the same class? They graduated together? Michael Miller, Kerry and I were. Matthew Leonard, I think was theology, but he was good friends with Michael and then Christopher Panic was, he was not in our class. I don't remember if he's an undergrad or what, but he was there, a contemporary in some way. I'll tell you, the number of people that are coming out of Franciscan University of Steubenville that are changing the world, changing the culture and defending the faith, it's remarkable. I mean, I don't think there's any other college like it. I really don't. It does feel that way. And yeah, praise God, I'm not sure what it is, but yeah, they're bearing a lot of fruit. So, so then, so was your husband with you at that point? Did you go back to California? You went back and had kids in New England, where he's from, he's from Massachusetts, and he worked for his father during that year. And then after grad school, we got married. All right. And then you're in Massachusetts and moved back to California, where we have remained. And you have how many kids? Six kids, just 21 down to nine. Okay. Great. Great. Good. All right. So I want to get to the book and I've got, I've got so much here. I mean, I've got, I like normally I just have the book and I kind of flip through and say, well, yeah, tell me about this, but I actually had to write down a list of everything. And I try to order, try to get some sense of order to try to make sense out of my questions. Where do I start? So I wrote down barely readable with my writing, you probably no one could read this but me. But I wrote great anecdotes, Colin. And I've got, I've got five of them that I narrowed it down to. And I think my favorite and by favorite, I mean, kind of like revolting, disgusting, horrible, right? Is the one from Azusa Pacific, which is on page 73 of the book. And if you need me to read some of these, let me know. I'm sure you probably remember them all. But, but that one, could you tell us about that incident? So that was, if my memory serves you right, there was a student at Azusa Pacific, which is liberal arts Christian evangelical college. And they were holding some sort of protest about some changes in the, I think they were asking for changes in this mission statement about what's allowable behavior. And they wanted to be more supportive of LGBTQ activity and relationship. That's what it always is, right? Isn't that always? And so she was leading, she had the microphone at this protest and she started a prayer and she addressed the Almighty telling him, this is not a sin, God, this is okay.  And that's what's so tricky about all this is that I feel to the Christian precept to walk with the marginalized, to reach out to the suffering and, you know, and to approach the world with compassion, which is true. But then they, you know, inject this whole poisonous relativism and rejection of moral line to it. So yeah, that anecdote was troubling. Well, and they're often crying when they do this, and it's emotionally charged and it makes it even more difficult. I saw one evangelical professor a couple years ago who said that, okay, the New Testament clearly says that the man and woman will leave their parents and become one flesh. But Jesus was wrong. Right. And I thought, oh, nice. All right. At least here, at least here was somebody that was acknowledging that the New Testament said that, right. And, and it's interesting, this guy's really banking on the, on the mercy of Jesus, right, if he's going to get up there in some day and say, yeah, I said in front of a whole group and wrote articles and books saying that you were wrong. Will you forgive me? Right. But, but, but the quote from page 73, they, the protest students wore slogans and carried signs saying, you can be queer and Christian and God is non binary. God is not non binary. I mean, it doesn't doesn't Genesis say he created them male and female. I mean, right. And, and the quote from the student, this is her prayer. This isn't something sinful. God, this is something beautiful. I pray that we continue to live out the mission of being difference makers. God, that this would be a place of equality. God. So she's kind of, she's kind of lecturing God here. Right. And it's yeah. No awareness of what she's saying, you know, what's that we can be difference makers means it's such revolutionary, you know, Marxist kind of language. Right. But they, but it's just absorbed, you know, it just becomes the way that we think about these things. And I think students, they don't understand, I don't think most of these students understand what the presuppositions behind all that are. Sure. Yeah. God is non binary. I mean, is that how do you even, how do you even come up with that? Right. I mean, yeah, it really does. Another one here, this is on page 71. And this is a journalist for the New York Times spent many days attending race training seminars. One trainer, somebody named Marcus Moore, taught the group the concepts such as work before play, plan for the future, and adherence to rigid time schedules were examples of white norms. Right. So work before play plan for the future, adherence to rigid time schedules. These are white norms. Right. This is white behavior. More taught that white culture is obsessed with clock time punishing students for lateness. You know, I'm reading that and I'm thinking, well, how racist is this?  Right. Right. Or hard work or rational thought.  I think there's a couple of things going on. One is to, you know, that the ideology really is at its core, you know, trying to put race front and center. Yeah. But the other thing I think is happening is that it's, they want an elimination of any sort of merit. Right. So our success and failure in life can be attributed to the systemic forces outside of ourselves entirely. We cannot own our successes, nor own our failures. It's a hugely disempowering message. It really strips us of moral agency. And I think, you know, they talk a lot about, they'll say something like, you know, well, there's this simplistic pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of mentality that's the old way. And it's not acknowledging people come at life with different struggles and from different vantage points. And there's a truth there. Right. Certain people have, do walk into life with more seeming ease and more advantages, you know, mostly provided by a family structure. Right. That's the greatest privilege people can have is to have a whole and intact family. So there's a truth there. However, you know, to take it to, they take it to the other simplistic extreme, which is that there is no moral agency. There is no taking up our responsibility and improving our lives. And no one is going to come out of hard circumstances without that sense of ability that that that it's possible to get yourself out, you know, there's no, there's no, there's no ability to and no one would ever give that message, you know, in any other context, like if we're talking to someone about how to be a leader, like they're trying to talk to his leadership. The first thing you talk about is taking responsibility, taking ownership, you know, all these things. So why are we giving the opposite message to the people we want to help? Right. Right. I have, I mean, a really, a really good black friend of mine. When we meet for lunch or whatever, he's always five minutes early. I'm always late. All right. My students will tell you, I mean, I am notorious for it. Right. And I tell you, Noelle, I can't fix it. Right.  Right. He can't fix it. I'm always late. And he told me one time that his watch is set and he uses a wristwatch, right, for five minutes early. And he learned this from a coach that he had in high school, a white coach, I think, right? Who cares if it matters with color? But punctuality, this is something that, imagine if I said, if I said to him, oh, well, you know, dude, that's a, that's a white thing. You know, this, this, this, this, you're being punctual. Right. I mean, you should be late like me. That's a black thing. Right. Can you imagine that? It's, it's, it's unbelievable. And like you said, I mean, yeah, there's so many other things involved in this. Once again, it's the, the incredible stereotyping. Right. Here's how white people are. Right. They all plan things ahead of time. Right. They're all, you know, they're all on time. Right. All black people, they are not. Right. So you're not an individual. You're part of this mass stereotype. It certainly goes against the idea of the Catholic tradition, the Christian tradition that were made in the image of God as individuals, each with their own individual dignity. Right. These people put everybody in a group, everybody. Yeah. And there's some survey I referenced in the book where, and it was done by a left-leaning group, but the results of the survey came, it came out, the outcome was that white progressives view black people as less capable than how black people view themselves. Totally. So it's really, that ideology is really training, training you to be racist and think under the guise of fighting racism. But yeah. Under the guise of how to be an anti-racist to borrow from Ibram Kendi. Right. Yeah. And I think that's the trick is that when you really see what they're actually doing, most normal people left or right are going to find it repulsive. You know, it really is repugnant what they're doing. But whenever I bring this up to people, my friends who are maybe on lean left, they have no idea that they're saying that that's a white value. This is a black value. It's not broadcast, but there's, it's over time. And again, this is the pattern. This is the training. Imagine Ibram Kendi, author of the book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. Remember he referred to Amy Coney Barrett and people like her who adopt black children, which include me.  Right. And this comes from the expert on how to be an anti-racist. Right. I mean, what could be more racist than that? It's so toxic. It's very upsetting. Well, here, let me give you another example. So this is this one I found. Now, some of these are hard to get through.  You're reading it at different times and you feel like just throwing it across the room, right? Because the examples are so upsetting. This is a piece in the parenting section of the Washington Post, a feminist writer writing an essay in 2016, accusing her sons of being part of the problem of the misogynistic system.  At dinner one evening, she was telling them about a sexual assault case in the news.  Right.  Right. In reaction to their dismissal of the conversation, she writes, quote, I never imagined I would raise boys who would become men like these men who deny rape culture or who turn a blind eye to sexism.  So in a way here, she's almost like throwing her sons under the bus, right? Writing on a bed piece about her teenage boys who probably, at that point, it is like, Mom, could you just, I mean, please pass the spaghetti and meatballs. I don't want to talk about this tonight. Right. Yeah. It just feels so toxic. It reminds me of narcissistic personality disorder or even demonic behavior. Father Chad Rippiger talks about this, that they're so aware of their own injuries that that's a real temptation in spiritual life is to be consumed by your wounds in a way that that deflects from you ever having to look at your, you know, how you can improve or how you can, how you can actually feel forgiveness or mercy or in your own life and extend forgiveness and mercy to others, you know, not necessarily, you know, the person who wounded you even, but just in general. And I think it's such a toxic way to walk through the world. And to the point where it makes you happen, have to start accusing the very people that you're most irresponsible for it.  Yeah. And of course, needless to say, but you and I have to say it, right?   But, you know, we don't talk about the dinner table every night, though, that's, you know, that's probably not necessary. Yeah, no, certainly.  So I'm not, certainly not discounting that, that sort of pain. It's the way that's manifesting, right?  So toxic. Well, and you write her article went viral and soon her son's peers were approaching them with phones extended to show what their mother had written, had written about them, right? The boys even overheard strangers discussing them on a city bus. They expressed to her that they felt embarrassed and angry. All right. And how does the mother respond? She responded by doubling down and writing a second follow-up piece titled, I'm done pretending men are safe, even my sons. In it, she describes her sons as strong, compassionate and good, but that regardless of those virtues, they are not safe. Quiet misogyny is still misogyny. And by virtue of their being born male, she declared her sons to be guilty. And then she said here, I know I'm not supposed to cast an entire sex with a single paintbrush, not all men, but if it's impossible for a white person to grow up without adopting racist ideas, simply because of the environment in which they live, of course, they have to tie it to race, right? How can I expect men not to subconsciously absorb at least some degree of sexism? White people aren't safe and men aren't safe. No matter how much I like to assure myself that these things aren't true. Toxic. Yeah. And it's a redefinition of the human person, right? That the core of our personhood is redefined by oppression, either as perpetrators or as victims. At some point, talking the book about this, that, you know, if the Christian understanding of the definition of human person, we're defined in relationship to the love of God. And what they're doing is redefining us not by the love of God, but by the hatred of society. And that those imply two very different missions, right? Like if we're defined by the love of God, then we have a mission to, you know, know, love and serve him and spread the good news to other people that they're loved. If we're defined by oppression, then we have the mission to spread the bad news that to other people that they are hated. You know, these are polar opposite identifications and also missions. And you can see how one is about based on rupture. And the other one is based on cohesion and harmony. And as you point out, the Marxist element to this, right, is the idea of taking, you know, a certain group and making that group the victim group, you know, like Marx had with the proletariat, right? And the working class, the economic class. So the critical theorists, you have a long chapter on the Frankfurt School, you know, they started critical theory, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, you have a lot in here on Herbert Marcuse. So they took, they took the school of Freudian Marxism, but they would all the time Marxism ever since critical theory ever since has been about finding the latest victim group that needs to serve as the sort of redeemer group, right? And absolutely fundamental to this is that the victim group needs to be aware of its victimization, right?   And meanwhile, you know, that black kid may have been raised in a wealthy family, upper class, and the white kid, a lower class, my wife and I have a good friend who went to Swarthmore, and she had a roommate who was Latino and one who was black, two girls, and oftentimes they would say to her, well, you wouldn't understand this because you're white. And she said, are you kidding me?   My school was like prison conditions. And she said, and meanwhile, one of the two girls went to a very, very, very wealthy high-end school where she probably faced nothing like that at all. But the idea was, you know, my friend, she's white, so she's privileged. And the other ones, they're not white, so they're not privileged. Yeah, it's such an oversimplification. And it creates this perverse incentive in all of us, I think, to try to find our moral stature in our, in our victimhood. You know, I think, I think that's the, that's the new victim culture is that we find, you know, that's how we find our dignity.  And it causes a society that's constantly scanning each other to see how they're being hurt. Right.  Well, guess what? You are, you know. Yeah, yeah. I'm the source of discontent. And this is the MO of the movement. I do have your book and takedown. Actually, I love that book. I read that really in my research is excellent. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, you said it quite a bit. I was surprised by that. The, but, but the, yeah, the idea that to tell somebody that it does suggest a lack of dignity and you're fomenting hate, you're teaching hate, you're teaching people to be a victim. And it goes totally against what I mean, you and I were raised to believe, right, Martin Luther King, Jr. judged by the content of our of our character, not the color of our skin. These people and I have here behind my computer, this is Patrice colors. She's the founder of Black Lives Matter. This is this is her memoir. And I'll tell you no, well, every person in this book is in a group. There's no individuality.    You are Latino. There's just no individuality. You are a member of a group and your group defines you. Yeah, it's reductive. Yeah, reductive is a good way to put it. It is, it is. All right, let me give you another example here. So this is this is Nadia Bells Weber. Is that her name? Do I have it right? Yeah. And this is on page 16. This is kind of gross. I don't even know if I want to read this. And it's, I saw this in Kerry's book, too, the sort of lack of femininity and some of the cases with with some of these women, but she's a Lutheran pastor. And here she is. She's ripping on Augustine. And it said when it came to his ideas around sex and gender, he basically took and here she describes going to the bathroom, right, and the church and encased it and Amber. So Guston, Guston was all right, but he really wasn't because he wasn't writing about sex and gender. And you talk here that this belief in her latest book, which is called shameless, was it bulls Weber, right? Yeah, calls for a Christian sexual revolution with regard to sex, gender, transgenderism and feminism. So this person here would be the ultimate example of your kind of woke religious left, right? She's a pastor. She's a Lutheran pastor. According to her, the effort to deny sexual pleasure in any but the most extreme circumstances is futile, even contrary to God's will.  She was not under fig tree. She heard no angelic voice through this experience became clear to her that Christians needed to reconstruct the moral architecture surrounding sexuality. And then she has this bulls Weber practices what she preaches when her 16 year old son came to her to say he was in a relationship with another boy. She responded by tossing him a pack of condoms. And you know that this book shameless is a best seller, New York Times best seller. Oh, yeah, she's celebrated. And she came on my radar because I have old friends from evangelical, evangelical world who were sharing videos of her.    And the same thing with this kind of hookup culture that she's supporting, you know, and I'm sure she would couch it as saying, you know, as long as you have full consent, you this is really what you want. Consent is, you know, such a thin, it's they reduce all of morality down to consent, because if nothing's intrinsically wrong, then in your will triumphs any law, then the only thing that can determine the rightness or wrongness of an act is your will, right, and mutual the mutual consent of the will. That's like trying to trying to contain a fire with a paper fence, you know, there's there's a whole moral architecture and things happening beneath the surface that we don't necessarily always understand. So to say we can consent to something, it just doesn't matter, we're still going to feel hurt afterwards. And we don't have the moral vocabulary to articulate that. I don't I don't think young women do we are young men anymore. And so they feel that this shouldn't be a hurtful or harmful behavior. But it is it's things happening to them that things that they're doing with their bodies, you know, and this is a road to despair. Ultimately, it's like the seeds of the transgender movement, you really see in the sexual revolution, because we're basically saying like, you can do whatever you want with your body, which basically assumes your body means nothing, which means that you mean nothing, we are our bodies, or reject how you were created, right?  And in the case of bulls Weber, is that the name? Yep. I mean, we're not talking here about a secular atheist feminist. This is a pastor.  So I mean, this is where some of these some of the woke religious left is gone. Speaking of vocabulary. So you start you start off the book with with Wellesley, the graduation ceremony at Wellesley. And how does that go? I had never heard this before. This is Hillary Clinton's all modern from the 1960s. And it seems like they've gone kind of only further and further to the left ever since then. Yeah, so it's a very leftist environment. And they so some years ago, they started singing at the annual commencement and crowned that good with instead of brotherhood, they would all yell out sisterhood to kind of declare it's an all women's school and they're tend to be very feminist. Brotherhood means sisterhood. I mean, it includes women, but I guess we just lost that one. We can't convince anyone of that. Let's just forget it. Yeah. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry. Anyway, so they started having more and more more transgender students at the school. And so the transgender students who were, you know, women who think that they are men started yelling out brotherhood because to, you know, to not to denounce the sisterhood, but just to also proclaim their existence that they too exist as, you know, men that they believe. And then the parents would come and they would say brotherhood just because that was the what they were used to. And then finally, someone came up with the idea. Well, let's just reconcile it by yelling out sibling hood. There you go. Like such a perfect anecdote of, you know, encapsulating a microcosm of what's happening in the movement, just this cacophony of chaos screaming to declare our existence, you know, into the void. Well, and it gets worse. So you said that who was it? In the description of the event, let's see, this is the New York Times author. And then there was somebody who ran for, let's see, instead of these things, sibling hood Council. Yeah. Yeah. Is that it? Can you explain that? So it was a young woman and she came to in the fall. And at some point, it started announced that she was now going to be referred to as Timothy, that she was actually a man. And she found for some position in the student council, I think in charge of diversity. And she was very well liked. The students had no problem with transgender issues. You know, they were fully embracing and affirming of all that. But there as a petition started circulating among the students saying, you know, this is a we need a diverse person. And this is we're perpetuating the patriarchy by nominating a white male. Timothy was confused. She said, I would certainly don't want to perpetuate the patriarchy. However, I do feel as a trans person that I am diverse at, you know, one would think, you know, yeah, this is the thing is that it's so incoherent that it ends up always consuming itself. You know, we see that with a feminist versus the transgender now. And there's no harmony or coherence ultimately to have it ends in contradiction. When asked how she felt, Timothy confessed to being to feeling conflicted. She believed herself to be a minority as a trans student, but also knew that the patriarchy was alive and well, and did not want to be part of the perpetuation of oppression. The job is to promote a culture of diversity on campus. Students are generally friendly. When Timothy began to object that she as a white man, quote unquote, was not represented the diversity such a role required, by the way, as well as all females still there are there no, I should say biological males. Yeah, I think it's still all female. So if if a biological male applied there, identifying as a female, they would have to take them, they write exactly, they'd have to take them. And so all this hard fought feminism for all these decades to keep men out of the school, this is eventually going to blow it up, right? Yeah. And surely it's happened. I would think there must have been a case of some man identifying as a woman trying to go there. Certainly. Yeah. And if not yet, it'll happen. Yeah, I bet it. I think it might have already happened actually now. I'm straggling my memory. I think that that has happened. And there's no way the school could say no to that. And you know, I feel like I have to caveat this.  Yes. Yes.  I feel like this is the distinction that we have to make as Christians. And we as we talk about this to point out the absurdity of this ideology, this is to recognize that that and to fight against the ideology. It's not, you know, it's not to fight against individuals.  But I think that is important to have clarity on how ridiculous and absurd this ideology is because it's harming them. It's harming the very people. Yeah, they'll they'll use that they'll weaponize whatever they can. And and you know, even realizing why she probably really didn't mean that, right? They'll they'll use it as a knife to twist it into you anyway. You talk about the oppression Olympics. I love that. I love that subhead. That's great. And you're talking about the Frankfurt School there. And I'm going to write this down. The the engine of the Frankfurt School critical theory. I think this is no, well, I think this is a great definition of critical race theory. If if I had like two lines, I'd use this, the engine of the Frankfurt School critical theory took on a life of its own as a concern, different categories of oppression. The ideology as applied to racial grievances is term critical race theory. And that's that's really what it is, right? I mean, it's the idea ideology applied to to racial grievances. That's right. Yeah. So yeah, so the brawning of the critical theory was basically, you know, as I mean, as you well know, as a scholar on Karl Marx, it was, you know, taking the something that applied to economics and instead, writing it to the culture, you see, you seize the means of culture rather than means of production. So it became about race, gender, sexuality. The interesting thing too, is that at some point, the book could talk about, you know, the way that they treat the races versus the sexist is really fascinating to me. And since that other differences between men and men and women has to be eliminated. Whereas the differences between the races has to be highlighted. And I think the fact of those two different approaches is to create greater categories of enemies across broader lines, because men and differences between man and woman imply a difference of behavior. The difference between black person, white person does not imply a difference of behavior does not require other differently. And so enemies out of men and women here, and then highlighting the difference between the races, which doesn't need to be highlighted creates more enemies across the races. Yeah, Pope Francis talked a lot at the beginning of his pontificate about the complementarity of man and woman, right? How the differences in the two help one another.  But there, but yeah, the push here is to is to blow up those differences, right? And then and then on race to do what? To emphasize them. So that's why you can be transgender, you can't be transracial, right? There's been Rachel Dozel, I think was her name, the white woman who identified as after black, and she would let the chapter. Anyway, you it's not acceptable. You can't you can't cross race. It's a great point. That's yeah, that's a great point. And you know, here in talking about Kimberly Crenshaw, who introduced the concept of intersexuality to critical race theory, she believed the existing categories of oppression were oversimplified and inadequate. Her contention was that within one person, there could exist multiple oppressed identities, or even a duality of privilege and oppression.  By the way, people stop and listen. Okay.   There's no individuality here, right? All black women are this way. All white women are this way. This is stereotyping. This is broad brushing everybody. This is defining people by their skin color, by their skin color, by their gender. For example, an employer might fulfill expected norms of diversity by hiring a white woman and a black man. Well, it seems he has met standards in two oppressed categories, women and people of color. The person lost in the intersection is the black woman. Similarly, black men are oppressed based on race, but are oppressors based on gender. And I love this example. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, one of the leading candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, being a white male, is an oppressor.  Yeah. So there's this concept of positionality that plays well into the intersectionality concept. So everyone has a position in their access to the truth. So the person who has the least access to the truth is the white straight male because he's in all the dominant classes. Whereas the person who's an oppressor- Which means he's a multiple oppressor at all those different levels, right? Yeah. So he can't see anything except the dominant position, whereas a woman has a bit more access to reality because she can see the dominant view, but she can also see a bit of the oppressed view. So the more categories of oppression you can check off in yourself, then the greater access to reality that you have or reality, but therefore the greater platform and ability and right to be heard ultimately. And the more you can speak out, right? So in a sense, like the white male, he really can't even say anything, right? He is just a flawed oppressor. His identity, that's it. Yeah. He is so morally inferior based on past grievances.   But again, think of how utterly un-Christian and un-Catholic this is. This is a whole worldview that throws out everything we know about human nature, based on a Christian worldview, Judeo-Christian worldview, and they're coming up with new words, new language, new propositions of human nature. I had that written down. Yeah, you call this standpoint, you don't call this, but whoever calls it this, right? Standpoint positionality, right? Can you say that again? What that means? Yeah, you're based on your oppressed identity or a privileged identity. That gives you a position that has less or more degrees of access into reality and a right to be heard. So the further out you get, the more you can see the whole picture, whereas white, the white straight male would be right in the center. He can only see the center. He can't see all of the, you know, circumference of reality. And so he's right to speak. So mom and dad, Catholic, Christian parent who's sending Jimmy or Susie to that secular college for $60,000 a year, this is what you're paying for them to learn, all right? I had a student in my office last week and said, who said, well, I mean, I know if I didn't go here to Gross City College, this college, I know I'm not, I'm not, I'm probably not going to read Dante at my school. I'm probably not going to learn about Western Civ. I'm probably not going to read Shakespeare and anything. That's right. You're not going to learn any of that. And instead, you're going to learn all this gobbledygook and this all this new language, new terms, everything else, which probably frankly, hopefully praise God, hopefully no one will even remember it or know about it 30 years from now. I don't know. I mean, my view is it's just going to get worse and worse. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. I mean, but and that's the thing is that you hear this time and again that they really are trying to get rid of that canon of Western civilization. Shakespeare is right now. Dante, you know, Anthony Eslon is excellent on this. He makes this point that he came from, you know, I don't remember West Virginia someplace, a working class in Kentucky, I think, that he thought I want to learn Russian so I can understand the Russian author, you know, I want whatever they're called, no matter how different it was, they have this, you know, he so understood the beauty and how compelling it was and how what the access to truth that they had and were presenting in such a compelling way that he thought, I'll do whatever it takes to understand their culture, to understand, you know, these things. It reminds me of them. There's this dust up a couple of years ago, AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She dismissed Saint, there's a statue of Saint Damien Molokai, and she dismissed him as a white male.  And that's the thing that he come back to.  Yeah. And yeah, an Eastern European who went to live with the native peoples in Hawaii and went there to get leprosy and refused to come back and went there and died with these people.  And after all, there's a woman that we could replace him with.  My family and my mom's side, my mom's 100% Italian. They're from Calabria, you know, that goes back to La Ponto, Knights of Malta, late 1500s. I probably have slavery in my family past. There's been slavery on every continent in America to every group of people. Again, you know, read the Bible, read the Old Testament, read about Jews, Egypt. But they are, and again, it's very Marxist, very critical theory-like, right? They're making everything about race. Everything is put through that filter.  I mean, this is exactly what we're supposed to not be teaching people. Right. And it's the patterns have been trying to try time. And again, in Maoist, you know, China and, you know, Leninist, Stalinist Russia, and always to the same results, but we keep regurgitating it. You have a great quote from Mao on that. I probably won't be able to find it. But we have, we have just a few minutes left. Let me hit a couple things. The, you quote Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birmingham jail letter, which I love because he quotes, he quotes Augustine and Aquinas in there. And I recently had to do a presentation to well about natural law.  I can't tell you how many different versions of the Birmingham jail speech I found online where there was an ellipsis where the whole natural law part was cut out. Just cut out, right? They don't even read that part. So you, so you can read MLK's Birmingham jail letter and not even read about the section on Aquinas and Augustine and natural law. So a lot of this depends on where you're going to school, who's teaching you and who's not. You mentioned Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is just out of control.  You've written about that too. That actually, that article, they was, I published twice, I think at the first time was maybe five years ago, Robbie, Robert P. George posted it and he said, anyone who sees what's happening at Teen Vogue, please do something. And it actually was the moment when I thought, I'm going to start trying to do something. You know, I actually responded. It was that Teen Vogue article. It's so bad. It's, it's, it's really bad. And the other one, this is on pages 170 to 171. So this is near the end of your book. And I love this. This really gets to the heart of what you're talking about before you get to the final section, restoration, which I want to ask you about. But you give, you have a section on cult behavior. And again, the subtitle of this is a Christian response to the cult of progressive ideology. And so you have characteristics of woke cult, cult behavior, some characteristics of cults and how they are incorporated by the woke. And the one that you give is unquestionable dogmas. Right. And I think that's one of the things we're talking about here. Critical thinking is discouraged. Right. I mean, these people truly do have dogmas. Yeah. And they're not the critical, the thinking is not the purpose of thought is not true. That's power. And so you have to, you can't question it, because if the person who aims at truth wants to invites questioning, the person who aims at power wants to silence questioning. Yeah. And that also involves the manipulation of language, right, and terminology, coming up with your own terms in order to kind of push out critical thinking, anyone who questions the thinking, right? So it becomes a dogma. It's part of the way of creating the dogma. Another one, adherence can never be good enough. I think that one is really, is really powerful. Right. Explain what you, what do you mean by that? Well, this is, I mean, this is all throughout Robin D'Angelo that, you know, that she said, she'll say things like, I'm convinced there really is no truth. There's no truly good white person. It's just not possible. But the best you can do is spend your life doing the work, you know, trying to divest yourself of your whiteness. I mean, these are things that they say Ibram Kendi too. And in a way, so you can, you could never be, you can never be quite woke enough, right? And you can never, and again, with a white privilege thing, you kind of picture the guy in the sensitivity training session, right? Who's trying to maybe self-flagellate, I am bad, I am bad, I am bad, but he just can't be bad enough.  No matter the way he could be Mother Teresa, she could be Mother Teresa, it could be St. Damien Molokai, it doesn't matter what defines you or not your moral choices and actions, but the color of your skin, right? Incredibly so, yeah. Isolation from people outside the group, even family and friends, right? Very much sort of cult-like behavior. Morally bad behavior is justified for some, but intolerable for others. We see that all the time. That one drives me crazy, right? Yeah. Yeah. Adrian Vermeel had a great line about this. He said, you know, about the double standard, how, you know, you can be violent if you are on the sake of, for the sake of ideology, you cannot be violent. It's not allowed on the opposite end. And he said, it's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy. You know, I think that's the thing that we have to realize is that they don't have a problem with the double standard. It's actually built into the system with repressive tolerance and all that. And also the lack of, there's no understanding of universal principle, you know, even with everyone's article for the register recently about some woke stuff happening at this Catholic school outside of Chicago. And that was a great piece. That was a great piece. That was a really good piece.  Yeah. Everyone knows it's an unjust statement, but it's okay. It's for the sake of ideology. So you can be Karl Marx. You could be a dead white European male and a German from the 19th century, all bad, right? You can be as Marx was a racist, an anti-Semite, a sexist, but it doesn't matter because Marx is Marx. He's a good guy, right? You could be Margaret Sanger and have a Negro project and do racial eugenics. And having spoken to the Silver Lake, New Jersey women's chapter, the KKK in May 1926, and write about it in your memoirs. But it's okay because you founded Planned Parenthood, right? And then you'll have, you know, like Ronald Reagan will have said one thing to Richard Nixon in a 1972 phone call that no one is really even sure what he meant, canceled, right? You renamed the Reagan airport, right? So the, you know, the double standards are just, they're incredible. And I think this is infuriating, right? To so many people. Absolutely. And I think the more that we don't expect there to be equal treatment, you know, we just have to recognize that there's not going to be equal treatment. Yeah. The double standards are eternal and that's the way there, that's all there is to it. How they operate. Attacks, again, the characteristics of cults and how they're incorporated by the woke, attacks, shuns and delegitimizes those who stray from the dogma. Yeah, right? If you question any of these sacred cows, then you're ostracized, right? They need total adherence. Harbors per se, harbors persecution complexes and catastrophic thinking. What about that? Well, I think that that's just what victim culture does, right? And that this movement grows through rupture and through and through identification of perpetrators. And so there's a constant need to feed the movement by identifying further and further ways in which people are harming us or groups are harming. And the last one, sloganeering to avoid serious reflection or questioning. That's a really good one. Can you think of an example of that? I mean, I think that the Black Lives Matter is a sloganeering to avoid. So I was going to say, right, these are true statements. Black lives do matter and we do want to be anti-racist, you know, but just to appeal to these universally true statements and then inject this whole ideology into it that's repugnant to most common sense people. It's to keep people from thinking too deeply about what the ideology is actually proposing. Right. That's exactly right. Or, you know, my choice, my body, right? But in fact, it's, you know, there's a baby in the womb that we're talking about here. But BLM is perfect, right? You know, what, you don't support this group? Are you saying Black Lives don't matter? No. It's a perfect example about if you've got a name, if you've got a good name, man, you could go really far with that name, especially if you've got these people in the media on your side. Right. That's what it comes down to. So the final part of your book, and we'll wrap up with this, is called Restoration. So what do you think, Noel? Where do people go from here? What do they do? Was it your piece in the National Catholic Register? I think you talked about a funder, maybe a donor, to the Catholic School in Chicago. Maybe it was at your piece. And he said, I'm not getting any more money if you teach this garbage. I don't know if that was you or not. I can't remember. I certainly remember talking to the, there was certainly, that's certainly happening. I can't remember if I cloned that in that particular piece or not. So I think there's a couple of different ways to look at the restoration. One is really practical and one's really personal. So the practical is I think we need new institutions, we need to pull our money out of supporting places that are intent on hating us. What capital has to be fought? Parents need to pull kids out of schools that are putting this poison into their kids. We need to build new things and there are a lot of creative and smart people and there's a lot of money actually that is ready, I think, to start building new institutions. I think that's really necessary. We need new schools, but also in the institution of family. There has to be restoration of the institution of family. That is the fundamental way in which we cataclyse the future. Most kids are cataclyzed far more by seeing their parents live lives of prayer and virtue than they are by what they learn in a classroom or in a Sunday school environment as important as those things are. But ultimately, I think that there's a real personless approach here where the movement really operates like a mob. It reduces and absorbs the human person and it makes us anonymous. It makes us look outside of ourselves, accuse, rupture, but it's a movement of anonymity, I think. I think the Catholic life, the Catholic worldview is all about being known. It's deeply personal. We see this in the structure of the family. The family life makes you see your faults, but it also gives you a chance to contend with your faults. But you have to really see yourself.   It helps us to grow that sort of intimacy. But also the Church and the Sacraments, I think of confession as being such an antidote to this movement, whereas the movement is prompting us to constantly accuse, deflect from our own culpability and look at the sins of others. Confession is the time when we're really forced to regularly stop and not excuse ourselves, not deflect from our own culpability, but look at it, confront it honestly. And the human person does not want to do that. We're very prone to excusing ourselves. And the wisdom of the Church is the supernatural combined with this understanding of our human nature, that this is what we actually need to do. We need to see the evil on our own hearts. And that type of knowledge helps us to see the deep depth of mercy of God and how much we need a Savior. And unless we see our need, I think that it's very hard to see our need for Him. And so the more that we can grow obviously in that relationship and that all of our activity, all of our institution building, all of our ways that we fight this movement be an outgrowth and overflow of that interior life that we're receiving from Him through grace and through prayer and sacraments. That's the way that we can change the world. Well, and you said the mob mentality and the anonymity, that's something that always gets to me because you'll hear, oh, he has been canceled on Twitter. They canceled him. And I always say, who's they, right? Who's canceling him? Let's cancel the person who canceled him. Who is that? And it's like, you know, they're legion, right? They're faceless, you know, they're anonymous. And it's just this buzz, the screaming mob. And, you know, Po Benedict, the 16th talked about the anonymous power, right? The crucified Jesus, they're shouting, crucify and crucify. You don't know the names of any of those people who were yelling that you don't know any other faces. And it's the same thing with these Twitter mobs, you don't even know who they are. You can't even isolate the people. Yeah. And with education, let me say this, the, so I see people all the time and you're protesting what's going on with the school board. And I think, get your kids out of there, homeschool them, send them to a private Catholic school, classical Christian school. You know, why are you putting up with that? But at the same time, I favorite that anyway, because we homeschool, I see people in places like Loudoun County fighting back against the school board. And I appreciate that. I'm glad. I'm glad there are people who are willing to stay in and fight. Now, I would still take the kids out anyway, but it's worth, it's worth speaking up and not rolling over and trying to stop this madness. That's a great point. And there's certainly a distinction that has to be made because we do need people in there fighting, you know, but ultimately, I think if the school is intractable, some of these schools really do, they can be reformed, I think, and they will back down. And now's the time to do it because it's such a momentum happening now. So I think we'll know in the next year or two whether or not that there's just need to remove our kids totally or whether or not there were certain enough schools that could reform. And send your kids to the right colleges. All right, please stop the craziness. And with some of these colleges too, especially, you know, what some of our friends call like, you know, contested Catholic colleges or contested Christian, the ones that are on the cusp of kind of going woke and going in the direction, you know, a lot of these are worth fighting for. And if you and if you're in one of those colleges where you still have good faculty that are there, you have to fight back. You've got to fight back. Don't let the school be completely taken over. Right? I mean, as a former Protestant, I saw that happen to denominations that I was in where they just went completely off the deep end. And now they're gone. Yeah. So how can how can people get ahold of you? Where can they follow you? Tell us about your website with Kerry grass. Yes. So Kerry grass, our mutual friend, she and I co authored the theology poem books. And we have a website that we edit together called theology of home.com. You can subscribe for free. We provide daily content for women mostly, but we also have a significant amount of men who follow us too. We've got a shop there. I've got a personal website, noel marrying.com. We're both fellows at the EPC. So we're pretty active on their channels to their channels as well. So yeah, a great group, the ethics and public policy center. And so noel marrying.com and theology of the body.com. See the get theology of the home theology. No, just theology of home doc theology of home.com and Steve Cunningham our fabulous producer who's listening right now. So Steve, put that stuff up on the screen. I know you will and I know you won't miss any of that. Noel, are you working on any other books? Yeah, Kerry and I are actually co-authoring a new theology poem book. It's going to be a little bit shorter and slightly different, a little bit more thematic. So yeah, that's what we've got going on now. Okay, anything else after that, at least not planned currently? I'm hoping to take a little bit of a book break. This will be the fourth book in the big three years. So I love article writing. That's my big, big passion. So I would love just to get to the time just to really get back into article writing more and more. I do too. And that's one of the hardest part of being tied down with books is when you can't bang out an article. And my wife said to me, ask her where she finds the time to write all these books, right?  I mean, that's what it comes down to, right? And I think with me, it's probably, it's partly therapeutic to write these things and sort of get them off your chest and get them out there. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I used to always want to dialogue with people, disagree with me, like, let's talk to the sound and see if we could arrive at some truth here. And I think this kind of scratches that itch for me where I don't have to constantly be bugging people to talk to me about why we disagree about something. Write an article and think about, think it through on my own. Sure. All right. Well, great to talk to you. So Noelle Marying, awake, not woke on the cult of a Christian response to the cult of progressive ideology. So great to meet you. Thanks for joining us here today and keep fighting the good fight, being not afraid. It was great talking to you. Thanks so much for having me. Sure thing. And thanks everybody for listening. We'll be back again with another episode of these Tan Books podcast. Please check us out online. We've got older episodes available online. And we'll see you again soon. Thanks. God bless


Hi everybody and welcome to today's Burns Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher and today I'm so happy to be joining you from my office space at the Beautiful Burns Foundation where I hope you'll be able to join us soon. Now today we're headed into room number 12 which Albert Burns had called the American Room. To look at this central painting right here let's zoom in a bit entitled Christ and the Woman of Samaria painted by Boris Pippin in the year 1940 as we can see from his signature. Now within this room we see it bookended by two other paintings here and here by Pippin various pieces of metalwork of wrought iron and as you know Burns did arrange all of his wall ensembles on on visual terms and I think it's wonderful the extent to which this Achilles scotch and down here looks so much like these silvery clouds that are drifting across this fuchsia sky the livid fuchsia sky in Pippin's image and then we've got other images by immigrant Jewel Pascine down here Ernest Lawson another self-taught artist like Pippin Albert Malty Marie Prendergast here is Albert Burns' very dear friend his self-portrait William Glackens over here on the same register as this little image of two sphinxes by Glacken's nine-year-old daughter Lena and so looking out clearly Burns has placed Pippin in this context of American artists with some amount of self-teaching going on here and so let's let's look a little bit closer at what that means so and and what Pippin was looking to accomplish with this image and so to look more at the image itself let's go on in here's here's our closer image and we again have these silver clouds in this absolutely glorious fuchsia sky that he's painted we've got Christ looking imperial regal in this purple cloak over his white robe encountering this woman of Samaria she's got a jug for the well over here I love that the signature the pavement the well the the Middle Eastern buildings in the background are the same silver and as much as from a distance the trees the leaves the grass look black we can see how richly in detail they're picked out here and so before we move on to look more at Pippin's style let's look more at what story this is depicting and it's an episode from chapter four actually in the gospel of John and so what it says is Christ had come to pass through Samaria and he's gone to a well and a woman of Samaria came to draw water Jesus said to her give me a drink his disciples had gone into the town to buy food the Samaritan woman said to him how can you a Jew ask me a Samaritan woman for a drink for Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans Jesus answered and sent her if you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you give me a drink you would have asked him and he would have given you living water the woman said to him sir you do not even have a bucket and the well is steep where can you get this living water are you greater than our father Jacob who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks Jesus answered and said to her everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again but whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst the water I shall give will become in him an eternal spring a spring of water welling up to eternal life the woman said to him sir give me this water so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water and so you know this episode it says it's supposed to take place around noon but I think it's brilliant the way in which Pippin has depicted it as it looks like dawn or at twilight to electrify this moment between foreigners where this woman Samaritan who it says nothing is common in Jews has recognized in him the living God and the strong water from the well as a kind of prefiguration of baptism as a prerequisite according to Christian belief of entry into heaven and eternal life and so as as for the personal idiom in which Pippin has depicted it let's look a little bit more at the artist himself and here he is around the time he painted Christ in the Moment of Samaria at the Pyramid Club in north Philadelphia at 15th and Gerard a club for black professionals and he's talking with Albert Barnes now Pippin was a local artist he grew up nearby in Westchester and was a war hero he'd served on the front lines in France in World War One in an all-black regiment and like a lot of other American artists was exposed to French art modern art at that time and having gravely injured his right arm in combat he was able on pension to work on his art for some time thereafter and he was a self-taught artist he attracted the notice of Barnes displaying his work at the Carlin Gallery in Philadelphia in the late 1930s and ended up studying at the Barnes Foundation and something that had compelled Barnes about the work of Pippin was the extent to which here let's go back just a sec to look at Christ in the Moment of Samaria the extent to which his images did make use of old masters such as this version old master version of the same subject that you can find in gallery number 14 but put it in his own style his own perspective made it modern and and personal and something else that Barnes had appreciated about the work of Pippin was that self-taught aspect of it much like we're going to look actually at another picture on the same wall in gallery 14 here by Henri Rousseau a French self-taught artist early 1900s this image of scouts attacked by a tiger and I think that in a lot of ways it looks similar to Pippin where Rousseau is staged this crisp dramatic action against this almost curtain or screen of dense but wonderfully accurately rendered jungle foliage to make the the action scene up close personal and with what Barnes understood is this kind of authentic almost spiritual force to it that wasn't right out or academic or anything like that and so let's go back then to Pippin's Samaritan woman and another aspect that Barnes believed Pippin had brought to this was blending it together with African-American spiritual music in this case a him entitled Christ and the Woman at the Well and it's something that that Barnes had believed brought again this kind of authentic force as it were to the art of Pippin and I suppose we may notice as well that Pippin has made the figures look Middle Eastern and whether this is a means of representing historical accuracy because it's does after all take place in the Middle East or self-representation in a spiritual picture a lot like the way in which the same characters in the Italian picture look Italian you don't necessarily know the precise ingredients Pippin was bringing to this um that being said he was himself spiritual Pippin was and he certainly had a brilliantly expressive style that I think causes this encounter this again to use the word electric encounter between Christ and the Samaritan woman live reviewers I think throughout the 20th century and today um in in a way that comes alive for us and when we see it in the galleries and I do hope that you'll be able to come to the Barnes and see it soon and thanks so much for watching today that's it for today's Barnes takeout I'm Tom Collins new Bauer family executive director of the Barnes Foundation I hope you enjoyed Barnes takeout subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation


The nation's soaring college debt has been called a ticking time ball. To offset this burden on middle income students, UC Berkeley has implemented the middle class financial aid plan. Formerly known as the middle class access plan, this initiative applies to families within an $80,000 to $140,000 income range. The plan caps the total yearly cost of an eligible student's education, including tuition, housing and book expenses, at 15 percent of their family's total income. So we implemented the plan, like I said, because we're seeing a trend that as the state has pulled support away from the UC system and public education in general, the university has been forced to raise tuition and fees to make up for some of that revenue and that puts the burden on students and families. The program will cost between $10 to $12 million per year and will be paid for by philanthropic donations as well as revenue from out-of-state students. However, the campaign is unsure about long-term funding. We have what we need for the short term and we're setting the foundation to be able to sustain the plan in the long term. We really have a commitment to do so, but we are still in the midst of piecing the funding together from its various sources. This plan comes at a time where student debt has surpassed credit card debt. Rising tuition has put significant blocks and restraints on what I can do in the future. For example, as a freshman, I'm now over $25,000 in personal debt. I've had to start working a lot more. Last semester, last spring, I was working two jobs to help pay for my living expenses as well as some of the tuition and it's definitely taken a hit on me. We have seen a growth in the average debt level that undergraduates are graduating with. We think it's too high. We want Berkeley to be accessible for anybody who's qualified to come here, not to make a decision based on finances. Currently four in ten Cal students pay no tuition, which is instead subsidized by the current UC Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan for low income students, as well as state and federal grants. The university expects that between four and six thousand students will benefit from the new middle class access plan, which will be implemented in fall 2012. The chancellor has made it one of his top three priorities for the university affordability. The plan has inspired politicians like assembly speaker John Perez, who recently launched the middle class scholarship plan to provide assistance to students whose family income is under $150,000 but who are not eligible for financial aid. The bill is currently being reviewed by the assembly committee on higher education. So we think we're changing the conversation about affordability at a public university and leading the way to have a broader conversation about who should be getting financial aid and what that should mean. UC Berkeley's middle class access plan isn't perfect, as students have voiced concerns. I wish that the middle class financial aid plan would include out of state students. Personally, I just wish we could see it expanded a little more, or take into account families with a large number of children or, you know, extending circumstances. I really think it's an exciting thing that the university is taking on. I think it's going to be a great model for other universities to do as well. However, excitement surrounding the plan is clear, as UC Berkeley is the first public university in the U.S. to implement a program of this kind. For CalTV, I'm Jasmine Siegel.