Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything, all right, Bracy V. Hill. The second,
Speaker 1: we're gonna role play for a minute. You're you're at
Speaker 1: a party and you're you're up at the punch bowl
Speaker 1: and someone comes up and they say, no, what do
Speaker 1: you what do you do for a living? And you
Speaker 1: tell him what I say, I'm a history professor, kind
Speaker 1: of okay to continue role playing. Then I'll be Then
Speaker 1: I'll say I'm I'm your interlockate tour at this party.
Speaker 1: I say, well, what like what? And I go, you know,
Speaker 1: I did my dissertation on British rational religion in the
Speaker 1: late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, but I teach
Speaker 1: American hunting history and particularly how it intersects with religion.
Speaker 1: I'm tracking what most people don't at that point in time.
Speaker 1: So they've gone up there, so my my character has
Speaker 1: now left. They answered the question I could also is
Speaker 1: they go hunting? And I say yeah, and they go hunting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot to study there. And I started going
Speaker 1: off into my spiel about how that hunting culture, particularly
Speaker 1: in America has transformed over centuries, adapted itself to various
Speaker 1: peoples and animals that have been present on the continent. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that it continues to change even to today. And
Speaker 1: so what I do is I look at how American
Speaker 1: culture of hunting, really cultures of hunting have changed throughout
Speaker 1: the years. And I actually teach classes at my university
Speaker 1: on the history of hunting, in which case, well I
Speaker 1: teach to I teach a senior level of course that
Speaker 1: is nominally called the History of Hunting in North America.
Speaker 1: And then I teach you you know that I've got,
Speaker 1: you know, this great subtitle that no one ever prints. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it says something about from basically from
Speaker 1: survival to controversy. Uh. And then I teach a freshman
Speaker 1: only version, which is it's a they walk in the door,
Speaker 1: it's called a freshman Academic seminar, and they get me
Speaker 1: and I don't even get to pitch the class to them.
Speaker 1: They they sign up for a doing orientation, so I
Speaker 1: don't know who's selling it, but they walk in and
Speaker 1: we do a freshman version of it. So it kind
Speaker 1: of teaches them how to write, etcetera. But they engage
Speaker 1: the idea of that there's a history of this cultural
Speaker 1: phenomena in America. They get credit for their American history
Speaker 1: for it. But this is great, right um. And you know,
Speaker 1: if I get a chance to tell them first aimsod
Speaker 1: you know, yes, we're gonna watch Bambi alright, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna watch a little Ted Nugent because I have to
Speaker 1: our roll some Doug dynasty And that's my in a
Speaker 1: way of trying to bring him in something that they
Speaker 1: may have seen before. I said that this is real history.
Speaker 1: We're gonna look at primary sources, gonna people's experiences. Uh
Speaker 1: and in particular because of my focus, we're gonna at
Speaker 1: least look at how religion plays into this, from Paleo Indians,
Speaker 1: Native American tribes, the arrival of Puritans, don't forget the
Speaker 1: Spanish already here too, write the French as well, and
Speaker 1: how that plays out as particularly Anglo Americans sweep westward
Speaker 1: across the continent and encounter new people's, new animals, economics,
Speaker 1: and how all plays together. Now, I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: actually fulfill that, and of course the semester, but that's
Speaker 1: my grand goal. That's the that's the ambitious grand ambitious game.
Speaker 1: Would you mind there's a lot I'm already backed up
Speaker 1: in my mind, but real quick, can you can you
Speaker 1: tell people? I don't think we've ever talked about this before.
Speaker 1: Can you explain a people the difference between the primary
Speaker 1: and secondary resources. That's a great question. Um. So, a
Speaker 1: primary source is material and it used to be just texts.
Speaker 1: But historians are not opening their minds to looking at
Speaker 1: things more than this text we talked about like a
Speaker 1: material culture, so we'll look at things. But an artifact
Speaker 1: something that humans have modified, they've created from a particular
Speaker 1: time period, and that's the time period that we're investigating.
Speaker 1: That's a primary source. So a primary source can be
Speaker 1: a diary entry from eight and I'm studying eight. A
Speaker 1: primary source could be a computer if I were studying
Speaker 1: a particular period where that computer was relevant. Uh So,
Speaker 1: primary sources are in some ways limitless, but not really
Speaker 1: because primary sources have a tency to disappear, right so
Speaker 1: paper hesitency to wrot, mold, disappear. Would if you're studying
Speaker 1: paleon Indian cultures, you don't find their their their homes
Speaker 1: that are constructed of wood. What you find, at best
Speaker 1: is the hollow that was left by the post, right,
Speaker 1: that's filled in with a different type of We perceive
Speaker 1: it as a history that's written in rock exactly because
Speaker 1: everything else is gone. So most of what we find
Speaker 1: in our our our blade technology, right, so your Clovis technology, etcetera,
Speaker 1: folds and stuff like that, and that stuff has intensity
Speaker 1: to last. So that's a primary resource. But so is
Speaker 1: UH Patagonia, coats, um or textbooks. If I'm studying a
Speaker 1: period and those are resources that tell me something about
Speaker 1: that culture of that time period, etcetera, that's a primary source.
Speaker 1: So primary sources, uh can be stories that were told
Speaker 1: and recorded, whether they were written down or recorded literally
Speaker 1: on various types of technology. So someday this conversation could
Speaker 1: be a primary sources primary sources. It's exactly right now,
Speaker 1: it's so what if loose the Clark journals, primary sources, um,
Speaker 1: undaunted courage secondary source? Right, well, secondary secondary source is
Speaker 1: uh a Julian. We take about the secondary source as
Speaker 1: a secondary history, secondary source for history. So that what
Speaker 1: happens is it's where the historian intentionally or unintentionally analyze
Speaker 1: is material that's in front of them, and so she
Speaker 1: she has these various types of data in front of
Speaker 1: it that are primary sources, and she analyzes them, determines
Speaker 1: their importance, and in most cases weaves them into a narrative.
Speaker 1: Now many times the historian then will not just use
Speaker 1: primary sources, but she'll also use secondary sources. So if
Speaker 1: I were writing a history of hunting, which I'm supposed
Speaker 1: to be doing right now front undisclosed University Press, I
Speaker 1: hope to finish it a history of hunting of U
Speaker 1: culture in Texas, then I would look to histories of Texas.
Speaker 1: That's a secondary source. But that's useful to me as
Speaker 1: I construct my narrative of hunting cultures in the state
Speaker 1: of Texas and the Regian Texas. But I also would
Speaker 1: turn into primary sources as I write my secondary source.
Speaker 1: So the secondary source is this analysis and report, because
Speaker 1: this is what historians do. Historians have to communicate. That's
Speaker 1: what we do. We communicate by speaking, we communicate our
Speaker 1: writing um and if we fail in that venture, of course,
Speaker 1: then we failed to as a historian. But the historian
Speaker 1: distills places importance on certain data ignores others. It's science
Speaker 1: and art. The art is the idea that I have
Speaker 1: to communicate to you whatever my audience is that I perceive,
Speaker 1: I communicate to you what I think is important about
Speaker 1: this period. And I take many times in all this
Speaker 1: various data that doesn't seem to fit together, and I
Speaker 1: make a coherent, I hope story for you to understand
Speaker 1: the past. But of course ignore other stuff too, and
Speaker 1: that's where scientifically I have to be very careful. I'll
Speaker 1: go into archives, I look at paintings, Um, I look
Speaker 1: at guns. Although us last summer I spent time in
Speaker 1: a museum and a fellowship just basically mess around with
Speaker 1: knives and guns, particularly from Texas in the nineties. Entry.
Speaker 1: It was fun, it was great. But I've got to
Speaker 1: give meaning to that thing. So we tell the story. Um,
Speaker 1: and that's that secondary source, whether I'm telling you about
Speaker 1: it myself or I'm writing it and presenting it to
Speaker 1: you as an audience. Okay, now can you humor from
Speaker 1: me me from it? Like while I have you here? Yea,
Speaker 1: there's there's three trying to think there's a few areas
Speaker 1: that in past episodes we've touched on matters of a
Speaker 1: biblical nature, didn't have the expertise. Okay, so we should
Speaker 1: say that, right. So my expertise is right. This is
Speaker 1: where I like pull out my union card. So I
Speaker 1: am a historian, but I have a master's degree in theology,
Speaker 1: and I have a PhD in the religion. So for
Speaker 1: the audience, who's going So why are they asking his
Speaker 1: story and about the Bible. I'm still not the best source,
Speaker 1: but in theory, someone educated me on these things to
Speaker 1: a degree in the past. Alright, this, I'm gonna ask
Speaker 1: you some trust me up questions. I'm gonna ask you
Speaker 1: some low level because this is just cleaning up some
Speaker 1: messes we've made in past episodes. And I want as
Speaker 1: a way to introduce you and just to bring a
Speaker 1: thing up because we got a lot of feedback from
Speaker 1: this recently. Okay. We have a friend that we work with,
Speaker 1: Mark Kenyon, and Mark Kenyon has been trying to kill
Speaker 1: the same deer for years, okay, And I was explaining
Speaker 1: to him one day that he was gonna have a
Speaker 1: saul on the way to Damascus moment where he saw
Speaker 1: the light and decided to not shoot this deer. After all,
Speaker 1: I was predicting that this would happen, And I said,
Speaker 1: I can't remember if it's if the dude's name was
Speaker 1: Paul or Saul, and a lot of people wrote in
Speaker 1: to say, what, Yes, it's a tricky question. It's the
Speaker 1: same guy. Okay, it's the same guy. So if you
Speaker 1: look at the So the story takes place in the
Speaker 1: Book of Acts, which it's a history, by the way,
Speaker 1: it's a two part history. So the Book of Luke,
Speaker 1: which you may have heard of the Gospel Luke and
Speaker 1: the Book of Acts are one book. It's just in
Speaker 1: two parts. So you can tell because the intro it says,
Speaker 1: dear theophilis in the beginning of Luke, that's a guy's
Speaker 1: name like lover of God. And we don't know if
Speaker 1: that's really a guy or if it's just this, you know,
Speaker 1: this character he is writing out there for the because
Speaker 1: he says, basically, Luke. The writer of Luke says, so
Speaker 1: you know that there's been these other histories written about
Speaker 1: our faith, but it's I'm paraphrasing these they this they're
Speaker 1: a mess, he said. So I've done is I've tried
Speaker 1: to put together for you an orderly history. So that's
Speaker 1: his intro at the beginning of Luke, and then you
Speaker 1: get to Acts, and actually chapter one says dear theophilis
Speaker 1: part two. All right, now, I'm gonna tell you about
Speaker 1: what happens after Jesus goes. Now, he starts with the
Speaker 1: resurrected Jesus and acts number one. And then of course
Speaker 1: Jesus goes. You know, he's gone. Angels go what are
Speaker 1: you doing here? And he lays out They lay out
Speaker 1: the thesis. They say, basically, why are you still standing here?
Speaker 1: Basically go tell the message from Jerusalem to the ends
Speaker 1: of the earth, and gives a lot of other place
Speaker 1: names in there. And so he lays his thesis out
Speaker 1: number one. I'm gonna tell you about Jesus, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna do an orderly fashion. Is the basis your faith,
Speaker 1: Luke number Luke, Chapter one, Acts Chapter one. You say,
Speaker 1: but why aren't they next to each other? Don't ask
Speaker 1: me about the cannon. Alright, but the canon is a mess.
Speaker 1: But anyhow, they separated in the stick all the little
Speaker 1: biographies about Jesus together, and they separated these two books.
Speaker 1: So the second chapter, if you're the second part of
Speaker 1: this history by this writer, which is historically, or i said,
Speaker 1: traditionally called Luke, describes the story of really kind of
Speaker 1: two major characters in the formation of the early Christian Church.
Speaker 1: The first is Peter. So Peter gets like the first
Speaker 1: couple of chapters, and then they shifted this guy named Saul,
Speaker 1: all right, a great persecutor, great persecutor. He's he's he's
Speaker 1: born in southern Asia minor Turkey, Tarsus. Uh. He comes
Speaker 1: to get educated in Judea. So he's a he's a
Speaker 1: pharisee's he's a bright guy, trained at the best school,
Speaker 1: if you will. All right, So he's a persecutor. The
Speaker 1: early Christians famously overseas, Oh man, you're making me pull
Speaker 1: the stuff in the back of it. He oversees the
Speaker 1: martindom of Stephen. Right, Okay, what's my name? Right? There
Speaker 1: you go. It wasn't for him, I wouldn't be named me.
Speaker 1: There you go. Yeah. So in or out Damascus, which
Speaker 1: is the capital of Syria, Soul has his experience. The
Speaker 1: resurrected Christ somehow speaks to him and calls him Saul, Soul,
Speaker 1: why do you persecute blinds in basically knocks him off
Speaker 1: his ass or blinds him for the rest of his life.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, no, no no no, to be
Speaker 1: a miracle. Alright, So so I don't know if he's
Speaker 1: on an ass or a horse anyhow, knocks him a right,
Speaker 1: So he's he's blinded, and he goes in and there's
Speaker 1: a fellow who's part of the Christian community who basically
Speaker 1: praise for him, and he's blind for a little bit
Speaker 1: and then his side his gang. So there's a miracle.
Speaker 1: So he gets this divine this uh, the christophany, what
Speaker 1: if you wanna call it, this vision of the Christ
Speaker 1: are the voice of the Christ, his appearance. And this
Speaker 1: is how Paul later on we'll talk about his names.
Speaker 1: This is how he validates he was an apostle because
Speaker 1: while the other guys that there were twelve, right, they
Speaker 1: were close, one of them apparently got it wrong. Right.
Speaker 1: So the eleven that the close associates of Jesus, Uh,
Speaker 1: they're the apostles. They're called their commissioned to go out there.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of others who were as well.
Speaker 1: But Paul says, hey, Jesus called me himself, all right.
Speaker 1: If you go through the Book of Acts, as the
Speaker 1: writer Luke, let's just call him, is working through his
Speaker 1: thesis of showing how the Christians take the message from
Speaker 1: Jerusalem to Judea to Samarian, to the ends of the earth.
Speaker 1: He picks it up with Paul, who goes by Saul.
Speaker 1: But Saul uses the name Saul and Paul back and forth. Actually,
Speaker 1: the end of Acts, he still calls himself Saul. He
Speaker 1: tells the story that Jesus appears to him and calls
Speaker 1: him Soul. It's Luke as he tells his story that
Speaker 1: shifts to Paul. In fact, once Paul leaves the area
Speaker 1: of Jerusalem, Luke subtly shifts from Seul to Paul. Now
Speaker 1: here's my theory on why Saul is a Hebrew name.
Speaker 1: It's the first king of Israel, right the United Kingdom
Speaker 1: there of Israel, uh, and that's a good Hebrew name.
Speaker 1: But he was born in Asia Minor, in a Roman city,
Speaker 1: and that's why he has Roman citizenship. Now he comes
Speaker 1: to jude all that kind of stuff, but he has
Speaker 1: a Roman name. So Paul or Paulus is his Latin name,
Speaker 1: and so he goes by Paul, just like you would
Speaker 1: go by Soul. Just like there are other characters in
Speaker 1: the New Testament, like this guy named um Thomas who's
Speaker 1: also known as Didimus the Twin. So there's people who
Speaker 1: have multiple names. So what you see is the shift
Speaker 1: from Saul to Paul in the Book of Acts to
Speaker 1: fit the historians thesis. So as he leaves the center
Speaker 1: of Judaism and moves into the gentile, the world of
Speaker 1: the Goyem, the gret a Roman world, he shifts to
Speaker 1: Paul to show how Paul is taking the Gospel to
Speaker 1: the ends of the area. As a long answer, that's good,
Speaker 1: I liked it. Can move on to the next part.
Speaker 1: My next question, blue laws, Oh, just real quick to
Speaker 1: touch on this with your expertise. A guy was pointing
Speaker 1: out that we had something terribly wrong. He says, one, okay,
Speaker 1: all right, let me let me get this right here,
Speaker 1: he says. Here in North Carolina, as Janice might be
Speaker 1: able to tell you, we have recently modified the laws
Speaker 1: for Sunday hunting to be much less restrictive. And to
Speaker 1: the listener, there are states in the American South and
Speaker 1: elsewhere you're not allowed to go hunting on a Sunday,
Speaker 1: although there are still certain prohibitions, especially to your normal
Speaker 1: Sunday morning church service hours. One minor correction to Steve's
Speaker 1: point about the Sabbath is that Sunday isn't really considered
Speaker 1: to be the Sabbath. I was saying the Sabbath right
Speaker 1: for Sunday. Sabbath is just the Hebrew word for seventh
Speaker 1: and corresponds to the Christian account when God arrested on
Speaker 1: the seventh day. It is always Sunday. Christians worship corporately,
Speaker 1: corporately on Sunday and remembrance of Jesus resurrection. Now there
Speaker 1: are plenty of Christians that confuse the two, but nowhere
Speaker 1: does the Bible talk about Sabbath laws, rest from work,
Speaker 1: short distance of travel, et cetera. Applying to Christians on Sunday,
Speaker 1: this guy says, I don't see it why it should
Speaker 1: be mandated as free from all activity. I don't hunt
Speaker 1: on Sunday because that's because I'm at church. Does resonate
Speaker 1: with you at all? All right, So a little bit
Speaker 1: of a number of things going on here, all right.
Speaker 1: First off, there are number of states that do have
Speaker 1: blue laws. Uh. My best friend, his name's Josh. He
Speaker 1: grew up in Pennsylvania, a little place called Enan Valley, Uh,
Speaker 1: and opening a deer season it was like a holiday,
Speaker 1: like a holy day. But from what I gathered from
Speaker 1: the stories he's told, me it was a Monday, because
Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania you can't hunt deer on Sunday. So there
Speaker 1: are number of states. Yes, okay, so it which is
Speaker 1: interesting because this whole William Penn's experiment. If you're from me,
Speaker 1: he was a Quaker, right, and so Pennsylvania was supposed
Speaker 1: to be a place where freedom of religion took place
Speaker 1: in a unique and in brand new way. You know
Speaker 1: what William Penn wants describing that state, talked about how
Speaker 1: grouse would walk into his house. He had observations about wildlife,
Speaker 1: so that Benjamin Franklin, we should talk about him. He's
Speaker 1: got some weird views snakes anyway. Uh. Blue laws then
Speaker 1: ironically show up in places, and I believe Rhode Island
Speaker 1: which is as well, which is also established on religious freedom.
Speaker 1: I could be wrong with Rhode Island, so we're right
Speaker 1: in and tell me all right, But the point is,
Speaker 1: ironically that as we see the establishment and sometimes in
Speaker 1: places you would expect to see religious freedom and not
Speaker 1: expect to see religious ideas pervaded secular life. For lack
Speaker 1: of a better way of saying it, that's where you
Speaker 1: find it. So there are number states that don't allow
Speaker 1: hunting on Sunday. Why well, there was generally this assumption
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years among Christians that the Sabbath was Sunday.
Speaker 1: But the Sabbath isn't Sunday. The Sabbath is actually Friday night.
Speaker 1: Is when it starts sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. You
Speaker 1: got it right, And that's why that's like when like
Speaker 1: like Jews, Yeah, absolutely, you go to synagogue with Orthodox jewesday.
Speaker 1: That's when they do their honor the Sabbath from sundown
Speaker 1: Friday sundowns not just Orthodox but Reformed Jews as well.
Speaker 1: It's not infrequent we go to synagogue. Uh, the number
Speaker 1: of synagogues actually even in the town where I live,
Speaker 1: but where I've grown up, and it starts on Friday nights.
Speaker 1: It's your Schobat service. So that was the day of rest.
Speaker 1: And where does this come from? There's a couple of
Speaker 1: different hints about it in in in particularly the Penitute
Speaker 1: the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the
Speaker 1: Old Testament if you want to use that if you're
Speaker 1: Christian first active. But the probably the most interesting one
Speaker 1: is of course the first chapter Genesis one, which lays
Speaker 1: out this creation story and it rolls into early part
Speaker 1: of Genesis too. Um, And do you have these these
Speaker 1: days in which God creates through various means, uh, the world.
Speaker 1: That is that he separates water from land, and he
Speaker 1: puts vegetation, and and then he creates uh, you know,
Speaker 1: he has light and darkness in it as the stellar formations,
Speaker 1: and then he has the birds and the four legged critters,
Speaker 1: and eventually on the sixth day he creates humans right
Speaker 1: along with other things, but humans and all these creations
Speaker 1: are basically good, but the ones with human it's it's
Speaker 1: very good. And then it says on the seventh day
Speaker 1: he rests now again, I'm gonna pull us in back
Speaker 1: of me. But I believe it's in the book of Exodus.
Speaker 1: You have a retelling of this, and it's etological, which
Speaker 1: is a fancy way of saying it's a story that
Speaker 1: has an explanation for why we do what we do.
Speaker 1: And there it's explicit because God sit on the seventh day,
Speaker 1: so we rest as well. Um. And there's two different
Speaker 1: ideologies going on there and the two books. But so
Speaker 1: it's established in in the in the Hebrew culture that
Speaker 1: you rested on the seventh day. It was a way
Speaker 1: of essentially, Um, I hate to say it, but mimicking God,
Speaker 1: but in a in a positive fashion. Um. And so
Speaker 1: on the seventh Day you rested, and there were certain
Speaker 1: behaviors you didn't do in the rabbis. Jewish rabbis years
Speaker 1: afterwards continued to comment on this. There's certain things you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be doing right, probably hunting, working, Um, off top
Speaker 1: of my head, cutting wood. You have sacks, by the way,
Speaker 1: on on the Sabbath. That's not work, that's that's okay. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's what I remember hearing in class. That caught my attention.
Speaker 1: I remember that in class. But so certain the fishing, fishing,
Speaker 1: fishing is okay. I don't know. I don't know what.
Speaker 1: To be honest, I don't remember. No state has outlawed
Speaker 1: Sunday fishing or Cinday sacks, I guess. But the point
Speaker 1: is you do have this intriguing extension then of and
Speaker 1: the Christian you say, why Christmas on Sunday? Here's the shift.
Speaker 1: They go back to the Book of Acts. Uh. These
Speaker 1: were Jews that came to believe them that this Jesus
Speaker 1: was the Messiah, the awaited One. Um. And they continue
Speaker 1: to do Jewish things. They still went to the Temple.
Speaker 1: It was there hadn't been destroyed by the Romans in
Speaker 1: the year seventy by the guy named Titus, So it's
Speaker 1: still there. Um and uh. They continue to do but
Speaker 1: they have to figure out who they are though, right.
Speaker 1: So there Jews, but they believe that the Messiah has come. Uh.
Speaker 1: They seemingly still are doing sacrifices in the Temple. They're
Speaker 1: still gathering. But you see in there early in the
Speaker 1: Book of Acts, increasing tension then between these Jews or
Speaker 1: followers of Jesus and Jews that didn't buy into the
Speaker 1: he was of Messiah, until eventually they kicked out of
Speaker 1: the out of the synagogues where they would gather, and
Speaker 1: they're essentially pushed out of the Temple region. And so
Speaker 1: they pick a new day to worship on Sunday. That's
Speaker 1: how that all came about. Yeah, and Christians have turned
Speaker 1: to the Sabbath Sunday not too as again as Christianity
Speaker 1: Christian Yeah, yeah, right now, so you have Seventh Day
Speaker 1: ad ventice for instance, if you're driving them, they follow
Speaker 1: more of a Herbraic code. It's I am a little
Speaker 1: picky choosing right there. Certain things there, for instance, most Sunday,
Speaker 1: i'd ben as I know, or vegetarian, right, um, And
Speaker 1: they have very strict diets, and so they keep many
Speaker 1: of the date of the Seventh Day had been this
Speaker 1: one time for a few days. I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: how did it go? Well, she didn't date Friday night
Speaker 1: to Saturday night. Yeah, and as a meat eater, I
Speaker 1: can't remember. Yeah, right, okay, so it's gonna be a problem. Possibly, so,
Speaker 1: but seven Day. Even so, there's groups of what you
Speaker 1: might consider radical Christianity. She was vegetarian, you're right, but
Speaker 1: it really date. It was like I was. I was,
Speaker 1: I was interested in trying to date her. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: so that's where you began to see and you still
Speaker 1: see written that said that particuarly in the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: where you see kind of utopian movements and more radical
Speaker 1: types of Christianity, and even in America go back and
Speaker 1: back to the old ways exactly. But whoever it was
Speaker 1: that said, hey man, we're gonna do some semblance of well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna like exclude by law the most egregious things
Speaker 1: heavy drinking, hunting. Well, most people were Sunday people who
Speaker 1: were Sunday people, which I mean again, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of states you can't buy hard liquor on Sundays. It's
Speaker 1: the same principle. And then we call those blue laws
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, but there's like I guess it's around
Speaker 1: a dozen or so states that still have blue laws
Speaker 1: for hunting. Okay, can you now tell me give me
Speaker 1: the quick wrap on your your your book? All right?
Speaker 1: All right? Is it? Can I still called a Newish book? Yeah?
Speaker 1: It came out in November of two. Yeah, I can
Speaker 1: see that friendly all right, so real quick? Um, the
Speaker 1: books called God Nemerod in the World exploring Christian perspectives
Speaker 1: on sport hunting. It's published by Mercer University Press, which
Speaker 1: has a Sports and Religion series. Yeah, Sports and religious
Speaker 1: and sports and religion like what Yeah, okay, so it's
Speaker 1: a competitive verb. It pulls it two together. So it's
Speaker 1: sports and religion together. Yeah, alright, printed, I don't have
Speaker 1: to yeah. Um, And so they've got books on baseball football. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well there's nothing to write. I don't know. I didn't
Speaker 1: read the book. Yeah, but as you as we learned
Speaker 1: in this book, there's all kinds of ways that hunting
Speaker 1: plays into the Bible. Is not a lot of baseball
Speaker 1: plays into the Bible. It's ridiculous idea. I didn't write
Speaker 1: that book. I did write this. If you have you
Speaker 1: step out the long as show it is what is
Speaker 1: there to be said? Yeah, I don't know. I didn't
Speaker 1: read the book. I didn't realize. I knew that there
Speaker 1: was a lot of hunting in the Bible, yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't realize how much. And so I started looking at
Speaker 1: this book. Yeah, yeah, I mean there's a lot going
Speaker 1: on there. Um, so real quick. The story of the
Speaker 1: book was I was writing a dissertation and my dissertation
Speaker 1: was looking at radical groups in England and Britain. I
Speaker 1: started out with a law large, which is a group
Speaker 1: in the fourteenth century in England. I ended up losing
Speaker 1: my director from a distant religious group, radical religious. I
Speaker 1: like radical minority religious groups, all right, I just do um.
Speaker 1: And so then I ended up for various reasons, things
Speaker 1: got shifted around. Ended up working with a fellow from
Speaker 1: the University of Storily in Scotland. He was visiting in
Speaker 1: the United States as a distinguished scholar um and we
Speaker 1: we we found a topic that I could study with
Speaker 1: him that fit within his purview. So I started studying
Speaker 1: late seventeent century early eighteenth century radical religion we call
Speaker 1: rational religion. It's as a proto Unitarian. People who grew
Speaker 1: up within the Orthodox Christian movement actually were defending it
Speaker 1: against the Anglicans in Britain, and then suddenly came to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that in particularly things like the Trinity were problematic.
Speaker 1: One plus one plus one did not equal one. And
Speaker 1: so they were applying reason in the British Enlightenment to
Speaker 1: the religion of their tradition. As you can well imagine,
Speaker 1: they were soon ostracized by everyone. And so I particularly
Speaker 1: worked on a guy by the name of James Pierce.
Speaker 1: So I'm working with people on the edge um in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven. Of course, I'm always for a
Speaker 1: diversion because I'm a procrastinator. Suddenly I'm walking with this
Speaker 1: guy across campus and me he's so cool. He's got
Speaker 1: the voice of God right with this British accident with
Speaker 1: the Cambridge. His name is David Bebington, and uh, David
Speaker 1: Bevington's is just fantastic. Uh. And we're walking across campus
Speaker 1: and I mentioned he mentioned he don't go to this
Speaker 1: guy's house for dinner. I said, I know him. Actually,
Speaker 1: my wife and I've been hunting white wing doves there
Speaker 1: and he stops, just stops in the middle campus on
Speaker 1: the sidewalk, and it looks at me and it's like
Speaker 1: he doesn't know what to say. He just we just
Speaker 1: had Thai food. He just invited me to do his distion,
Speaker 1: my dissertation with him, and he looks at me, goes,
Speaker 1: that's that's so French, French, French, he's British, and he's like,
Speaker 1: what doesn't America. Yeah, so and and we just kept
Speaker 1: walking along and I started thinking, all right here I am.
Speaker 1: I'm committed to doing Christian history within two degree with
Speaker 1: things on the edges, but also within Christian community on
Speaker 1: the edges. I thought hunting was okay. I mean, I
Speaker 1: knew there a lot of people didn't hunt, but I
Speaker 1: guess this is a big question. And so I started
Speaker 1: bouncing it around, came up the topic, found a guy
Speaker 1: to kind of work with me who's does sports, uh
Speaker 1: and leisure studies. We proposed I proposed it in particular
Speaker 1: to a number of presses, and their responses was sexy,
Speaker 1: but that ain't gonna sell, and so it didn't go anywhere.
Speaker 1: I finished my dissertation. I didn't want to work on
Speaker 1: my dissertation anymore. I still owe it seven years later
Speaker 1: to the publisher. But I started looking for a diversion.
Speaker 1: And I was in San Francisco and I had this
Speaker 1: idea of you know, about hunting. It's been bouncing back
Speaker 1: in my head to look at it from all kinds
Speaker 1: of different perspectives, from history, uh, from religious, theological, ethical perspectives,
Speaker 1: and clearly I couldn't do them all. So I needed
Speaker 1: other voices. I wanted other people to participate in this,
Speaker 1: but no one's really doing this um and the idea
Speaker 1: was it was? It was? It was nascent, shall we say.
Speaker 1: But I went to the session with this series editor
Speaker 1: of the Sports and Religion series, and Mercer was there
Speaker 1: already talking. Went up after him. I said, I had
Speaker 1: got this idea for this book. You listened to me.
Speaker 1: He said, send me an email. I send him an email.
Speaker 1: He said, see me a proposal, and he said I'll
Speaker 1: take it. So I started creating this book. And that
Speaker 1: is I wanted to write some some some essays myself.
Speaker 1: And there were people that I talked to of the
Speaker 1: last several years that were interested in writing about the
Speaker 1: ethics of hunting, the history of hunting, about why it
Speaker 1: was good while it was bad, how to do it
Speaker 1: better than other ways, but with a particular attention to religion,
Speaker 1: not just to ethics. Be there's a lot of discussion
Speaker 1: of ethics out there, but with a particular attention to
Speaker 1: history of the religion and the current situation of religion,
Speaker 1: particularly Christianity. And I began assembling these this group of
Speaker 1: more than two dozen people. UM. I eventually brought out
Speaker 1: a co editor to talk a little bit about sports,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't four hunting, if you will, and he
Speaker 1: brought in his friend Sean Graves UH to to do
Speaker 1: a kind of anti hunting piece. The main central anti
Speaker 1: like a religious based anti hunting and philosophy. It's it's
Speaker 1: a composite. So if you look at the book, it's
Speaker 1: into parts. The first eleven chapters are descriptive, they're historically descriptive.
Speaker 1: They talk about hunting communities today UH closely associated with religion. UM.
Speaker 1: They go all the way back to the Hebraic tradition
Speaker 1: as an essay front by a guy named Uh Basque
Speaker 1: can at bass hunting buddy of mine UH and also
Speaker 1: a scripture scholar, and we work away through the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: we work our way to the early modern period, and
Speaker 1: then we work away to the President. And in that
Speaker 1: section with doing oral history, so recording primary sources from
Speaker 1: people who hunted to the last century, analyzing it, making report,
Speaker 1: and then allowing hunters from all types of walks of life.
Speaker 1: UM athletes in particual because of sports and religion, UH, musicians, artists, UH, teachers, academics,
Speaker 1: soldiers all kind of talk about their story, but just
Speaker 1: tell a story, have them right their essay if possible.
Speaker 1: There's a few celebrity hunters that you would see on
Speaker 1: things like the Outdoor Channel. UH, like Ralph since lur
Speaker 1: always been to pronounce his name from Archer's choice. Jason
Speaker 1: Robertson did an essay with him from the dynasty UM
Speaker 1: and to letting them speak. And then the last half
Speaker 1: is from the Ivory Tower. So if you will, the
Speaker 1: first half is about the field and the people who
Speaker 1: are in it, and the last half is people who
Speaker 1: live in the I retire academics who want to tell
Speaker 1: you the hunting is right wrong or this is a
Speaker 1: better way to do it. And then there's a conclusion.
Speaker 1: So the book is a composite of perspectives. Um And
Speaker 1: one would argue from about years of experience. What first
Speaker 1: got me interested in the idea um that there was
Speaker 1: something to think about here is I was reading years,
Speaker 1: many years ago in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and in
Speaker 1: the epilogue to the book, he's hunting walrus with Alaska natives,
Speaker 1: though he's actually in Russian Wars, and they're slaughtering walrus
Speaker 1: on the ice and the smell of blood and gunpowder
Speaker 1: are still lingering in the air. And Lopez doesn't get
Speaker 1: into it, but he alludes to the reconciliation or the
Speaker 1: need to reconcile Jacob and Esau, or this reconciliation that occurs.
Speaker 1: I remember thinking, like, what's that. So I go and
Speaker 1: look at the story of Jacob and Esau, which I interpreted.
Speaker 1: I've been told by people that it's not I interpreted
Speaker 1: it to be a story about hunters and non hunters.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you, like my understanding of um and
Speaker 1: and I want to get it. I want to touch
Speaker 1: on Nimrod to who I wasn't even aware of. Okay,
Speaker 1: but Jacob and Esaw, here's this mother. She's pregnant with twins,
Speaker 1: and the first baby passes out, and it's Harry, covered
Speaker 1: in hair and clinging to his ankle is a fair baby.
Speaker 1: The hair covered baby that comes out first is Saw.
Speaker 1: And the fair, non hairy baby that comes out clinging
Speaker 1: to his ankle is Jacob. He Saw becomes a hunter.
Speaker 1: He's a savage, and he hunts with his bow, and
Speaker 1: he Saw the hairless one, it's an agrarian. Oh sorry, Jacob.
Speaker 1: The hairless one becomes a farmer. Their father likes wild
Speaker 1: game and often sends Saw with his bow to go
Speaker 1: scrounge him up some wild game, and he Saw, being
Speaker 1: the eldest, is entitled to the birthright. The old man
Speaker 1: grows old and blind and sends Saw off with his
Speaker 1: bow to kill him some wild meat. Jacob goes and
Speaker 1: kills one of his lambs, drapes it over his shoulder,
Speaker 1: cook some lamb for the old man. The old man
Speaker 1: eats it, likes it, touches, feels the fur, thinks it's Saw,
Speaker 1: and bestows upon him his birthright. I took it to
Speaker 1: mean that this was the moment when God gave favor
Speaker 1: to the agricultural people's and shunned the hunters through trickery,
Speaker 1: and it's telling because Jacob is second born. But this
Speaker 1: is clinging to the ankle of the hunter. So I
Speaker 1: couldn't see it any other way. That it was sort
Speaker 1: of a way of pointing out that the the Christians
Speaker 1: were a grarians, they were pastorists, they weren't wild savages,
Speaker 1: they weren't out hunting. And here's a story to sort
Speaker 1: of account for how God's favoritism was granted to the
Speaker 1: agricultural peoples and not to the wild savages. But I've
Speaker 1: been told that that's not how that's not how you
Speaker 1: should look at it. The great thing about it as
Speaker 1: is up for interpretation, right. So so the story you're
Speaker 1: looking at is in Genesis chapter twenty five. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so Jacob and he saw born and he saw is
Speaker 1: described then as being uh he comes out red and
Speaker 1: he's hairy, right, and it says he's harry like a
Speaker 1: garment like like a I don't know, mo hair suit,
Speaker 1: I don't know, right, And and and then there's Jacob
Speaker 1: um our body dirt looks like this. Yeah, So did
Speaker 1: you got two stories? One of course is that has
Speaker 1: been out hunting and it comes in he's famished, and
Speaker 1: you know what that's like, right, he's just gonna eat anything.
Speaker 1: And he comes in and uh, Jacob says, basically, I'm cooking.
Speaker 1: No interesting thing is you think about cooking, and some
Speaker 1: cultures of course cooking, well, so cooking. It's interesting. We
Speaker 1: cook in American culture, and I know things are shifting.
Speaker 1: Gender roles are are malleable. But I would see in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century if I said, oh, look he's cooking stew,
Speaker 1: you would go mm. Because the image we have post
Speaker 1: Victorian era is of the woman cooking in the home.
Speaker 1: Now that's we we play with that because if it's
Speaker 1: something large and muscular translation meat men have taken this
Speaker 1: over and by the way, man, I think you've always
Speaker 1: done this. If they can make it difficult, they will, right.
Speaker 1: So we get smokers and we slap slash slabs of
Speaker 1: of a hog and and all kinds of other things
Speaker 1: are sausages on a smoker. And suddenly the masculine, right,
Speaker 1: we allow that to come in. Yeah, you know this
Speaker 1: is it's funny been because like an interesting thing with
Speaker 1: in our home Thanksgiving my mom, Right, we'll take the turkey,
Speaker 1: do all the work on the turkey. Okay, cook the giblets, rolls,
Speaker 1: the whole damn thing, make the stuffing stuff and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. But my old man, who had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with this all day, all day, you
Speaker 1: just do whatever you want hunting usually would come home
Speaker 1: at night and be like, I will carve the turkey.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, because like clearly you'd be incapable woman of
Speaker 1: now slicing it. You've done all this but your skill
Speaker 1: set and somewhere and we've found the moment. We've got that,
Speaker 1: we've got the tool that the symbol of, if you will,
Speaker 1: of life and death. That not the blade, right, whether
Speaker 1: it's electric knife or it's this big chef's knife and
Speaker 1: the and the masculine takes over and Jacob's cookinge. So
Speaker 1: he's cookinge, he's not hunting. And so you get this
Speaker 1: idea of Esau who's on he a liminal character, liminal
Speaker 1: not like you know, like the thing that's sour, but
Speaker 1: l I M E N on the limits, on the edge.
Speaker 1: Hunters are always there. They have to be there on
Speaker 1: the edge, right, I mean, even if it's on the
Speaker 1: edge of suburbia, your bow hunting, you're still on the edge.
Speaker 1: So hunters are always a marginalized group. Because as we
Speaker 1: see the domestication of the earth by way of the
Speaker 1: Neolithic agricultural revolution and continuing agriculture, we all these are
Speaker 1: pushing wildlife to the edges. Now I know, some do well, right,
Speaker 1: So white tailed deer have done exceptionally well with some
Speaker 1: of this type of edge, if you will, kind of environment.
Speaker 1: Others don't write migratory animals generally don't. Whether we're building
Speaker 1: a road or doing something else, we're disrupting their patterns
Speaker 1: of migration. So hunters are always liminal stalls, a liminal character.
Speaker 1: And he's all on the edge. Jacob's at home, Jacob's
Speaker 1: hanging out with the women, all right, that's what Genesis says.
Speaker 1: He's a mama's boy. He's breaking some gender roles of sorts.
Speaker 1: He's breaking some gender roles here. And Isaac the Dead
Speaker 1: has a taste for venison he saw his first born
Speaker 1: provides into this. So what you get it's almost kind
Speaker 1: of like a hunter gatherer myth in conflict with this
Speaker 1: movement toward a grarianism and the domestication of animals, and
Speaker 1: so comes up and he ends up selling his birthright
Speaker 1: to Jacob for this poor rige for this because he's
Speaker 1: so hungry. He's so he's famished, right and Jacob, it
Speaker 1: says uh, And Jacob gave esau bread and stew of lentils.
Speaker 1: Think about it. Both those things are products of agriculture.
Speaker 1: Lentils you're growing from the earth. And bread is a
Speaker 1: product of course growing grains and cereal milling producing bread.
Speaker 1: So Esa brings meat, Jacob brings Neolithic agriculture. Here it is.
Speaker 1: But there's also a comment here too, where a criticism
Speaker 1: when you do have hunter gatherer cultures up against agrarian cultures.
Speaker 1: From the agrarian perspective, a criticism of the hunter gathered
Speaker 1: culture is the feast and famine, the highs and lows exactly,
Speaker 1: so the fact that he's coming back, he's coming back
Speaker 1: starving from an unsuccessful hunt. He's this guy like right here,
Speaker 1: bro bowl lentils, small produce it just so you get
Speaker 1: the second story that shows up, the when you alluded to,
Speaker 1: and it's like a second story about how he loses this.
Speaker 1: I didn't catch this though, a right, and I forgot it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that he already bought it fair and square from his brother.
Speaker 1: He bought the birthright, fair and square. All right, So
Speaker 1: when the great things about looking at the Revival in
Speaker 1: particular is it's woven together over centuries, and so a
Speaker 1: lot of times we get these stories that seem to
Speaker 1: to be redundant um and many times there and there's
Speaker 1: all kinds of arguments among biblical scholars, and they get
Speaker 1: all they know they're right, and they get in their
Speaker 1: little schools of thought. But you likely have here are
Speaker 1: two different myths, two different oral traditions that were floating
Speaker 1: around one, which explained then how you saw is marginalized
Speaker 1: in Jacob becomes the one who inherits not just the
Speaker 1: birthright but the covenant that's made with Abraham and passed
Speaker 1: down to Isaac and then to Jacob um. And so
Speaker 1: you get these not that you shouldn't be seen them
Speaker 1: as competing stories. It's like the story of Noah, right,
Speaker 1: how many animals did Noah taken through the ark? When
Speaker 1: one account says to the other, thing says seven. Well,
Speaker 1: what it is is probably stories woven together. Is the
Speaker 1: genesis one account different than the genesis to account to
Speaker 1: creation stories. So we probably have here are two myths,
Speaker 1: two stories. And by myth, I don't that he bought
Speaker 1: it one that he got tricked out. You got it right.
Speaker 1: So again when I say myth, I should say that's
Speaker 1: not to say a story about something that didn't happen.
Speaker 1: It's a story that a culture tells over time, and
Speaker 1: that story encapsulates what it means to be us. It's
Speaker 1: it's what ties us together. Hunters do this really well, right.
Speaker 1: We tell stories. We tell stories, and we tell the
Speaker 1: next generation how not to act and how to act
Speaker 1: by way of the stories. Sometimes we laugh at him,
Speaker 1: sometimes we mock characters and the story. But you know
Speaker 1: then the cultural values. So these are stories that were told.
Speaker 1: That's a myth um and mythology has that two elements logos,
Speaker 1: that reason, rational, kind of coherent nous. And the myth
Speaker 1: is the good story that he's told well over a fire.
Speaker 1: And so we had two stories. So the second story,
Speaker 1: so you've got Isaac and he likes his innocent, he
Speaker 1: likes his his his serabids, and so you right, good
Speaker 1: whatever um he sends, he saw out and sa is
Speaker 1: his favorite. But then the mother of Jacob uses deception.
Speaker 1: She takes first she places on his arms. Oh the ma,
Speaker 1: it's Mama's in there too. I mean he's a mama's boy.
Speaker 1: So she's the one that favors the egg guy. You
Speaker 1: got it, exactly, the big egg. And so you get
Speaker 1: them this story about how she dresses him up in
Speaker 1: the to make him seem like the Harry Hunter. So
Speaker 1: what you get then is this story about the Hunter
Speaker 1: literally being carved out of the Covenant. The trickster Jacob
Speaker 1: ends up getting the Covenant blessing. Now, I gotta I
Speaker 1: gotta warn you here. I think the stories of the
Speaker 1: patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob should not be used as
Speaker 1: and this is how you should act, because they all
Speaker 1: do things not so great. Um. But the the story
Speaker 1: from the break to is not to emphasize the behavior
Speaker 1: of the patriarchs, but emphasize the faithfulness of God still
Speaker 1: dealing with these miscreants and still continuing to promise there's
Speaker 1: a lesson. But embedded in there sure sounds like a
Speaker 1: little hunter and gathering, passing away and putting forward the
Speaker 1: idea of these pastoralists that eventually become urbanites. Um. And
Speaker 1: that's the story that's that wins after all. Think about it.
Speaker 1: Christianity is an inheritor or a descend of Judaism. And
Speaker 1: Judaism is a story written by domesticators, and it's a
Speaker 1: domesticating story. God wants you to be domesticated and that
Speaker 1: I don't mean that in a bad way, but to
Speaker 1: submit yourself. It's a story that comes out of the
Speaker 1: agricultural revolution. It's a story written by pastoralists and urbanites.
Speaker 1: It's written by agricultural interests. And it's not surprising that
Speaker 1: you don't see hunting Lionized put forward as a model.
Speaker 1: Well but in your okay, hold that thought, because I'm
Speaker 1: only gonna I'm only gonna counter it with what I
Speaker 1: learned from the book. Go for it. But first I
Speaker 1: got another thing I got like coming from Judy. Are
Speaker 1: you mean with the Hobad the Orthodox? There's like a
Speaker 1: there's thing called Hobbad House, right, and it's like some
Speaker 1: strain or sect of ultra Orthodox Jews who have a
Speaker 1: sort of ministry. Were they a sort of ministry to
Speaker 1: wayward or what they would regard as wayward reform Jews.
Speaker 1: So anyways, I used to go to these Habad lectures
Speaker 1: because it's really interesting. Okay, no background, no not, you know,
Speaker 1: you go back as far as you want. My family's
Speaker 1: history is not a Jewish character in it. But one
Speaker 1: day said to him, considering the dietary laws, like if
Speaker 1: you look in the Old Testament, what it says like
Speaker 1: you you do and don't eat, I'm like, seems to
Speaker 1: me that it rules out wild game, Like if you
Speaker 1: look in the Old Testament, you can't go near wild
Speaker 1: game because it wasn't killed in the way that they
Speaker 1: say animals should be killed, which is to have them
Speaker 1: be totally healthy and have their throat cut. And in fact,
Speaker 1: it says in the Old Testament you can't eat carrying,
Speaker 1: which is taken to mean you can't eat crippled up
Speaker 1: animals that the animal like to the point where they
Speaker 1: would take the lungs out of the animal to make
Speaker 1: sure that it hadn't had any lesions from having been
Speaker 1: sick in the past and recovered from it is taken
Speaker 1: that literally. So you have to have a super healthy
Speaker 1: animal that you kill with a special knife and you
Speaker 1: cut its throat. So I said, so, how can how
Speaker 1: could a person eat wild game at all? And he said,
Speaker 1: I guess you have to catch the net, catching the
Speaker 1: net and then have and then do the sacramental like
Speaker 1: the ritualistic slaughter of the animal is what he explained,
Speaker 1: and the net thing caught me because this is the
Speaker 1: thing that surprising about your book, and I'll explain what
Speaker 1: it's surprising about this and then you can speak on it.
Speaker 1: But one of the writers in the book, early on
Speaker 1: it goes on to a staff She's like, listen, the
Speaker 1: intended audience of this book was intimately familiar with hunting,
Speaker 1: because when you're writing something, you take for granted what
Speaker 1: your audience knows. And he goes into looking at metaphor
Speaker 1: and similarly in the Bible, and just to explain in metaphor,
Speaker 1: like his metaphor, he chooses as the metaphor time is money. Okay,
Speaker 1: now this is like the metaphor time is money is
Speaker 1: a is a way of explaining time. You're like saying time.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try to define and help explain time. To
Speaker 1: explain time, I'm gonna use something we all know about
Speaker 1: and we all understand money. So here you're using, like
Speaker 1: using this thing we all agree on the parameters of
Speaker 1: it to explain something that we don't that we might
Speaker 1: not or he's assuming is is a little bit our
Speaker 1: understands a little more flaccid. So then he goes on
Speaker 1: to say how many times explain how many times in
Speaker 1: the Bible there are metaphors that are like, you know,
Speaker 1: like when you're out net and birds, or you know,
Speaker 1: when you get like a bad hit on something with
Speaker 1: your bow, again and again and again. The way most
Speaker 1: people won't even like see that this is going on,
Speaker 1: and so you kind of make this assumption that they
Speaker 1: were speaking to people who they like knew would get
Speaker 1: all this exactly. So this is the essay by Kenneth
Speaker 1: Bass and uh again, Bass is a scripture scholar. Uh
Speaker 1: he's a professor at Central Texas College and um, so
Speaker 1: it was just an idea he had, So we kind
Speaker 1: of developed as almost all these essays that kind of
Speaker 1: worked with the authors try and find something I could do.
Speaker 1: So he thought he'd just kind of go back and
Speaker 1: explore where's hunting in the Old Testament, because I mean,
Speaker 1: you think about it, the hunters that are named in
Speaker 1: the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible by name are a
Speaker 1: guy named Nimrod. Yeah, I forgot, because I forgot to
Speaker 1: have even talked about the name of the book god
Speaker 1: Nimrod in the world Esau. And then the hunter who
Speaker 1: appears the most who is named is Yale. God is
Speaker 1: the most prominent hunter in the entire Hebrew. God is hunter,
Speaker 1: God is hunter. So the question is how is God
Speaker 1: hunting and how these people hunting? So what he uses
Speaker 1: is this audience response criticism where you expect then your
Speaker 1: your audience to get the metaphor and similar And when
Speaker 1: he began to explore it, he began to track, pardon
Speaker 1: the pun things that really he had never found in
Speaker 1: print before. That is that there is this continual, well
Speaker 1: frequent reference to hunting culture. Now it's almost always negatively spun,
Speaker 1: and most of the time it's spun from the perspective
Speaker 1: of the prey. So the metaphor in the assembly that
Speaker 1: show up in the Hebrew Bible expect you to understand
Speaker 1: the whole idea of hunting, and that you understand both sides,
Speaker 1: the hunter and the hunt head. And it's used many
Speaker 1: times to pull out the poignancy of that relationship and
Speaker 1: to project in particular the the the plight of the
Speaker 1: not so much to strength of the predator. And in
Speaker 1: this process he begins to look at how did they
Speaker 1: hunt in the ancient Near East? And yes, they do
Speaker 1: use the bow, which is most commonly used to think
Speaker 1: about it. When when God Yahweh places the the the
Speaker 1: rainbow in the sky at the Noah Uh covenant in Genesis,
Speaker 1: and he says, by the way, among other things, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna judge you how you treat each other as humans
Speaker 1: and also animals as animals treat each other, but then
Speaker 1: gives permission to eat animals. This is in the storyline,
Speaker 1: is to shift away from vegetarianism. Presumed the vegetarianism. He
Speaker 1: puts a weapon in the sky. It's a bow in
Speaker 1: the Hebrew. It's the same word bow weapon. He places
Speaker 1: a weapon of the Yeah, and what he doesn't say
Speaker 1: is ain't gonna be no death. What he says, I'm
Speaker 1: just not gonna kill anybody anymore this way. But it's
Speaker 1: a bow. So what Bass does is he works his
Speaker 1: way through it. When he finds is that the Hebrew people,
Speaker 1: while they didn't hunt, they were familiar with it and
Speaker 1: as no cable TV. So how did they know about hunting?
Speaker 1: How do they get all these metaphors the stories are
Speaker 1: still being told. People on the edges must have still
Speaker 1: been hunting. And as he looked in particular at the
Speaker 1: laws the political laws uh in the Hebrew Bible. In
Speaker 1: those first five books, there's this book called Leviticus that
Speaker 1: has all the things you should and shouldn't do as
Speaker 1: part of the cultic practice. What he finds is there's
Speaker 1: a lot of animals that are permitted for you to eat.
Speaker 1: You could only get by hunting. They're not domesticated animals,
Speaker 1: Ibex and the like, these gazelle types, these are all
Speaker 1: viable foods, but you had to course hunt them. So
Speaker 1: what he recognizes is is that Hebrew scriptures seem to
Speaker 1: be anti hunting because they give you these metaphors and
Speaker 1: similes that play at the poignancy then of the prey
Speaker 1: being captured or sometimes of course bad people falling into
Speaker 1: their own traps, etcetera. And when he recognizes it's not
Speaker 1: the weapons of hunting, as we would only think of
Speaker 1: them just the bow and arrows, spear or javelin, But
Speaker 1: their nets, their pits, these are the things that they
Speaker 1: could use. There would be walls where they drive animals
Speaker 1: into them, into the pit, or into a reason they
Speaker 1: called a kite, that they could capture them and net them.
Speaker 1: These were actually quite frequently referenced in the Hebrew Bible.
Speaker 1: The Hebrew people may not have hunted that much, but
Speaker 1: they knew about hunting culture and that whole react relationship
Speaker 1: then between the hunter and the prey, the hunter and
Speaker 1: the hunted, was pivotal to understanding who they were, who
Speaker 1: they were in relationship to each other, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: how humans related to their God, because God was a hunter.
Speaker 1: But when you say that it's it's negative. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: doesn't the author explain that, well, he's not. They don't. Really.
Speaker 1: They don't like then go and condone agriculture either. They
Speaker 1: sort of use it in a in a similar way,
Speaker 1: like it's not like hunting is bad relative to other stuff.
Speaker 1: Think about the most if you've read the Hebrew Bible
Speaker 1: and the Christian New Testament, probably the most poignant symbol
Speaker 1: is one tied to an animal. Now it's not a
Speaker 1: wild animal, it's a lamb, the lamb led to the slaughter.
Speaker 1: It's a sacrifice lamb. If you get to the final
Speaker 1: end of the story where the Christians win revelation, right,
Speaker 1: it's a sacrifice lamb that appears that is triumphant. So
Speaker 1: in the Hebrew Bible there's also this focus on the
Speaker 1: killing of domesticated animals for cultic practice or for food,
Speaker 1: So hunting and animals dying and being captured, animals being
Speaker 1: led to a slaughter, ignorance of their fate which is
Speaker 1: about to come. The writers use those metaphors and similes
Speaker 1: to pull out, if you will, what he calls the target.
Speaker 1: That that that emotion, that relationship, that idea that was
Speaker 1: hard for them to teach, so they did it by
Speaker 1: way of this analogous language. So yeah, it's not explicitly
Speaker 1: anti hunting. But a problem is what the writer's turn
Speaker 1: to was that point in the hunt, the trap, the capture,
Speaker 1: the animal cause in the net at that point in
Speaker 1: time no longer able to flee. That's what they turned
Speaker 1: to most often, and that comes across as being negative.
Speaker 1: What's interesting about that is it gives us the idea
Speaker 1: that there was that level of sympathy and regret and
Speaker 1: empathy about animal life even then. Yeah, exactly, why can
Speaker 1: I ask? What did that lamb? Ca? Yeah, hey, this
Speaker 1: is Michelle. He might have heard some giggles in the background,
Speaker 1: but uh, what did that lamb represent? Like? Symbolically? Well,
Speaker 1: at various times it represented number of things. It depended
Speaker 1: upon the symbol right or or this similar um, and
Speaker 1: sometimes it represented those who were ignorant, who were going
Speaker 1: into trouble. In many cases, of course, the innocent lamb,
Speaker 1: the one that had no blemish, no spot, represented something
Speaker 1: that willingly went. Of course, most famously, it's going to
Speaker 1: be used by the Christians to represent Christ who knowingly
Speaker 1: in some ways went to right, willingly gave itself up
Speaker 1: for the redemption, to the accomplishment of something a blood sacrifice.
Speaker 1: And then I'm perceiving it not so much as what
Speaker 1: Steve said, We're like you're thinking about the plight of
Speaker 1: the prey. I'm seeing it as like this is what's
Speaker 1: at steak. And a lot of times again, even in
Speaker 1: the hunting metaphors, there's what's at steak as well. So
Speaker 1: you get people who dig pits to trap their neighbor.
Speaker 1: That's not literally right. It's not like you don't want
Speaker 1: your neighbor to phone to a bit. My neighbors are
Speaker 1: pretty decent. I wouldn't want that to happen to him,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. But it's this is what happens.
Speaker 1: Or most famously, of course, is there's this this uh
Speaker 1: saying that Jesus has he's got his disciples around. He says,
Speaker 1: you see the sparrows. No sparrow falls without God seeing it. No,
Speaker 1: you think, what's the sparrow falling for? I always wondered
Speaker 1: about that as a kid, and I heard it in church.
Speaker 1: What's bass pointed out? The sparrow is the cheapest animal
Speaker 1: that would be eaten. You could get a sparrow for
Speaker 1: a penny. Even spells out what sparrows, what dead sparrows
Speaker 1: call exactly, so you can even get like in bulk right,
Speaker 1: it's like going to Costco or Sam's or something. You
Speaker 1: can get your sparrows. They were cheap food. Notice that
Speaker 1: God doesn't stop the killing of the sparrow, the netting
Speaker 1: of the sparrow, but he's observant of it, he sees it,
Speaker 1: he's aware of it. So what makes them you get
Speaker 1: by the assemblies is an awareness of like how no
Speaker 1: turkey dies about is hearing about hearing about it? And
Speaker 1: where it happened, you know, and and but God doesn't
Speaker 1: not empower the hunter. But think about it and the
Speaker 1: story of Esaul and his father Isaac, it's made very
Speaker 1: clear that you don't always get game, and if you
Speaker 1: do get game, it's made clear it's by the blessing
Speaker 1: of God. God blesses the hunter and empowers him, allows
Speaker 1: him then to find prey for his own. So God's
Speaker 1: mixed in all that's the God, the Nimrod in the world.
Speaker 1: It's the idea of looking to the divide and and
Speaker 1: looking in this this faith or multiple faith traditions, the
Speaker 1: idea of the hunter. Who's this character Nimrod? So if
Speaker 1: you will the divine now right well and then and
Speaker 1: then the world. And an environmental approach, which I gotta
Speaker 1: say most Christians don't pay any attention to to the
Speaker 1: environmental and most hunters, I gotta tell you thing that
Speaker 1: they don't go to a church or synagogue and find
Speaker 1: a recycle bin at the back. But you're not this
Speaker 1: counters um, this counter something that was in an email
Speaker 1: just got no, it's not in this one. Do you
Speaker 1: think about like the creation story in the garden and
Speaker 1: being tenders of the garden and like Stewart's like, it
Speaker 1: seems like how are they missing that big point? And
Speaker 1: this is the huge issue, And that's the question of
Speaker 1: dominion and the question this is one that gets bounced
Speaker 1: around with multiple interpretations. And you're gonna talk about Nimron
Speaker 1: and there's a connection I got a ton of questions
Speaker 1: about what you're talking about, cause you talked about you
Speaker 1: talked about Elder Leopold, and yeah, okay, well here's here's
Speaker 1: the thing. The guy wrote in this is the guy
Speaker 1: that wrote in about Paul and Saul all right. Goes
Speaker 1: on to say a lot of Christians, myself included, have
Speaker 1: a passion for caring for our world and are very grateful.
Speaker 1: And he goes on, let's say some nice stuff. All right,
Speaker 1: So there's one. So so one of the things I
Speaker 1: particularly look at my own studies, um, and look at
Speaker 1: in my classes, but it shows up in this book,
Speaker 1: not just in my essays, but in some of the
Speaker 1: latter half from the academy, where you begin to see
Speaker 1: people who embraced an idea of hunting, but they want
Speaker 1: to do it in particular way. So, for instance, you
Speaker 1: have the Roman Catholic priest. You're not hitting me with
Speaker 1: nemrod right now. I'm weaving it back, I promise, um.
Speaker 1: And they're going to turn to Aldo Leopold um, and
Speaker 1: so Ted vitally he's at St. Louis University. Um, you've
Speaker 1: got uh, we've got a pacifist uh from Chicago, and
Speaker 1: he's gonna write in particular, he hunts any hunts with
Speaker 1: a bow. And the question is, you know, how can he,
Speaker 1: as a pacifist embrace this? And so he his name
Speaker 1: is Greg Clark. He turns to Aldo Leopold. So a
Speaker 1: number of Christian writers from the Academy are very much
Speaker 1: acquainted with Leopold, particularly San County Almanac. If you've read
Speaker 1: that and you know the story, it's the story of
Speaker 1: the wolf, right the green Eyes, right as as they
Speaker 1: just kill the wolf for the sake of supposedly increasing
Speaker 1: numbers of deer, and it begins to realize you can't
Speaker 1: look at hunting and at game management uh and managing
Speaker 1: resources with the idea of immediate gratification of increased populations.
Speaker 1: You have to see it like the Mountain sees it.
Speaker 1: You've got to think long term. So many Christian ethosis
Speaker 1: have turned to this, but what they're they're encountering is
Speaker 1: the challenge of the question of dominion. So one of
Speaker 1: the problems for people who want to be positive about
Speaker 1: hunting and they're looking for role models in the Bible
Speaker 1: is there's not that many. One of the interesting characters,
Speaker 1: the guy Iman nime Rod here we Go I promise
Speaker 1: you follow that rabbit. Thank you. There. It's an interesting character.
Speaker 1: He shows it just for a few verses. In Genesis.
Speaker 1: He's he's early, he's early, he's early on alright, So
Speaker 1: he's after Noah, after the flood story, and he's from
Speaker 1: a descendants of Ham. Now there's a whole story, uh Noah,
Speaker 1: and they all get the promise. Yehaw. He starts growing grapes.
Speaker 1: He gets drunk off his ass, he gets naked. Um,
Speaker 1: is you remember this story? And unfortunately you gotta read
Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible. Well no, no, no, that's a lot.
Speaker 1: That's that's grapes Fermentum gets drunkunk, gets drunken, naked, gets
Speaker 1: drunken naked, and his his son shows up and sees
Speaker 1: his nickeheadedness. Right, this is nakedness. This is good stuff
Speaker 1: in the Bible. There's adultery, there's murder, there's nakedness, there's
Speaker 1: there's just all kinds of great stuff. Their myths, their
Speaker 1: stories that had I mean they had traction around the fireplace,
Speaker 1: um and the heart. So anyhow, he gets drunk. He
Speaker 1: has a son named Ham, who sees his nakedness, goes
Speaker 1: back to his brother's dude dad's naked and drunk the
Speaker 1: other two brothers, and we don't know exactly what that means.
Speaker 1: He's all kinds of different interpretation that he saw his father,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh. The two other sons come in and
Speaker 1: cover the nakedness of their father. They showed their respect
Speaker 1: and for this, then Noah curses his son Ham. Now
Speaker 1: it gets tricky because suddenly it goes from curs did
Speaker 1: nothing to help, who did nothing to help? Ends up
Speaker 1: shifting to cursing descendant he has gotten named Canaan, and
Speaker 1: then it gets ideological and then can enabled Canaan, No Canan, Canaan. Okay,
Speaker 1: So all this is Nimrod is a descendant of this
Speaker 1: cursed lineage, and then light shows up. Nimrod is a
Speaker 1: descendant of the cursed lineage of the guy that saw
Speaker 1: Noah drawnk and just ran off to the squeal on
Speaker 1: him right right, So it's really it's a short section,
Speaker 1: so it goes real quick. It's in Genesis chapter Tennis
Speaker 1: is coush Hey, great names right there, Cush, Spaghett, and Nimrod.
Speaker 1: He began to be a mighty one on the earth.
Speaker 1: He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it
Speaker 1: is said, like Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord,
Speaker 1: and the beginning of his kingdom was babel eric a
Speaker 1: cod Kalna in the land of Shinar, and from that
Speaker 1: land he went to Assyria and built Nineveh, and it
Speaker 1: goes on. So what you get is this interesting character
Speaker 1: who was a mighty hunter before the Lord. The god
Speaker 1: saw him and seemingly empowered him and noticed it's proverbial,
Speaker 1: it's like before the Lord means in view of in
Speaker 1: view of Lord. And again interpretations very but many scholars
Speaker 1: will say that actually he was empowered and successful because
Speaker 1: of the gifts from Yahweh. But what he does is intriguing.
Speaker 1: He's a mighty hunter before the Lord, but he begins civilization,
Speaker 1: he starts founding cities. So you have a liminal character
Speaker 1: who's powerful and at the same time then goes and
Speaker 1: establishes these major kingdoms that you become aware of in
Speaker 1: ancient or Eastern history, most famously of course the Syria Um.
Speaker 1: So there's not much there. So Nimrod becomes an intriguing
Speaker 1: touchstone for both people who are positive or negative about
Speaker 1: hunting and culture. If I do this just serving is
Speaker 1: not much to go off and it's not. But if
Speaker 1: you read my entire chapter you'll find there's tons And
Speaker 1: what happens is the Rabbis talk about it and they
Speaker 1: have their own commentary. So this is kind of extra
Speaker 1: biblical commentary that floats around as well. But if I
Speaker 1: were to turn to Janice and say, dude, you're a Nemerod,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's going to be perceived as a
Speaker 1: positive evaluation. Definitely not. But isn't that like like I
Speaker 1: think if you look in the Urban Dictionary talks about
Speaker 1: like Elmer Fudd, like right, because the blundering hunter. But
Speaker 1: if you were to look at a a journal, a
Speaker 1: sporting journal in the early eighteen hundreds, early hunters and
Speaker 1: early hunters, I should say, hunters in the British and
Speaker 1: American traditions, we're calling themselves nemerods based on that little
Speaker 1: dinky messters because how is that more important than because
Speaker 1: he was a mighty hunter before the before the Lord.
Speaker 1: So what you get his nimrod, where there's so little
Speaker 1: there becomes either the wonderful argument against hunting look twisted
Speaker 1: into the negative and then twist in the Historically, what
Speaker 1: it was used is it was interpreted that he was
Speaker 1: one who was a hunter, and not a hunter of animals,
Speaker 1: but a hunter of men. That he subjugated men and
Speaker 1: people's and thus became a founder of empires. Empires by
Speaker 1: the way that we're not democratic republics, right, these were
Speaker 1: tyrannical empires. And so it's perceived then that Nimroid becomes
Speaker 1: then this symbol of oppression. And so that's what he was.
Speaker 1: And they don't give that power to him by God.
Speaker 1: They simply say that God observed and or saw him
Speaker 1: the positive view, Okay, would the Bible have let that happen?
Speaker 1: That they meant hunter of man? So is there a
Speaker 1: precedent for using hunter to mean hunter of man? Well,
Speaker 1: what happens is you begin to get these commentaries and
Speaker 1: then among other people, there's a guy by the name
Speaker 1: of Augustine. You may have heard of him. Augustine's a
Speaker 1: theologian uh in the late three hundreds. I think he's
Speaker 1: born in three fifty four and he dies in four
Speaker 1: thirty a d uh. And he lives in North Africa.
Speaker 1: He's from a place called Hippo, pretty cool carthage Um,
Speaker 1: and he ends up writing some really important books and commentaries.
Speaker 1: He writes an autobiography called Confessions, and he also writes
Speaker 1: a way of trying to figure out what's going with
Speaker 1: Rome because Rome is sacked by the Visigoths uh in
Speaker 1: four ten. And he writes a book called basically Two Cities.
Speaker 1: So Augustine's really really important. He also gives the West
Speaker 1: it's clear view kind of about sin, original sin. They're
Speaker 1: all born busted. Thank Augustine for this. It's an Augustine
Speaker 1: the world view. But Augustine spends Nimrod as well in
Speaker 1: this perspective, and so you get this tradition that builds
Speaker 1: on other you can say, bills on other ignorances, but
Speaker 1: essentially begins to expand it. And you have the Nimrod
Speaker 1: disinterpreted in many different ways. And this idea of posts
Speaker 1: or should say extra biblical commentary that's floating around that
Speaker 1: many of these early Christian scholars tap into have him
Speaker 1: being in this empire founder not necessarily a hunter. And
Speaker 1: so I mean, you just gotta scrape away at the layers,
Speaker 1: going through all those primary sources, right, and you begin
Speaker 1: to see how you work your way to this. Now,
Speaker 1: what happens is in the eighteen hundreds, while early sportsmen
Speaker 1: who are particularly moving then towards the idea of sports
Speaker 1: hunting and developing it into something that we began to
Speaker 1: write about in Europe or in the US, both because
Speaker 1: it starts in Britain in particular, but a lot of
Speaker 1: Brits come over in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties
Speaker 1: and they bring with them hunting sporting culture. They begin
Speaker 1: to create journals like the Spirit of the Times is
Speaker 1: probably the most famous ones. It's coming out from the
Speaker 1: East Coast, but the major writers are actually British sporting
Speaker 1: writers couldn't make it in Britain to come to America,
Speaker 1: and they began to push america uh sportsman into a
Speaker 1: new perception of hunting because up to that point in time,
Speaker 1: hunters were basically what we might call pot hunters. They
Speaker 1: were there to hunt for meat, et cetera. The Daniel
Speaker 1: Boone's who's the hero? Right that Davy Crockett's even right,
Speaker 1: sorry about the Alumo, but he nonetheless was a guy
Speaker 1: on the edge. So you see them moving forward. The
Speaker 1: kind of cuts point out real quick like the differences
Speaker 1: there because Boone and Crockett are often like discussed together,
Speaker 1: they're very different people there. They are really are Boone
Speaker 1: was a market hunter. So talked about a guy on
Speaker 1: the edge, right, he spent his whole life chasing the edge, um,
Speaker 1: the edge of civilization, right. But he was a market hunter.
Speaker 1: Hunted bear meat to sell the meat, hunted deerskins to
Speaker 1: sell the highs, and that's how he made his income.
Speaker 1: Crockett was attached to military campaigns and would hunt to
Speaker 1: feed people out in punitive expeditions against the Indians. But
Speaker 1: that you gotta eat, right, and so Crocket would higher
Speaker 1: on to go and meat for these expeditions. Both are
Speaker 1: associated with the frontier. Oh yeah, absolutely, And this is
Speaker 1: this isn't this isn't trying to take apart what you're
Speaker 1: saying was pointing out to people like what sort of
Speaker 1: hunting they were up to to be, like they were
Speaker 1: commercial individuals, pot hunters, meat hunters, market hunters. Well, what
Speaker 1: you get here is just basically hunters, um. And you
Speaker 1: don't get the whole idea of pot hunters until you
Speaker 1: have sport hunters. So what sport hunters began because they
Speaker 1: invite the distinction exactly. So rather than so it's like
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier, there's you can be a hunter,
Speaker 1: but there's a better way to be a hunter. Right,
Speaker 1: So and so today we have the same distinctions. We
Speaker 1: have things like meat hunters and we have a right
Speaker 1: and then how does that work out? That's another ethical thing.
Speaker 1: We can show that the side. But we come back
Speaker 1: to it. By the way, it's a great book came
Speaker 1: out around the year two thousand, two thousand one. It's
Speaker 1: out of print now, but I courage you anyone to read.
Speaker 1: It's called Hunting in the American Imagination. It's by a
Speaker 1: guy named Daniel Justin Herman. He's a professor, do you good? Right?
Speaker 1: So he develops this distinction. Quote him, I don't want
Speaker 1: to oversell it. Um. I mean, there's some things I
Speaker 1: don't agree with, but he really does something pivotal in
Speaker 1: the discussion hunting cultures in America. It's his dissertation. But
Speaker 1: he wasn't a hunter, and someone basically said, oh, we
Speaker 1: don't have a topic here right on this and it
Speaker 1: worked and I'm so thankful he did this. He laid
Speaker 1: the grandmark. But he describes that these British hunters come over,
Speaker 1: they develop a sporting culture by way of particularly periodicals,
Speaker 1: and Americans as we continue to push the frontier further
Speaker 1: and further west take up this sport hunting. And cand
Speaker 1: I had another thing in here. Man Boon's people were
Speaker 1: from his family was British, not at all hunters when
Speaker 1: they came well, they had they discovered hunting in a
Speaker 1: very practical way. So these people you're talking about, our
Speaker 1: our upper like Boons people were working people. These British
Speaker 1: sport hunters are are the genteel. It's so particularly that
Speaker 1: come to America year afric But these are like wealthy individuals.
Speaker 1: They've been doing this for centuries in Britain, but in
Speaker 1: America we see this cultural shift towards sport hunting and
Speaker 1: there in bracing even if they're not wealthy, they embraced
Speaker 1: this idea. So for instance, there's this is this poem
Speaker 1: I found in Spirit of the Spirit of the World, uh,
Speaker 1: Spirit of Times from I think it's from eighteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: and of course I do Texas history as well, and
Speaker 1: uh it's it's Scattering the Morning Do and it's by
Speaker 1: an anonymous author and it's from It's just like it's
Speaker 1: eight years before the Civil War. It's written along the
Speaker 1: mouth of the the mouth of the Brases, if remember correct.
Speaker 1: So at the Gulf Coast. They're in Texas and it's
Speaker 1: a bunch of guys talking about getting drunk and tomorrow
Speaker 1: they're gonna go hunt. But it's sport hunting. Now eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty two, Texas has only been a state for seven years.
Speaker 1: It's only been a republic and then a state for twenties.
Speaker 1: Someone vanquish command commanches are are fixed the gang get
Speaker 1: territory during the Civil War. They're gonna push in back
Speaker 1: into central Texas. So Texas is just really East Texas
Speaker 1: and the coastal region. But they're already distinguishing themselves as
Speaker 1: sport hunters and the writing poetry and getting it published
Speaker 1: in New York for the journals. They are the periodicals
Speaker 1: that are coming out. So we have this birth of
Speaker 1: sport and they turned to nimerod As as their kind
Speaker 1: of their hero. He's a gifted hunter based on Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just because he's hairy and red. Not think about
Speaker 1: that one for a minute. You're talking about racism and
Speaker 1: and things that are going on with the Native Americans, etcetera.
Speaker 1: You can see why they wouldn't write no, No, we're
Speaker 1: not nimerod We're mighty hunters. Just it's a mighty hunter,
Speaker 1: mighty hunter. Yeah, and so they that one adjective, that
Speaker 1: is it. And that's how the r now nimerod then
Speaker 1: becomes a reaction again, a pejorative, an insult, because it
Speaker 1: begins to be seen, particularly in Britain. When it comes
Speaker 1: over to America in the twentieth century, people would be
Speaker 1: called nimerods. But they were being seen in as a
Speaker 1: bunch of country gentlemen who wanted to be like the
Speaker 1: wealthy of previous centuries who around road to hounds, right,
Speaker 1: chase the fox. And there were these new gentry. They're bunchly,
Speaker 1: a bunch of rednecks, rubes, country folk who basically trying
Speaker 1: to act like gentlemen. And so they would be mocked
Speaker 1: then as oh, you nimrods. And you begin to have
Speaker 1: just as you have the use of the name as
Speaker 1: this um positive no man, if you will have taken
Speaker 1: on by characters, you also have this pejorative that the
Speaker 1: critics on the outside are using. Also economically, it becomes
Speaker 1: like the term fake news, where you take something just
Speaker 1: turn it around on itself. Yeah, and so of course,
Speaker 1: fud right, thank you. Let's personify hunters as idiots, as
Speaker 1: rubes as people who can't actually get the rabbit, and
Speaker 1: so you get the fud kind of approach. Um the Nimerod, Yeah,
Speaker 1: man Nimrod gets a lot of traction. Thing is, and
Speaker 1: if you read my essay in the book, he's been
Speaker 1: he gets traction. Not just recently, he gets traction for centuries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not much there, but you know what, if you're
Speaker 1: trying to make an argument, it helps. If the not
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence, you know what I mean, you
Speaker 1: can make it what you wanted to make it. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like what you're always saying about Laramie, and uh,
Speaker 1: who's Who's Who's like a great Western Oh, the mountain
Speaker 1: man Laramie, Yeah, he got everything names shows up out west,
Speaker 1: promptly gets killed and stuff down through a hole in
Speaker 1: the ice and the beaver pond, and it winds up
Speaker 1: at half the damn state. Now, no one knows. No
Speaker 1: one knows where this dude came from. Nothing's known about him.
Speaker 1: It's just that somewhere someone's like, oh and some dude
Speaker 1: named Laramie couldn't find him. Sure enough, I found him
Speaker 1: dead in the beaver pond. The less you know, the
Speaker 1: more you know. It just winds up. It just gives
Speaker 1: you a lot of room to run. See, now, here's
Speaker 1: a question I want to ask you towards them, but
Speaker 1: I almost want to ask it to you now, but
Speaker 1: it's like it's too big of a question. Tell me
Speaker 1: this is too big of a question, all right, because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff from the book that I
Speaker 1: want to get into. But I need to ask this
Speaker 1: in your world, in the world of biblical scholarships, just
Speaker 1: a hard question to ask because it's like you need
Speaker 1: to have it be this way or else they wouldn't
Speaker 1: be biblical scholarship. Is it? Is it discussed how the
Speaker 1: Bible is too open to individual interpretation? Meaning there are
Speaker 1: those who look at the Bible and the main thing
Speaker 1: they see is by God, I should persecute gay people.
Speaker 1: Some people look at the Bible and they see I
Speaker 1: should do everything in my power to alleviate suffering. Like
Speaker 1: how right? How is it so big and so open
Speaker 1: to interpretation? So what you're asking me right now, is
Speaker 1: you see this land mine? Would you like to step
Speaker 1: on it? Okay? Okay, let me find let me okay,
Speaker 1: how could it be? Okay, let's let's not even go big.
Speaker 1: Let's go small Nimrods good? How could it be like
Speaker 1: what do you see when you begin to see that
Speaker 1: that some people in some time? Because here, let's let's
Speaker 1: bring it even more narrow. I'm sure that when that was,
Speaker 1: when that was being told around the campfire as a
Speaker 1: story to explain who we are, what we believe, what
Speaker 1: we ought to do, there probably was not a lack
Speaker 1: of clarity around how you're supposed to feel about nimrod Okay,
Speaker 1: that's okay, So let me let me touch it and
Speaker 1: and we'll see. I don't want to go too far
Speaker 1: with it. This is a huge question. It is a
Speaker 1: big question. Um, and it's a question. Okay, it's a
Speaker 1: big question. Let's see what I can do with it
Speaker 1: in my American history courses. Can you ask my question
Speaker 1: real quick? Do That's why I'm gonna read it. I
Speaker 1: want to make sure it's clearly I've I've muggied the
Speaker 1: waters when it was when it was a narrative, like
Speaker 1: when it was a narrative that people were telling in
Speaker 1: real time to explain who we are, what we believe,
Speaker 1: what our traditions are, and it was being impactful in
Speaker 1: the intended way. Do you feel that it was confusing
Speaker 1: then or is that? Is that not answerable? I think
Speaker 1: it's not answerable, not answerable. I think it's not answerable.
Speaker 1: I mean the Bible itself is a composite composed for centuries.
Speaker 1: And at least this is the prospective historians and bilbl scholars,
Speaker 1: okay today um. And as a result of that, many
Speaker 1: times the beginning, the origins have been lost. We don't
Speaker 1: we don't know how it started. Now, historical criticism many
Speaker 1: times tries to work its way back to figure out
Speaker 1: where this came from, how it originated, what its import
Speaker 1: was then, and why it finds its way into the
Speaker 1: stories in the Hebrew Bible. What There's a guy named
Speaker 1: Lhausen in the nineteenth century puts forwards something called the
Speaker 1: documentary thesis. And what he argues is, if you look,
Speaker 1: for instance, just at the pentitute, this first five books
Speaker 1: we've been talking about against the word pentitude five books, Genesis, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Speaker 1: Numbers and Deuteronomy, is that the Old Testament, No, no,
Speaker 1: you got like a butler a ton more, a ton
Speaker 1: more books than the Old Testament in the here re Bible. Now,
Speaker 1: in those first five books, in particular, what you see
Speaker 1: than are various layers of sources being brought together. The
Speaker 1: sources themselves, many times were composites of oral traditions, maybe
Speaker 1: written traditions that were being brought together. Now he he
Speaker 1: defines them. He particularly looks, and he's saying, I think
Speaker 1: that these patterns are there, and that these sources can
Speaker 1: be looked at chronologically so famously. If I can do
Speaker 1: this right, it's j E p D. I think it's
Speaker 1: rights p D. I have to look it up. So
Speaker 1: what he has to see as the y'all list, the
Speaker 1: elois uh, the priestly source, and the deuteronomous. So what
Speaker 1: he looks at is he looks at the scriptures and
Speaker 1: he looks like, for instance, what name is used for God?
Speaker 1: So in Genesis one you see one name for God,
Speaker 1: and Genesis too you see a different name for God. Well,
Speaker 1: what is it, hit, You have two different creation stories.
Speaker 1: What this hints to the scholar who looks at it
Speaker 1: from a critical point of view is you have two
Speaker 1: different stories from two different sources. They even call God
Speaker 1: two different names. Once Eloheim, the plural of l or God.
Speaker 1: The other is Yahweh, this particular personal name that the
Speaker 1: Hebrew people had for God. So these seem to be
Speaker 1: two dishes to do, two different traditions that existed that
Speaker 1: were pulled together by an editor at various times, maybe
Speaker 1: multiple editors, and they're brought together because they're seemingly tight
Speaker 1: enough to communicate the story a salvation story, perhaps right,
Speaker 1: but at the same time that you get them many times,
Speaker 1: or where these stories originated and how they started in
Speaker 1: what their original meeting was. One argument is, if you
Speaker 1: read the story of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, is
Speaker 1: that really these actually weren't father son and grandson. There
Speaker 1: were three different stories about founders of tribes that as
Speaker 1: the Israelites came together, Hebrews came together. There they said, well,
Speaker 1: let's put them together, and somebody began to The stories
Speaker 1: began to grow and meld, and surely then Abraham had
Speaker 1: a son whose name was Isaac, and Isaac had a
Speaker 1: son whose name was Jacob, and the stories get melded together. Well,
Speaker 1: when you meld all that together, assuming you don't have
Speaker 1: divine inspiration, it gets complicated and meaning gets lost there.
Speaker 1: And that's what you get is the argument of these
Speaker 1: faith communities that brought these texts together. The Hebrew people
Speaker 1: who brought their texts together, and then the Christian community
Speaker 1: that took centuries. By the way, we don't the Bible
Speaker 1: that we have, that is the New Testament today was
Speaker 1: not really kind of brought together, and in the arrangement
Speaker 1: we have today to almost four hundred, it takes basically
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty years for the New Testament to
Speaker 1: get there. There are books that Christians in the early
Speaker 1: centuries held us being inspired and and and guiding that
Speaker 1: are not in your Bible. Books like the Book of
Speaker 1: James was troublesome, but because the books associated the letters
Speaker 1: associated with Paul seemed to be in juxtaposition to the
Speaker 1: themes that are found in the Book of James Revelation.
Speaker 1: Revelation almost didn't make the cut because if you've read
Speaker 1: the Book of Revelation, who knows what it means? That
Speaker 1: was written by a guy in prison on the island
Speaker 1: right there, John, right John on patmos So. But the
Speaker 1: point is it's so out there that many Christians like,
Speaker 1: this sounds like good stuff, but I'm not sure what
Speaker 1: it means. It could be interpret a lot of different ways.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure we want to keep it in the cannon.
Speaker 1: So the cannon tics forever for it to be formed. Well,
Speaker 1: basically three fifty years the Hebrew cannon, it depends on
Speaker 1: the interpreter, but years for the Hebrew cannon to be finalized.
Speaker 1: So so your question is excellent, how can you have
Speaker 1: different interpretations? And the answer is huge, and that is
Speaker 1: you're going to so me do it this way. I'll
Speaker 1: give you a short example to show how complex this
Speaker 1: issue is. I teach American history. Yeah, I know, I
Speaker 1: have degrees in theology, but I'm made my way over
Speaker 1: to history and the historians kind of taken in. They
Speaker 1: slap cultural historian tab on me and they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: you're good, stay over in your corner, all right. So
Speaker 1: I teach American history and I focused in particularly on
Speaker 1: the various interpretations of freedom in the years leading up
Speaker 1: to the Civil War in particular. But you look at slavery,
Speaker 1: the issue is and it's a thesis that was put
Speaker 1: out there by a number of historians, uh, and I
Speaker 1: think it's got a lot of value. Is that what
Speaker 1: you see is that in America, the interpretation of slavery
Speaker 1: as America is eight And I'm gonna put quotes around
Speaker 1: this because please hear the quotes Christian nation. That is
Speaker 1: the myth that ties Christian primary America together is that
Speaker 1: of Christianity. I don't think that wrong, But the point
Speaker 1: is that story of Christian story. Even people who would
Speaker 1: never go to a church, we're still familiar with the
Speaker 1: Biblical Yeah, yeah, I mean, but I mean if you
Speaker 1: look like the founding of like the Euro American tradition
Speaker 1: was guided. They knew the stories and the morality was
Speaker 1: defined many times about the stories that they heard or
Speaker 1: at least as interpreted. What you find is that Christianity,
Speaker 1: particularly the Bible. I should say the Bible loses its
Speaker 1: traction in American culture as a document that is an
Speaker 1: authority for making policy and determined the most important issues
Speaker 1: in the eighteen fifties. And it's not Darwin's Origin a
Speaker 1: species that kills it, which comes out in eight it's
Speaker 1: the problem that the Bible failed to properly answer with
Speaker 1: one answer only is slavery right or wrong? And what
Speaker 1: you get then are very I would argue good arguments
Speaker 1: that say slavery is a biblical institution, that God allowed
Speaker 1: it to be formulated and created in the Israelite communities,
Speaker 1: and that God even set rules on it looked from
Speaker 1: the Leviticus, etcetera, and that the New Testament provided no
Speaker 1: caveats regarding the extension of slavery forward. In fact, there's
Speaker 1: a little book that no one ever uses. It's called
Speaker 1: the Book of Phileman or Philaman. Uh, get bored in church,
Speaker 1: go read it. You can do it. It just takes
Speaker 1: a minute. And it's written to a guy who's lost
Speaker 1: the slave of a fugitive slave. He ran away, became
Speaker 1: a Christian, came to Paul. Paul sends him back, buddy, Paul.
Speaker 1: Paul sends him back to his owner, who's Philamen. The
Speaker 1: slaves a guy named Ossimus, and says basically, look, Fleaman,
Speaker 1: you treat him like a Christian brother, and if you can't,
Speaker 1: you send him back to me. But Paul never says don't. Well,
Speaker 1: Paul never says free him, keep him as your slave,
Speaker 1: but treat him like treat him. If you can't do it,
Speaker 1: sending back. So what many of the Southern theologians argued was,
Speaker 1: and they were politicians as well, as that slavery had
Speaker 1: a biblical foundation. Northern increasingly rabbis and Christian ministers began
Speaker 1: to argue that the particularly the New tests Men offered critiques,
Speaker 1: notably that Jesus came to set the captives free, give
Speaker 1: sight to the blind, and that the Golden Rule was
Speaker 1: this ultimate challenge to slavery. Why would you enslave another
Speaker 1: man or woman when you wouldn't want that done to you.
Speaker 1: So the spirit of the New Testament was against slavery.
Speaker 1: So by the time we get to the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: the nation is ripping itself apart. The compromisers like Henry
Speaker 1: Clay and John C. Calhoun is not a compromiser, but
Speaker 1: he's dying the whole generation of men that had held
Speaker 1: the nation together over this issue. We had the Missouri
Speaker 1: Compromise of eighteen twenty, where we keep compromising. The Compromise
Speaker 1: of eighteen fifty brings California in and all those Southwest territories.
Speaker 1: There's nobody there anymore. And no longer does the Bible
Speaker 1: give a valid or acceptable answer to the huge question,
Speaker 1: because there's multiple interpretations about the most critical thing. If
Speaker 1: you want to put it this way, the country's facing
Speaker 1: is a black man, a man as in all men
Speaker 1: are created equal. And if it can't answer that simple question,
Speaker 1: is the black man a man and his slavery of
Speaker 1: valid institution or invalid institution, what good is it for
Speaker 1: making public policy? And so that example demonstrates how our
Speaker 1: nation itself, which was at least of some historians evangelical
Speaker 1: at the time and turned to the Bible as its
Speaker 1: main authority, couldn't find an answer or by the way
Speaker 1: of saying it, without multiple answers. And then they go
Speaker 1: out and kill more of each other than we lost
Speaker 1: in all of our other wars combined, somewhere between six
Speaker 1: hundred and six un Now there's a great history, and
Speaker 1: he's just retired. His name is Martinel. He was at
Speaker 1: Wheaton and then at Notre Dame. Who uses a line
Speaker 1: I'm gonna paraphrase, I'm gonna do a horrible job, he says. Basically,
Speaker 1: the matter is decided by the great theologians. William to
Speaker 1: come to Sherman and Philip Sheridan. If you know those names,
Speaker 1: you're buffalo stories. You know those names, they're not theologian
Speaker 1: what they are or as there are men of war.
Speaker 1: And so the decision about how to interpret the Bible
Speaker 1: was decided on the battlefield God. If God is a
Speaker 1: god of time and history and a providence determined what
Speaker 1: was the right interpretation. Yeah, he did. He did it
Speaker 1: through a proxy. He did it through a proxy for
Speaker 1: a sun that which is not surprising because he does
Speaker 1: a lot of things to So. Yeah, so scripture has
Speaker 1: been interpreted in any different ways, and for our own nation,
Speaker 1: it points them to a major major issue. Man, Okay,
Speaker 1: can be back up now. Sorry, Okay, you talk about
Speaker 1: perceptions of hunters, and when I say you talked about
Speaker 1: I mean people. Yeah, like your your book is structured
Speaker 1: and people you have, you know, people that are contributing
Speaker 1: to your book that this idea the perceptions of hunters
Speaker 1: comes up. But do you feel that there's a religious
Speaker 1: perception of hunters that gegorically differs from a secular perception
Speaker 1: of hunters? Meaning, Okay, our attack attack hunting from a
Speaker 1: religious perspective. That's probably a better way to get what
Speaker 1: I'm getting at, because I could do it very well.
Speaker 1: I could attack hunting from a secular perspective because I
Speaker 1: would just go borrow all the secular arguments I know
Speaker 1: that are out there about right suffering of any form
Speaker 1: and sentient beings and no, no, no no, no, right implications
Speaker 1: of wildlife management. How hunting has been unregulated, hunting caused
Speaker 1: all these you know, catastrophic losses in the wildlife world.
Speaker 1: I could do it all day long. Um, I understand
Speaker 1: all the arguments. I don't agree with them all. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of caveats, but I get them. So hit
Speaker 1: for me what a religious critique of hunting would look like. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let me answer me answer a question you didn't ask,
Speaker 1: and then try and get at it. So why is
Speaker 1: it even a valley question? Why should we be asking
Speaker 1: do Christian hunters have why DoD Why do we even
Speaker 1: want to talk about them? Did they have a different
Speaker 1: world view? Well? I think it's I think it's important.
Speaker 1: Are you asking me to know? I'm saying that's I'm
Speaker 1: gonna answer. That's rhetorical. Sorry. So in one of the
Speaker 1: chapters it's called Hunters of the Past and President all right,
Speaker 1: I look at some sociological instruments. In other words, they
Speaker 1: went out and the questionnaires about all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that they point out is
Speaker 1: if you go through and I analyze the data, is
Speaker 1: that hunters in America not surprised. And of course we
Speaker 1: just had the new report that came out. Then hunters
Speaker 1: in America are just we're just losing numbers. We're losing
Speaker 1: only percentages, but we're losing We're losing hunters. This in
Speaker 1: the last two years, dramatic loss. And so the question
Speaker 1: is why is this culture we need to save? How
Speaker 1: can we encourage the identity or formation of an identity
Speaker 1: of this culture? And this is, by the way, is
Speaker 1: this is when the underlying objectives of my book is
Speaker 1: I want hunters to realize they have an identity. They
Speaker 1: need to figure it out. But there's no way for
Speaker 1: this culture to survive if they don't have a common identity.
Speaker 1: They don't identify who they are, what they are, who
Speaker 1: they're probably what they're doing in a relationship both to
Speaker 1: the rest of the world and the natural world as well.
Speaker 1: So you've got to formulate. But by looking at the
Speaker 1: data that came out and analyzing it, when the fascinating
Speaker 1: things I discovered was that according to the questionnaires, while
Speaker 1: hunters are dropping in number, hunters that remain are increasingly religious.
Speaker 1: Now that doesn't mean they go to church all the
Speaker 1: time and they're the questionnaires address this. Many of them
Speaker 1: are just what I would call religious, and that is
Speaker 1: that they identify themselves as being religious, believe in a God, uh,
Speaker 1: go to service occasionally, maybe once a year, et cetera.
Speaker 1: That's what you get then is this very large number
Speaker 1: of hunters every year in a decreasing minority that are
Speaker 1: overtly religious. So if we're gonna talk about hunters in America,
Speaker 1: we need to recognize that more and more hunters, as
Speaker 1: the numbers draw, are going to be religious. To continue.
Speaker 1: Another question is if there's going to be a debate
Speaker 1: about hunting, whether it's a valid enterprise or not, then
Speaker 1: there's going to have to be the only philosophical or
Speaker 1: ethical kind of secular arguments. But if there are people
Speaker 1: who see themselves as doing something that is religiously approved,
Speaker 1: divinely appropriated, you're gonna have to argue against that as well.
Speaker 1: And a secular argument may not cut to the roots
Speaker 1: of where they see as maybe their prerogative or even
Speaker 1: their responsibility. Okay, all right, So why is it do
Speaker 1: hunters see the world differently? Um? The answer I think
Speaker 1: is complex. The problem I find with the Christian hunter
Speaker 1: is to still align from Martinel as well, from a
Speaker 1: different book he wrote called Scandal the Evangelical Mind, where
Speaker 1: he said, the problem with the evangelical mind is there
Speaker 1: is no evangelical mind. What I would argue is the
Speaker 1: problem with the Christian hunter is the Christian hunter doesn't think.
Speaker 1: What do you mean? I mean just that they don't think.
Speaker 1: In other words, what I found when I interviewed Christian
Speaker 1: hunters is they didn't think about being Christian and a hunter.
Speaker 1: Only a minority did so. While they identify trying the
Speaker 1: two things together now, so they're not so. While they
Speaker 1: supposedly have a worldview that should be dominated by their
Speaker 1: identity as a Christian in particular, they don't actually take
Speaker 1: that Christianity and think about it in an enterprise that
Speaker 1: many of them choose as being Yeah, their father, perhaps,
Speaker 1: their wife, their spouse, their mother, their whatever they happen
Speaker 1: to be. But the next thing they're gonna put on
Speaker 1: theirs and I'm a hunter, but they're Christian, probably was
Speaker 1: before that. But they don't think about it um and
Speaker 1: so should they. And so I'm gonna give you a
Speaker 1: quote here from a book just came out. It's called
Speaker 1: Knowing Creation Prospectives and Theology, Philosophy and Science by guy
Speaker 1: named Andrew Torrance. Sees the editor and Thomas McCall I
Speaker 1: like to think this is spectacular because I actually taught
Speaker 1: Andrew Torrance was human his ninth grade, and so everything
Speaker 1: he says that's brilliance belongs to me. He's a lecture
Speaker 1: at the um in Scotland at I think where he's
Speaker 1: a He's at St. Andrew's University. Okay, So, but he
Speaker 1: makes this quote, and he's talking about science, but it's
Speaker 1: applicable to the Christian hunter. The Christian, he writes, believes
Speaker 1: that the natural world is created, ordered, and maintained by God,
Speaker 1: who acts in its history in special ways. As I've
Speaker 1: been arguing, there's no reason for the Christian scientists, nothing
Speaker 1: from an Hunter, but in her capacity as a scientist,
Speaker 1: to think that maintaining those beliefs would get in the
Speaker 1: way of the scientific task. She should, and now I'm summarizing,
Speaker 1: do her job as a scientist, but she still needs
Speaker 1: to do it as a Christian because, now skipping of
Speaker 1: page furthermore, the Christian believes that God is actively involved
Speaker 1: in history, creating a faith that can serve as a
Speaker 1: witness to God's creative, providential, and redentive activity. For this reason,
Speaker 1: there should be a difference between the way in which
Speaker 1: the Christian scientists insert historian Promman Hunter here, and the
Speaker 1: naturalistic scientists approach and interpret the structure behavior in history
Speaker 1: in the natural world. If a Christian is truly a
Speaker 1: Christian and believes that there's a world that has been
Speaker 1: created shaped, has a narrative that's tied to a god,
Speaker 1: that is whatever they see in scripture, then they should
Speaker 1: act according toly accordingly. So for the critic who turns
Speaker 1: to the Christian Hunter and wants to argue ethics, they
Speaker 1: should if they're arguing with an intelligent and reflective Christian
Speaker 1: Hunter turned then too ethical questions arguments that challenge them
Speaker 1: the basis of that Christian interpretation. What I discovered is
Speaker 1: Christian sea hunting a lot of different ways, and actually
Speaker 1: from critics, they would see it many times just like
Speaker 1: kind of slavery. And that is what you get are
Speaker 1: people who say, I look at the story of Genesis
Speaker 1: one and Genesis too, and what I see is that
Speaker 1: humans are empowered to have dominion, to be not just simply,
Speaker 1: if you will, cultivators of the earth, but to subdue it,
Speaker 1: and therefore I can do with it as I will.
Speaker 1: I find these people don't recycle good all right, now,
Speaker 1: not all of them do so without thinking. Perhaps from
Speaker 1: the best arguments I've seen is by a um, a
Speaker 1: theologian and a biologist by the name of Stephen van Tassel,
Speaker 1: and he has he's extraordinarily erudite. Uh. He teaches at
Speaker 1: a school in Britain, but also works in the West
Speaker 1: here in America dealing with rotents. By the way he
Speaker 1: deals with his stick stick is how do you kill things?
Speaker 1: Are a pest um? So he does it from a
Speaker 1: very erudite approach, but it's rare. The problem is when
Speaker 1: you begin to question how then humans should relate to
Speaker 1: the natural world. If you believe in the Christian view
Speaker 1: that somehow the incarnation of Jesus Christ as the Divine
Speaker 1: now within the human somehow, giving both approval to the
Speaker 1: divine creation that we know however that happened, but also
Speaker 1: that the sacrifice of that lamb on the cross somehow
Speaker 1: brings about a new reality. Does that new reality of
Speaker 1: the crucifixion and the resurrection change how we should relate
Speaker 1: to the natural world. Does it bring about a new covenant?
Speaker 1: Doesn't bring about a new relationship to animals? Two to
Speaker 1: the Flora and fauna of the earth if it does,
Speaker 1: and it particularly many times critics of of of hunting
Speaker 1: turned to the Book of Isaiah and they see this
Speaker 1: kind of messianic where the lamb lies down with the lion,
Speaker 1: that this is the way it was and this is
Speaker 1: the way it should be. They're going to argue that
Speaker 1: you are a new creation in Christ. So the world
Speaker 1: also participates in that covenant, just like the world participated
Speaker 1: with the covenant and Noah's covenant with God. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't just Noah who was going to be protected from
Speaker 1: the flood, but the earth was, and the animals are
Speaker 1: going to be protected from that kind of flood uh
Speaker 1: and destruction. So that covenant extends then to the entire world,
Speaker 1: natural world, animals, etcetera. So stop killing animals. Now that's
Speaker 1: a horribly simplified view. But if your creation, new creation
Speaker 1: in Christ, quit sending live properly inappropriately with your fellow humans,
Speaker 1: and live appropriately in a non violent way with the
Speaker 1: flora and fauna around you. But the problem is the
Speaker 1: reality problem is a number of things. One is, does
Speaker 1: that mean then that I have to make large cats vegetarians?
Speaker 1: Is the natural world of view a window through which
Speaker 1: I can see the divine plan. That's been a long
Speaker 1: held claim of Christianity. It's called natural theology. That I
Speaker 1: can look at the world and I can see, in
Speaker 1: its magnificence and its complexity and its diversity, the hand
Speaker 1: of a divine and providential, divine hands working in this
Speaker 1: world that, even if I don't know or can't see
Speaker 1: a God, the magnificence, the beauty that I see when
Speaker 1: I see a waterfall or a mountain, when I'm sitting
Speaker 1: up there and not having seen any game animals, moves
Speaker 1: me to what we might call a religious experience, the
Speaker 1: idea there's something greater than me, a greater than human reality.
Speaker 1: So I may not know that there's three and one trinity,
Speaker 1: I know that there's this thing, this greater than thing,
Speaker 1: greater than me, thing that has provided, that has created me,
Speaker 1: brought me into being in some fashion, whether evolutionary theory
Speaker 1: or whatever you have. So if there's a new creation,
Speaker 1: is therefore the predatory world that is reality that all
Speaker 1: things consume all things. We die, and if they can
Speaker 1: get to the steel, they're end up, worms are gonna
Speaker 1: get me, etcetera. We all get eaten. Is that not
Speaker 1: really God's plan. And if that's so, isn't this world
Speaker 1: then something that's not really the creator God's isn't this
Speaker 1: and some nastick if you read, for instance, the essay
Speaker 1: by Nathan um And and the question is where do
Speaker 1: we go from here? Is the argument that we're supposed
Speaker 1: to be a new creation, and that we're supposed to
Speaker 1: see the world, the natural world, a new way live
Speaker 1: with humans and animals, and a new covenant of peace, tranquility,
Speaker 1: and of love. Most importantly, does that deny the world
Speaker 1: we know? We'll see answer. I don't know. I just
Speaker 1: write about this stuff. No, for me, it's it's a
Speaker 1: difficult question because I think about this and I look
Speaker 1: around and I see, I see that the world does consume.
Speaker 1: It just does. And I, as a hunter, feel I'll
Speaker 1: admit euphoria when I am, if you want to call
Speaker 1: it successful, when I kill, and at the same moment,
Speaker 1: I feel absolute guilt and loss when I look at
Speaker 1: that which was once beautiful no longer moving. I feel
Speaker 1: pride when I feed friends and family with the meat
Speaker 1: that I've taken. Ill even I even have pride when
Speaker 1: I look at the furs on my floor. The I
Speaker 1: don't have any great trophies, but the taxidermy amounts on
Speaker 1: my wall. I tell the stories about those things, and
Speaker 1: for that moment me, it's kind of sacramental that animal
Speaker 1: lives again when I tell that story. It's why to me,
Speaker 1: taxidermy amounts, by the way, mean nothing if if you
Speaker 1: find him in a junk store, because there's no story
Speaker 1: attached to them. There's no reality. That's no longer being
Speaker 1: it's no longer being associated with them. It's just plastic
Speaker 1: form with first stretched on it. But for me, all
Speaker 1: these things are going on, and as I read the
Speaker 1: scriptures there, they don't answer. To be honest, a lot
Speaker 1: of great questions they there's challenges, but there's a multiplicity
Speaker 1: of responses. For me, what I take away from it
Speaker 1: is I look to the natural world, a look to
Speaker 1: what moves me as a hunter who sees himself as
Speaker 1: one of his. You know, I hope when they put
Speaker 1: my gravestone it will be something like hopefully you know,
Speaker 1: faithful husband, good friend, teacher, hopefully good teacher, and hunter.
Speaker 1: Those four things would encapsulate who I am in so
Speaker 1: many different ways. I've hunted for grades, I've hunted for
Speaker 1: all kinds of facts and data in history, and I'm
Speaker 1: hunted for animals. But with that moment of gain, there
Speaker 1: comes loss. And I think that I can find an
Speaker 1: argument for hunting in the Bible, but it requires a
Speaker 1: hunting that is responsible, that is reflective, that looks then
Speaker 1: to the health of the entire go lee pulled on
Speaker 1: in biotic community, and that my failure to be responsible
Speaker 1: in both the kill, the hunt, and for simply trying
Speaker 1: to find the good of this earth. If I failed
Speaker 1: to do that, that's a sin, because that's a crime
Speaker 1: against what I know to be true and the God
Speaker 1: who gave this beauty in this world. So in the
Speaker 1: act of killing, consuming, I hope that I'm bringing life.
Speaker 1: Um And there's an article or a chapter who by
Speaker 1: a kind of Jim Tantalo, and Jim argues that even
Speaker 1: in the tragedy of death, I am transformed. If I'm
Speaker 1: reflective as an hunter, I'm transformed because in the moment
Speaker 1: of death, of killing something, I live more than I
Speaker 1: live before, because I recognize the reality of death for
Speaker 1: me to come. Yeah for for the hunter, because just
Speaker 1: as I kill, and just as I consume with joy,
Speaker 1: with poignancy, with sorrow, so I too will be consumed,
Speaker 1: whether by aberrant cells, clogged arteries, are something more violent,
Speaker 1: it's our end for the Christian. The hope is that
Speaker 1: there's something more. Because the covenant that embraced humanity in
Speaker 1: the very beginning of Genesis, one that embraces humanity and
Speaker 1: I don't know what the woe with Noah uh in Genesis,
Speaker 1: then is also the covenant that is going to embrace Christians,
Speaker 1: and if you will, in the sacrifice of Christ and resurrection,
Speaker 1: but also in Revelation, all those covenants also embraced the
Speaker 1: entire creative world. It's extended to the earth, to the soil,
Speaker 1: to the animals, to the vegetation. There's a redemptive process
Speaker 1: that goes on, and right now this is what we have.
Speaker 1: If I failed to be responsible, reflective, serious, right now,
Speaker 1: there's something that should also be going on. So that
Speaker 1: leads me to diet, tribes and class about other things.
Speaker 1: But yeah, well, I want to make sure I'm getting
Speaker 1: your last point that you say, right now this is
Speaker 1: what we have, meaning that you would feel is not
Speaker 1: the one. Can't just trash this knowing that you have
Speaker 1: the afterlife to fall back on. When I was a
Speaker 1: kid in church, we used to sing this song. This
Speaker 1: world is not my home. I'm just passing through. My
Speaker 1: treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels
Speaker 1: beckon me from Heaven's open door, and I can't feel
Speaker 1: at home in this world anymore. It's a great moving song,
Speaker 1: and I sang it for you know when I was
Speaker 1: in church as a kid. But now I think about it,
Speaker 1: that's not right. This is a creative world for me.
Speaker 1: It is a window to the divine plan. Yes it's predatory,
Speaker 1: but at the same time, out of death comes new life,
Speaker 1: whether it be Christ's story or what we see in
Speaker 1: the world around us. And so this is my home.
Speaker 1: I'm not just passing through. If this is where I
Speaker 1: have my beginning, whatever is beyond this life has to
Speaker 1: be built on this experience right here, right now. This
Speaker 1: is where I'm being formed. This is where I'm finding truth.
Speaker 1: There may be truth beyond, but this is what I've
Speaker 1: got and it can't just simply be a waste of time.
Speaker 1: So this world is my home. I'm not passing through.
Speaker 1: My treasures are here and beyond. Have you ever heard
Speaker 1: anyone talk about extinction, meaning that through human actions we
Speaker 1: would drive species extinction. Have you ever heard anyone talk
Speaker 1: about that and talk about Noah's Ark? Oh? Yeah, the
Speaker 1: pains that people went through to make sure that we
Speaker 1: were not losing animals. Oh, whoa, that's interesting. Oh I
Speaker 1: see what you're saying. Um, No, I never have. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: we will save two of everything. Yes, if it's result,
Speaker 1: I'll shoot it and I'll put it in a museum.
Speaker 1: The elker disappearing, But dad gambit I saw when I
Speaker 1: shot it. We'll put it in the Bronx Zoo. That's
Speaker 1: not an idea I've ever heard anyone bringer. I haven't.
Speaker 1: Actually now. It could be because I just don't read
Speaker 1: widely enough, but I haven't. Um. I got another one
Speaker 1: for you. Here's no and this is from this from
Speaker 1: your own Um, this is like an idea that comes
Speaker 1: up in your own book. How could a Christian reconcile
Speaker 1: the tension of embracing the bloody wild? I guess your
Speaker 1: words while finding salvation and a domesticating religion found by pastures.
Speaker 1: It's a hard question. And if you notice, I don't
Speaker 1: answer it, or you don't, I don't not me personally. Um,
Speaker 1: is there even attention there? Like do you be like
Speaker 1: I love the wild, like the fecundity and blood of
Speaker 1: it all? Right, Um, does that mean you're turning your
Speaker 1: back on this like pastoral history of of of the
Speaker 1: the early Christians, right, And the nineteen eighties and nine ninies,
Speaker 1: feminism reached into theology and women began to want to
Speaker 1: look for their places in Christianity. The problem is Christianity
Speaker 1: is the patriarchal religion, and it had been in patriarchal societies.
Speaker 1: So what they had to do is they had to
Speaker 1: go look, and they went back and they found women
Speaker 1: as best they could, who were influential in their own realms,
Speaker 1: who thought amazing things, and there was this kind of
Speaker 1: revisionist history. As a hunter and I read a religion
Speaker 1: that's based upon agriculture, domestication and pastors, I had to
Speaker 1: do that and kind of go back and try and
Speaker 1: find those spots because it's a minority perspective at least today,
Speaker 1: and I think it always has been, except in America.
Speaker 1: If you want to argue, basically during the mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: as we expanded westward, because we've been civilized, an urbanite,
Speaker 1: one could argue at least since the end of the
Speaker 1: medieval period and even then prior to that, when people
Speaker 1: got the hunt officially, of course we're royalty and the nobility,
Speaker 1: so that brief period. I have to look for those
Speaker 1: those answers to the question is this is there a
Speaker 1: tension between my religion or not? And I try and
Speaker 1: find those examples where there's not tension. Because in in
Speaker 1: the book there's a guy that comments, an American observer
Speaker 1: goes out to the edge, okay, the land of Boone
Speaker 1: and points out that man, guys that get out on
Speaker 1: the edge morally like, in a religious sense, they fall apart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was these guys that flirt with the flirt with
Speaker 1: the wilderness. The Puritans didn't like that. Puritans are agricultural.
Speaker 1: Let's just store the forest, right, burn the tree so
Speaker 1: we can have great agricultural land. Hunters were always problematic.
Speaker 1: They weren't in church on Sunday. They hung out with
Speaker 1: the Native Americans. They were always on the edge. They
Speaker 1: didn't come, uh, confine themselves to behavior that society approved of.
Speaker 1: Does does that mean that they could be not Christian?
Speaker 1: It depends how Christian was interpreted at the time. You
Speaker 1: ment being on church on Sunday, well, little house on
Speaker 1: the prayer there, damn sure, Christian, there's a there's the
Speaker 1: thing I mentioned. I feel like I talked about this
Speaker 1: in my Buffalo book, but I can't remember. And it's
Speaker 1: a letter when So, when the conquisators are in the
Speaker 1: American Southwest and they're, you know, subjugating Native Americans and
Speaker 1: trying to introduce them to like how you're supposed to be,
Speaker 1: someone writes back a letter to Spain complaining about the hunters,
Speaker 1: saying like, I don't get it. We've given them livestock,
Speaker 1: We've given them home, we taught them how to farm.
Speaker 1: They have all the stuff here, like, all the components
Speaker 1: are in place. But these people get wind overheard of
Speaker 1: Buffalo somewhere and they are gone, and it doesn't make
Speaker 1: any sense. It's almost like they want to be doing this.
Speaker 1: We've eliminated the need, so why if you can go
Speaker 1: buy beef at your corner store. They're like, what was
Speaker 1: what is the allure? What exactly is the problem with
Speaker 1: you people? And again I think that most anyone who's
Speaker 1: hunted and is again reflective they're looking at things, would
Speaker 1: argue that there's so much more than the acquisition of meat.
Speaker 1: And hunting. And I think some would argue that it's
Speaker 1: a religious experience. Now by religious, I don't mean like
Speaker 1: you you know, it's it's like going to church and
Speaker 1: at the homily. But in that in that moment of
Speaker 1: again pursuit the shot, the death and it may not
Speaker 1: be a prompt death, but hopefully were short in humane,
Speaker 1: that there is a sense of something greater than you,
Speaker 1: a power that's more powerful than you, a greater than
Speaker 1: human reality. And if you encounter that, you want to
Speaker 1: encounter it again. As at St. Paul's Cathedral in London
Speaker 1: one time and we were visiting and there was gonna
Speaker 1: be a service that evening and the choir was practicing
Speaker 1: as adults and children, and the place was fairly empty
Speaker 1: and they were practicing, and it was a religious experience.
Speaker 1: I was moved out of myself. What took place. The
Speaker 1: sounds it was, it was intoxicating, it was goose bump lee.
Speaker 1: I don't want to call it. It was something truly manniccent,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to recapture that every single time that's
Speaker 1: a religious experience, it's it's a sense of something greater
Speaker 1: than us. It's a sign. I would argue that there's
Speaker 1: a divine And I think hunters, if they are reflective
Speaker 1: and not just something pumping fists and slapping hands when
Speaker 1: they have success, or even when they fail, when they
Speaker 1: simply surrender themselves to nature, will begin to hopefully access
Speaker 1: that religious experience. So for me, that's addictive. If I
Speaker 1: went to a concert and I thought, man, that was
Speaker 1: the greatest Hi, not from you know, contact, talking about Hi,
Speaker 1: wouldn't I want to go to another concert? If I
Speaker 1: get a sense of the divine? Wouldn't I want to
Speaker 1: do that again? And a reality that you can't access
Speaker 1: by eating murders here or even going to church, because
Speaker 1: doesn't church essentially just try and grab that experience from
Speaker 1: many different types of denominations, and like, let's reproduce it.
Speaker 1: Let's have this music, let's have this coral arrangement, let's
Speaker 1: have this sermon, Let's have the great vaults right above
Speaker 1: us with the man magnificent building that tries to make
Speaker 1: you feel that religious experience. You can't be religious all
Speaker 1: the time, you just can't be. You can't always live
Speaker 1: in it. But hunting, to me is a religious experience.
Speaker 1: Some people starry interrupting. Some people have religious experiences at
Speaker 1: rock concerts. I'm not as a as a whole, but
Speaker 1: again but not from the high. But I feel like
Speaker 1: music can transports you. Sure it can. It can give
Speaker 1: you what you just described exactly what I might get
Speaker 1: when I'm out there on a unsuccessful or successful turkey hunt.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, I was listening to Rogan's podcast the
Speaker 1: other day and he had on Howard bloom Who's um
Speaker 1: this fascinating just certifiable genius, and he has tired, he's dead.
Speaker 1: Howard bloom Um specifically has researched these experiences that you
Speaker 1: are speaking of, this religious experience, this greater than you
Speaker 1: moment um, like this cohesion um that can happen in
Speaker 1: mass groups also such as concerts, rock concerts, and how
Speaker 1: they just grab hold of you and create this moment
Speaker 1: you'd like to replicate. Um. You know you saw that
Speaker 1: in you know, certain speeches like he brought up you know,
Speaker 1: Hitler and talking about how the fervor of grabbing that
Speaker 1: that audience, um, and people just get addicted to that experience.
Speaker 1: So absolutely, yeah. And the question is in that case,
Speaker 1: the experience of scapegoading is the experience then something that
Speaker 1: is a valid experience? All Right, so that's where you
Speaker 1: begin to be reflective. Is what I'm doing something that
Speaker 1: is appropriate, is right, is redeeming, is fulfilling, is making
Speaker 1: me in the world. There's a utilitarian proprocious sorts, but
Speaker 1: making us better, making us happy. I think the Christian
Speaker 1: hunter and the hunter in general can make arguments like that,
Speaker 1: but they have to be careful. Um. I think when
Speaker 1: you mentioned how you have to be that reflective, I
Speaker 1: almost see it as achieving like a sense of purity
Speaker 1: to the moment. So I think there is like the
Speaker 1: validity in that. Yeah, I mean you see that in
Speaker 1: some some of them argue. David Peterson's famous for doing
Speaker 1: this right. So there's like hunters, the hunter, the hunter,
Speaker 1: and writer David Peterson exactly. So there's a hunter and
Speaker 1: then there's the right hunter who is reflective. He draws
Speaker 1: some he draws a lot of lines. Oh he does.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of hunters who aren't hunters right.
Speaker 1: Might might just be one and maybe you'm my only
Speaker 1: but that kind of approach, and so you begin to
Speaker 1: draw those lines because you begin to say there is
Speaker 1: a better way, because there's a better way that makes
Speaker 1: you better, the world better, whether it be a traditional
Speaker 1: hunter with a bow, whether you keep seeking the greater
Speaker 1: challenge where you always allow of course, fair chase, you
Speaker 1: always allow the animal out. You only hunt public land
Speaker 1: for me people who have that option. So you find
Speaker 1: the other challenge, that pursuit of again the experience, but
Speaker 1: also something that you think may you better, transforms you
Speaker 1: into the better version of you and hopefully extends that.
Speaker 1: Then that's important. That makes you better than you then
Speaker 1: now right now? Not you better than everyone else? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: And it makes that that makes you a better person
Speaker 1: relative to your own experience right right. All the leopole
Speaker 1: would argue, are you making about it community better? Are
Speaker 1: you making healthy because, by the way, that's gonna have
Speaker 1: repercussions for you down the line. Ethically, are you being okay?
Speaker 1: Are you following fair chase? Are you seeking the good
Speaker 1: of the population, whether it be trimming down the numbers
Speaker 1: or allowing those numbers to recuperate. As a Christian, are
Speaker 1: you doing something that seems to be within the divine
Speaker 1: framework set up? Are you showing appreciation for the life
Speaker 1: that was there? You couldn't make that life, but you
Speaker 1: just took it. Are you showing you appreciation for the
Speaker 1: creator for the founder, if you will, are you recognizing
Speaker 1: the gift that was that animal? Do you continue to
Speaker 1: give sharing? I think so very important. Game dinners I
Speaker 1: think are really pivotal and sacramental events for Christian That's
Speaker 1: an interesting thing that I had never thought of. You
Speaker 1: talked ab up, was like that, there's a sacramental quality
Speaker 1: to hunting, but there's nothing like cooking your own food.
Speaker 1: But there's nothing like cooking it for someone else. And
Speaker 1: if you do it in the context of this is
Speaker 1: a gift from the creator, how much more so, and
Speaker 1: respect the life that was there. I know guys who
Speaker 1: want do taxing me right, they want they want to
Speaker 1: have them out. I disagree with that because I think
Speaker 1: I continue to give life to that experience by telling
Speaker 1: the story. But I understand to respect that because they
Speaker 1: do it out of respect for this beautiful creature. They
Speaker 1: don't choose not to have out of respect. Yeah, there are,
Speaker 1: Um it's silly to me. It's silly to me when
Speaker 1: someone's like, oh, I leave the antlers in the woods,
Speaker 1: because I'm like, but why not appreciate the whole thing? Exactly?
Speaker 1: But here's this thing that you could always have, right,
Speaker 1: But remember, But like I'm open, I don't agree with it,
Speaker 1: but I think that people arrive at these decisions in
Speaker 1: the way that that come from meaning and come from
Speaker 1: someplace honest. So whether I look at some of these
Speaker 1: things that people do um in order to acknowledge the
Speaker 1: importance of what happened does not light right. And people
Speaker 1: come up with these these personal ceremonies, um, a lot
Speaker 1: of them I look on like not for me, but
Speaker 1: I'm glad you did something and I'm glad you arrived
Speaker 1: somewhere because what we both see is it something important
Speaker 1: is happening here. So I understand the motivation. Alright, man, Michelle,
Speaker 1: We're gonna get around and make sure everybody knows what
Speaker 1: the book is. But Michelle, you got any rapper, uppers, concluders,
Speaker 1: goals and thoughts. Oh my gosh, this has been super interesting,
Speaker 1: more questions than answers, and really just I would like
Speaker 1: to just conclude by saying that I can't wait to
Speaker 1: read your book, and you know, really kind of trying
Speaker 1: to wrap my head around, you know, my motivations and
Speaker 1: I've thought a lot about that aspect um my motivations
Speaker 1: for hunting, and um, just what's going to keep me
Speaker 1: getting out there. And I do see a lot of
Speaker 1: alignment with kind of what the message you've shared here today,
Speaker 1: So thank you. M Yeah, I can say a couple
Speaker 1: of things. Uh, what I found what stuck and it
Speaker 1: was early on. There's a lot to take in today,
Speaker 1: but the fact that we've always been marginalized, a marginal group,
Speaker 1: and yeah, so it's kind of like we've been hanging
Speaker 1: on for two thousand, how many thousand years? Well it
Speaker 1: would be like, yeah, like a secular understanding would be
Speaker 1: the agricultural advent of the agriculture. So four thousand b c.
Speaker 1: That's when we again have Neil Thick agriculture. Since then,
Speaker 1: hunters have always been on the edge, you've been. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So for Harvard, Harvard long you define human history, it
Speaker 1: was strictly hunter gatherer cultures. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: some guys like man, you know that grass that we're
Speaker 1: always bringing home and then we like eat the grass
Speaker 1: and then we go defecate down in the creek bed,
Speaker 1: and now that grass has grown, Dude, I'm telling you, look,
Speaker 1: there's a lot more there than there is everywhere else.
Speaker 1: The mint someone made that connection was the beginning of
Speaker 1: the end man, or you know that deer I found
Speaker 1: and brought home. We'll check it out. He's still here
Speaker 1: and had a baby and he's still hanging around. But
Speaker 1: I just feel like it's it's relevant to today because
Speaker 1: we have this conversation and it seems like there's this
Speaker 1: these fanning of the flames. Is like it's the end
Speaker 1: because we're pushed to the But it's true, it's there, right.
Speaker 1: I think people have been saying that for so long.
Speaker 1: I'm sure, but what I'm what I'm saying is they've
Speaker 1: been saying it for so long because it's the truth.
Speaker 1: And maybe that's just because that's where we're this group
Speaker 1: is supposed to be and it's always has been. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, sure, so it's fine. There's nothing to worry
Speaker 1: about because we've been to ten percent for ten thousand years.
Speaker 1: I think like like the story of I've said, I
Speaker 1: thought that the story of Western civilization could be interpreted
Speaker 1: as a story of the gradual depersonal the the gradual
Speaker 1: de personalization of your food. Um, but yeah, I know
Speaker 1: what you're saying. They had it's been Yeah, it's a slow,
Speaker 1: seemingly never ending death. But yeah, but it's maybe it's
Speaker 1: not that. Maybe it's just like that's our place. Just
Speaker 1: it seems like it's seems to be always died. But
Speaker 1: that means something's gonna adapt. We adapted to the life
Speaker 1: of our frontier right by eighteen ninety Frontiers Gone Right
Speaker 1: in America. Alistair Drey he died unfortunately just after the
Speaker 1: book came out. He was from Scotland and he would
Speaker 1: go shooting, uh, Professor Sterling. But his type of hunting
Speaker 1: is he'd send me pictures of him and the guys.
Speaker 1: Was radically different than my type of hunting when I
Speaker 1: sent him pictures from me from Texas. But he was
Speaker 1: still hunting even with the restrictions in Britain and all
Speaker 1: that regarding firearms, and that they still found a way
Speaker 1: for his dogs for shooting birds, etcetera. Definitely on the
Speaker 1: edge at least of society, if not physically on the edge. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that the salvation or the path forward um
Speaker 1: was clearly articulated as long ago as it began to
Speaker 1: be articulated by Roosevelt. It was clarified and beautifully articulated
Speaker 1: by Leopold of what um, of what role this this
Speaker 1: discipline will have in the future. I just don't know
Speaker 1: that hunting will as democratic as it is so in Britain.
Speaker 1: Wild pigs, but who gets at the professional hunters? The
Speaker 1: hunt for cities, etcetera, hunt at night, suppressors night vision.
Speaker 1: So it'll still be hunters. But the question is what
Speaker 1: will be the population of those hunters. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: battle of the war. That's that's a portion of the
Speaker 1: war that will need to be fought. I don't mean
Speaker 1: to get to marshal and start using a bunch of marshals. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's my concluder. You are you good on concluders? Uh?
Speaker 1: I understand. I feel that there should be a law
Speaker 1: the academics write two books simultaneously. Okay, okay, while you
Speaker 1: were writing this book, working on this book, I feel
Speaker 1: that you should have simultaneously written a popular book. Now,
Speaker 1: my friend Dan Flores spent his whole life writing academic books.
Speaker 1: Then he retired, and now he's taking all of that
Speaker 1: wonderful information that he learned through his discipline and he's
Speaker 1: now saying to the guy in the bar, Hey, buddy,
Speaker 1: here's what I've been talking about. Here's all of these
Speaker 1: ideas I've been wrestling with, and I'm just gonna lay
Speaker 1: it out for you like a guy talking to an
Speaker 1: interested party. So do do you envision taking this and
Speaker 1: these ideas and just putting them out in a way
Speaker 1: that's that's and this is not a criticism, but in
Speaker 1: the way that's more accessible to the layman um or
Speaker 1: can't you because of your profession? Uh? No, it's possible. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, I teach it a position where I am
Speaker 1: a professional teacher, so I teach four classes at least
Speaker 1: a semester. So it's hard to do research at all
Speaker 1: because because you do all kinds of research. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: no one's a word to mean my institution doesn't support me, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I do this on my own, so it's hard
Speaker 1: to do that. Right now, I'm working on a book
Speaker 1: for Texas A and M Press, a History of Hunting
Speaker 1: in Texas. That's going to be an academic book, but
Speaker 1: I do want to try and make it and I
Speaker 1: want some people understand the distinction here. And when you're
Speaker 1: writing an academic book, you have to be very forthright,
Speaker 1: absolutely transparent about where this information is from, and being
Speaker 1: very transparent about biases, and just very open to both sides,
Speaker 1: looking at everything right right in a popular book. You
Speaker 1: can be like, okay, WRONGNA cut the chase here and
Speaker 1: just give you kind of like, here's here's my view
Speaker 1: of Starr. There's here's my view of how this is going.
Speaker 1: I'd love to do that. I'm not there right now, maybe,
Speaker 1: but I don't even know. Like so, I wasn't saying
Speaker 1: that you should want to do that. I'm asking like,
Speaker 1: do you want to do that? Do you think you
Speaker 1: will someday do that? And I'm totally cool if you
Speaker 1: just say no, I don't really I think I'd like
Speaker 1: to h This is not anything I intend to do.
Speaker 1: This is not my in theory, my academic discipline. This
Speaker 1: was just a hair brained idea that took ten years
Speaker 1: to finally develop. Get all these people on board, right, essays,
Speaker 1: many of them didn't write about history from me about hunting,
Speaker 1: but get them to think about this that it took
Speaker 1: so much energy. Would have been easier just for me
Speaker 1: to write it myself. Yeah, but I wouldn't have I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have all these voices. Lord, I don't know if
Speaker 1: I'll ever added another book. Um, it is hard. It's
Speaker 1: hard for me though, because I haven't fully formulated my ideas. Essentially,
Speaker 1: what I need to do is mature. I need to
Speaker 1: mature another ten years or so. I need to figure
Speaker 1: out again who I am, and just like we see
Speaker 1: hunters mature themselves where you've seen these studies, how they
Speaker 1: mature to the age of basically, give me a gun,
Speaker 1: I'll kill anything that moves if it's brown. It's down
Speaker 1: to the trophy hunter, perhaps the one who seeks the
Speaker 1: ever increasing challenges to find, the one who's really only
Speaker 1: looking to just be with others, to hang out at camp.
Speaker 1: We met day. We spent some time with one of
Speaker 1: those guys who passed through Hey, the other side, and
Speaker 1: he was a hunter who does not hunt, but celebs.
Speaker 1: If you ask him what he is, he's honored. Only
Speaker 1: later do you realize, well, I don't actually hunt anymore.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I can tell you what I think about
Speaker 1: from time I wake up to the time I go
Speaker 1: to bed. Exactly. I think I need to mature a
Speaker 1: little bit. I have to come I need to come
Speaker 1: to grips with who I am and what I actually
Speaker 1: think before I write that book. That's going to be
Speaker 1: more of an apology, not like, excuse me, but this
Speaker 1: is what I believe an argument but from maybe not
Speaker 1: from an academic perspective, but from the heart. But instead
Speaker 1: of saying to the reader, hey man, here's a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of things you could believe. Here's some questions that
Speaker 1: you should answer, but I'm not gonna answer for you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so give me a decade. Okay, now you go to me.
Speaker 1: My goal for writing this book was to simply encourage
Speaker 1: people to think and to create a conversation, because the
Speaker 1: conversation has essentially been so far people who said hunting
Speaker 1: is bad and leave me alone, hunting is just fine.
Speaker 1: God's that is okay if they thought about it as
Speaker 1: I see the decline of hunting, at least in participation.
Speaker 1: It bothers me because I think it's so important. It's
Speaker 1: who I am, perhaps too much, but it's who I am,
Speaker 1: and for me, it's my tribe. But my tribe doesn't
Speaker 1: have an identity, and I want the tribe to come
Speaker 1: to formulate an identity. Now, not everybody's a Christian hunter
Speaker 1: or religious hunter, but I think that we all could
Speaker 1: experience a kind of religious element to hunting. I think
Speaker 1: it's there, And like I ask you to believe what
Speaker 1: I believe, Sure what I do, but my goal is,
Speaker 1: and my hope is the hunters will simply begin to think,
Speaker 1: who am I, what am I doing? Why am I
Speaker 1: doing it? And in the process of thinking and reflecting,
Speaker 1: they'll tell their stories with greater honesty and with greater enthusiasm.
Speaker 1: That next generation will be fired up. That will create
Speaker 1: new generations of hunters who tap into the wonder and
Speaker 1: all it's splendor and frustration that is hunting, and that
Speaker 1: out of all of that will come another generation of
Speaker 1: hunters who think, who celebrate um and I think that
Speaker 1: we've been missing that for various reasons, partially because hunters
Speaker 1: haven't had to explain themselves, and now they do so.
Speaker 1: A reflective generation of hunters, people who recognize the beauty
Speaker 1: and the magnificence that we still get to play in,
Speaker 1: and that in process of play we find out something
Speaker 1: about ourselves, about the world around us, and even perhaps
Speaker 1: about our God, okay God nim Rod and the world.
Speaker 1: Exploring Christian perspectives on sport hunting Bracy V. Hill the
Speaker 1: second and Uh, if you want to check this out,
Speaker 1: how do they what? What's the best way to find it?
Speaker 1: The most beneficial to you? You know it? I'm probably
Speaker 1: gonna get very few royalties out of this. So you
Speaker 1: can get it on Amazon, Books, Barnes and Noble, most
Speaker 1: any type of mostly online. I haven't actually gone it's
Speaker 1: Barnes and Noble to see if it's on the shelf,
Speaker 1: but I do see that they occasionally lose, like nine,
Speaker 1: nine left, three left, two left, we're back, so somebody's finding. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great man. Thank you, thank you for coming on,
Speaker 1: Thank you for this opportunity. I thoroughly enjoyed it.