Spencer Klavan

Aug 14

20 min read ⭑

“It might be that actually the world that we have known through Scripture for millennia is the world that science is now uncovering in this newly beautiful way, and in a way that I think is vivid in the 21st century….”

Spencer Klavan, scholar, writer and podcaster, has a way with words. A graduate of Yale, Spencer earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. He’s written two books: “How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises” and soon-to-be-released “Light of the Mind, Light of the World: How New Science is Illuminating Ancient Truths about God.” He’s also the editor of “Gateway to the Stoics,” an associate editor of the “Claremont Review of Books,” and the host of the “Young Heretics” podcast.

In this interview, Spencer shares insights on topics ranging from the need to bring scientists and theologians together on common ground in science and faith to the best place to encounter the Nashville delicacy of the hot chicken sandwich. Keep reading to learn how the process of putting one foot in front of the other can become a significant spiritual practice and how “church talk” can cause us to be disconnected from the reality of our spiritual lives.

The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

My new hometown, as of about three and a half years ago, is Nashville, Tennessee. This is a different place from really anywhere else that I’ve lived. I grew up in London until I was about seven, and then we moved to Santa Barbara, California. I went to school back in England again by way of the East Coast (went to Connecticut and then Oxford), and now here I am. So it's like, “Coastal Boy Does the South.” One thing you know if you've spent any time in Nashville is that the local delicacy is the hot chicken sandwich. It’s probably closer to the mark to say it's not so much a delicacy as it is an object of veneration and worship. The question, “Where do you get the best hot chicken sandwich in Nashville?” is a diagnostic test for personality and sanity. It’s a major formative moment in any relationship when you have this conversation in Nashville.

There is actually only one right answer. All others are inferior and signs of questionable judgment. The best hot chicken sandwich in Nashville is in Tennessee Brew Works. It is a brewery kind of in the center of town. I first ate the Nashville hot chicken sandwich at Tennessee Brew Works after driving from Los Angeles all the way across the country to move here with my husband and my cat in the car, and we sort of stumbled out groggily. We’d spent about six hours on the road that day, after several other days of just full-bore driving. Texas is really wide — there’s just a lot of Texas. We eventually made it to Nashville, tumbled out of the car and found the first hot chicken sandwich we could. When I say that this thing melts in your mouth — I mean somehow they’ve managed to just transmute chicken into butter through some sort of southern alchemy. They must have found the philosopher’s stone of barbecue or something like that. Anyway, to me it symbolized this wild and adventurous new moment in my life.

What’s funny for me is that I’m finding myself more at home in Nashville than I have been in the cosmopolitan cities that I’ve lived in. I’m conscious of myself as very much a new arrival, but that southern hospitality is so famous, and we go back to that restaurant any time we get the chance. Whenever somebody is visiting, it’s the first place I take them. There is something about that hot chicken sandwich that just says, “You’ve arrived.”

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So, what are yours? What so-called "nonspiritual" activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?

I feel like there are going to be two kinds of readers, two kinds of responses here, when I say that my nonspiritual, spiritual practice is whiskey drinking and cigar smoking. I think half of the people are going to think, What's this guy about? The others are going to immediately know exactly what I mean. There is a little divey cigar bar here in Nashville. It's a half-hour walk from my house.

The other major spiritual practice in my life that isn't expressly spiritual is walking — a lot of long walking, writing, reading, thinking on walks. On a Friday afternoon, sometimes a Thursday afternoon if I’m feeling particularly cheeky, I will throw a shoulder bag with a laptop and some books over my shoulder, walk to a cigar bar and just sit and smoke. Usually what I do during that time, if I’m not just sitting and staring into the middle distance, is answer personal emails or text messages from my friends. I’m somebody who has very few but very close friends. I’m not a big social butterfly. I have a lot of acquaintances but only very few friends. And, my friends and I, our love language is almost exclusively long, unprompted text messages about obscure philosophical questions that have occurred to us. One thing that this means is I have a lot of reading material over and above what I’m already reading and working on for work.

But there’s something enormously restorative to me about sitting, smoking, and just answering your friends’ questions and getting back in touch with people. Not to make too much out of it, but there’s probably a significant divide between people who would react with horror at the mention of smoking and people who would maybe respond positively to it as a spiritual practice. This is something I will confess does destroy your body, or in some way puts you in physical danger, but I think that right now we are kind of hard-pressed to discover ways in which our physical health isn’t the only kind of health that matters. There’s something about cigar smoking that brings me back in touch with that. Yes, this is a vice in some kind of crudely materialist sense, but you only have to spend one of these afternoons to realize that in other ways it’s actually a great blessing.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We're just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?

This question really makes me think about an insight that struck me fairly recently. I’d say in my late 20s (I'm 33 now) I noticed something about somebody I was close to and had spent a lot of time with. This person is the most serene and even-keel person, just a presence of pure calm. And I suddenly realized that this person is not naturally a calm person but actually suffers from crippling anxiety. It was only when she let me know this that I could have ever had any idea. It hit me at that moment that when we look at other people who strike us as having particular virtues, who seem to embody something enviable, we always naturally assume those qualities are innate. This is just one of the dimensions or features that was born into those personalities. But when I look at myself, I realize that the things people know me for are probably the things I actually struggle with most and have therefore had to build coping mechanisms around.

There’s this weird inversion that happens with our public and our private persona where we attribute to other people these effortless natural graces, and then we understand about ourselves that our best qualities are actually really, really hard won. So for me, I would say the two things that I probably project to the world that are like this are positivity and discipline. And if I had to name my two deepest demons, I would say they are despair and sloth. I’m somebody that wakes up every morning with a heaviness upon me. I’ve always been this way. And a huge element of God’s transformative power in my life has been that light that breaks through, when you allow that weight to sit for a second and then decide to move forward anyway, that ability to put one foot in front of the other and gradually build a certain degree of momentum — no matter how you start out feeling.

I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius again recently because I’m doing a review of a new biography of him. His famous book is “Meditations.” He is a Roman emperor who is known as the emblem of stoicism, and he took the Greek philosophy of stoicism very deeply to heart and then embodied it on the world stage. I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that this book is a perennial bestseller, a 2,000-year-old bestseller. Every generation basically discovers it again. And what’s so moving to me about it is that it’s a book of philosophy, but it’s the rare book of philosophy by a guy who doesn’t have any answers and who is constantly failing at doing the thing that he says he wants to do.

What I think is so magnificent about that book and what I have learned, probably through my grappling with sloth and wanting to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling, is it’s actually the getting up again that is the whole of life. Aurelius says the obstacle is the way. It’s watching people admit, people like Marcus Aurelius who can rule the world, that actually every day they’re beating themselves up about something they didn’t do that they wanted to do, and now they’re just going to restate what they intend and try again. So that’s the thing that I struggle with most, but it’s also probably the thing that I’ve devoted myself most deeply to.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?

I run this Substack with my dad called “The New Jerusalem,” and it was born out of a desire on my dad's part and my part to break the mold of your classic and played out American public discourse. We were feeling on Twitter, in politics, and in the places where we often butt heads with each other in print, there was a very boring set of ideological grooves that was being run through. We both felt that we've had this lifelong relationship of open conversation and talk — probably the first of those friendships in my life that has been really built around endless discussion of ideas. It was probably my relationship with my dad that instilled this in me. In this wonderful time that we have now where we’re both in careers as whatever you would call it — public intellectuals, people writing, people of letters — we wanted to bring some of that more freewheeling and openhearted energy to discussions about God, which we really think are the discussions that matter most of all in the world.

One of the things that we’ve been tracking recently at the New Jerusalem in our letters back and forth to each other is the weird habit, not just of atheist or secular people, but of religious people to bracket God out of the nuts-and-bolts, practical conversations that they have about the world. There are so many ways in which I think this manifests itself. One of them is the strange disconnect between what I think of as church talk, where you’ll say things like “God is good all the time” or “amazing grace.” There are all of these phrases that we use depending on our denomination — it’s different in each church. We say all these really beautiful, traditional, uplifting things about God and then in our daily lives, we don’t really think about what that means or talk as if that were a tangible reality even though we do experience that.

People of faith see this in our lives all the time: you will be really wrestling with some major question and some guy walks by with a t-shirt that answers the question or finishes the sentence you were just saying in your head to yourself, and you think, “Okay, that’s like a concrete way, a weird, concrete way in which you were in relationship with some sort of cosmic order, entity, force with intention person.” So one of my obsessions right now is thinking about when we lost the knack for confidently asserting that the things of this world are also the things of God.

One major domain in which this is really true is in the domain of science, which has become such a looming and intense feature of our public life. If there’s any public theology toward which people are inclined to genuflect, any absolute standard of truth and morality, if you can cite a scientific study for something, people will suddenly reorient their entire mindsets. I am not a scientist, but I am a great lover of science. Rightly understood, physics is endlessly fascinating. One reason I find it endlessly fascinating is I find I’m endlessly theologically illuminating. I think that Augustine was right. You learn about God in part by studying his creation. On the one hand, science itself was presented as this anti-religion thing for so long. Then, on the other hand, I think believers got so fed up and hostile toward the idea, or even scared of the idea, that science might have something to teach us about reality. We all kind of agree to go our separate ways. The time is way past for that, and I actually believe that if we’re going to be living in this world that is increasingly dominated by science and technology, then it becomes imperative for both sides of that equation, the scientists and the theologians, to be brought into conversation with each other.

There’s some interesting stuff that’s been going on with that lately, and I wanted to throw my hat in the ring, which is why I wrote the book called “Light of the Mind, Light of the World.” It’s a book about the history of science and the future of faith. Like I said, I’m not a scientist, and you’re not going to hear about the resolution of quantum gravity first from me. I’m not going to be the guy that discovers that, but I am an intense, close reader of modern scientific discoveries and the historian of ideas. I think that we’re in a fascinating moment, and possibly a beautiful moment, when a lot of the things that physics is just now discovering are starting to make the world look like what’s described in the book of Genesis in this fresh and incredibly vivid way.

The book starts at the very beginning of the scientific endeavor, tells the story of how we got to the point where it seemed as if science had “disproven God” (or whatever nonsense), and then argues that over the last 100 years, science has actually been telling a completely different story that we have yet to reckon with and grapple with. It might be that actually the world that we have known through Scripture for millennia is the world that science is now uncovering in this newly beautiful way, and in a way that I think is vivid in the 21st century, and bringing to new light as it is for every new generation. So I’m really excited for people to read the book because it’s been my baby for a long time, and I actually think it might help people on both sides of this supposed divide to understand one another better.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it's God when it happens?

I’m a writer. That’s my primary activity, and these days there are so many other things that go into that. I think of tweeting as part of my job. I think of podcasting as part of my job. I work as a magazine editor at the “Claremont Review of Books.” I’m basically all day, every day, buried in some form of verbiage and trying to think about how to express ideas better, or I’m trying to think clearly and write clearly and speak clearly, which is an endless struggle and not as easy as it sounds. One of the benefits of working with words and with ideas and with language is it’s actually really clear when something is coming from outside of you. It might not seem that way. It might seem as if writers just sit around in their offices generating their own thoughts all the time, but actually there’s a totally distinct quality to what we have called inspiration.

There is a concept that we’ve had for thousands of years that there is a moment when you’re trying to muscle something into place or just grind out some new thought or idea and suddenly you let go and become a little bit of a conduit for something. Then you suddenly realize that you’re not there to promote your public presence. You’re not there to aggrandize yourself. You’re there to bless people. You’re a vessel, and you suddenly shift from thinking about yourself as the source of what you’re communicating and start to think of yourself as a channel through which the truth passes as it makes its way from heaven to earth. That’s like, on the one level, an extremely arrogant and self-aggrandizing thing to say. In practice it’s really more of like a self-annihilating or self-obliterating thing to say because you suddenly realize that your job is to get out of the way.

As a writer, I would say that for me, tangibly, in terms of the details of my daily practice, what this means is that discipline is basically everything. Everything I do is about establishing discipline, about setting aside the four hours in the morning to write with no distractions. It’s about keeping up with emails and managing the schedules and all the different things that I do to set this structure in place. The key for me, the sign of God’s presence in it, is that discipline is only an empty scaffolding. It’s like a kind of chariot that you build for inspiration so that you can ride it when it comes. The distinction between those two things is so clear. The loss of self that happens when all the preparation finally works out and something comes into the room from outside — I just feel very lucky that you can always notice God at work in this job.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it, which spiritual practice is workin' best for you right now?

I alluded to it earlier, but I am once again inviting people to experience the joys of walking. I’m like the number one PR rep for walking places. What I think I like about it is that there’s nothing particularly “spiritual” about it. It doesn’t involve getting into a particular frame of mind or burning any incense. I mean, all these things are good, and I am actually a fairly traditional liturgical person when it comes to rituals of prayer, but I also think that as Americans especially, and definitely as Protestants, we can get in our own heads about cultivating a particular frame of mind — in the sense that we’re only really knowing God if we’re feeling a certain way. In some churches, I think this expresses itself in an unspoken assumption that you’re really only “in the Spirit” if you’re uncontrollably moved to jump up and down, wave your hands around, clap, whatever.

I’m a great lover of all those things, and I’ve been to many charismatic churches that have totally opened my eyes to new blessings of the spirit. It’s not like I’m against any of that. I just think sometimes you actually just need to put one foot in front of the other. That’s what walking does for me. Of course, then you do start to get into kind of a meditative state, and there are all sorts of gifts that are waiting for you out there on the road. The nice thing about it is the only thing you have to do, the only thing you have to bring into the equation, is the most simple physical act in the world, and you can do other stuff while you do it. If you want, you can write and whatever, but, eventually, after about a half an hour, you start to realize that there is just an enormity in the ordinariness of things. For me, at the moment, I think there’s something very sacred about the distance from your own theories that walking gives.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources—lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are some resources that have impacted you?

I have to start with this blue Gideons Bible that I had at home when I was growing up. I assume, although I’ve never actually asked him, that it was my dad’s. My house was filled with the books that my parents had collected over the years, and at a certain point in my life, I started to wonder about theological things. If you could ask me, “Is there a God?” and if I were young enough and you’d explained what that meant, I think I probably would always have said yes. I wasn’t raised in any spiritual tradition, but I have always defaulted to experiencing the world as imbued with more than simply stuff. There always seemed to be spirit and life in the world. But I wasn’t raised religious, so, eventually, I started asking myself what I meant by all of that. That led me to read a bunch of different scriptures. The Bible, yes, but also the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita. I set myself a real program to figure out which of these books most struck me.

It was not that the other books didn’t have some insights and interesting stuff in them; it was that reading that Gideon’s Bible felt like coming home. I felt like,“Oh, that’s my guy. I recognize him, especially Jesus. That’s the God whom Jesus is incarnate and is present in the history of the Jews and the whole grand sweep of the Old Testament.” So I felt a sense of recognition. I felt a sense of homecoming. That Bible became a comfort object — that’s the only way to describe it. It became something that I referred to in moments of great unease. It had, at the beginning, a series where the authors had just taken John 3:16, which I guess is the most translated sentence in the world, and reprinted it in a million different languages — every language they could get their hands on. They had translated John 3:16 into these different languages, and I had my first-ever mystical experience staring at those words in every different language: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Because I’m a language nerd, and because it was an interesting intellectual object to me, reading and those words in a million different languages caused the “small-w” word to fall away, and the “capital-W” word to emerge from behind them. That was what I counted as my conversion experience, and I thought a lot about how we make fun of those Gideon’s Bibles because they show up in every hotel room. They’re dropping them there in the hopes that somebody will pick them up. There are so many little choices that people made along the way, never knowing whether they would bear fruit: the choice to publish those different translations in the opening of Gideon’s Bible, the choice to put them everywhere and try to get Bibles in people’s hands, my dad’s openness to my religious questions and the fact that there was a Bible in the house. So for me, that object is so much more than an object. It embodies this enormous tapestry of history that went into that one moment. I can only see God working through a bunch of different people, many of whom I will never know this side of Paradise. We'll never know that’s what they did.

The next is this book by Owen Barfield called “Poetic Diction.” If you love C.S. Lewis, as I do — inordinately passionately, then eventually you’re going to come into a footnote or somewhere, offhand, hear a mention of Owen Barfield because Lewis and Barfield were great friends. That book completely changed my life, and I had to hunt it down in the Oxford English Library. There was only one copy of it in the entirety of this massive research university. That is for me really emblematic of a thing that I say all the time: God prepares my reading lists. So Barfield has become a major figure for me intellectually, but it is also a reminder that the thing that you need will just sort of be dropped at your feet, one step ahead of you. There’s always going to be something on the path that you just pick up.

Finally, I have to give a shout-out to my mother since we’re talking about people as well as objects, and all books are representative of people for me in some way. My mother doesn’t get as much play because, unlike everybody else in my family, she’s not a media person. She doesn’t create or write or make podcasts or anything, but, probably for that reason, she is far and away the best of us. She had a career that she set aside for a time while my sister and I were growing up. She was there. And she simply embodied for me all the stuff that you can’t argue your way toward, all the stuff that you don’t need a syllogism to express — the overwhelming, abundant love and mercy of God that comes running for you when you’re hurt. For a kid like me, who was intensely cerebral and could have very easily retreated into a little cell of pure thought, to have a mother have such overwhelming tenderness and constant emotional attentiveness — I think it was obviously a godsend and completely transformative in my life for her to have been my mother.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season — and tell us what it's done for you.

I have this “Norton Anthology of Poetry” that has been with me since high school. It doesn’t have a cover because it fell off at some point in one of my many moves. It looks like the first maybe ten pages or so are getting ready to fall out as well, at which point I’m sure I'll have to look up the table of contents online. But I probably won’t need to because this is the classic example of the book that you really can let fall open to any random page. What I love about poems, lyric poems, is that they’re incredibly accessible in the sense that most of them are less than a page long. I find often that I can get sucked into this brain vortex of digital media. Scrolling, doomscrolling, constant updates — all this stuff that distracts us to shreds. A poem is a really easy first rung on the ladder back into more enriching soul food. It’s like you probably couldn’t get by in life only reading short sonnets, but it’s the first step for me on the way back. Like, maybe I could also pick up a book. Like, maybe I could put my phone in the other room and actually spend a whole hour reading. I have this beloved companion with me in this moment, where every day seems to bring an unprecedented historical event and just activates what is.

For me, one of the worst temptations at the moment is to be like that Willem Dafoe meme where he’s inhaling some blunt or something, just staring at his phone all the time with his wide, bloodshot eyes. That feels like me, half the time. I often think, speaking of God’s grace, that we always want to put down whatever is afflicting us and then instantly attain what we think of as some kind of perfect spiritual state. But since we live in time, and since God knows that we live in time and are limited by time, God actually often gives us something that won't ultimately be the last stage — but is the next thing that we’re capable of receiving right this second. There’s an enormous lesson in that for me. And also, I just kind of love poetry, too.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

We just talked about my book that’s coming out. When you write books, you start to realize that when a book comes out, suddenly the public experiences it as this new object. But for you, it’s like you have to almost remember what’s even in it. There was a time when this book consumed my attention, and I cherish that. I’m really grateful for it and excited for people to read it. But, weirdly, you’re kind of on to the next thing by the time the book comes out. So I always find when you tell people you’ve got a new book idea, they’re like, “Already?” And you’re like, “Well yeah, because it’s been two and a half years, basically, since I had my last book idea.” But what that means for me is that I’m in that wonderful stage with the book that’s coming out right now. I can’t change anything I’ve said. What I said and any flaws that are there, are there; anything good that’s there, is there, and I’m locked in to that book. After that process, which is an incredibly involving, all-consuming process, you’re suddenly just let loose into this really spacious, intellectual place where you actually don’t have to know what you think. Perhaps you might learn some things and change your mind about stuff. That luxury, which is what it really is, is different after you’ve been moving commas around for months on end and trying to lock in to the newest possible thing. So that’s where I’m at right now with books and what I know right now.

When you say give us the scoop, I guess this is the first time that I’ve talked about this, but I definitely know that my next book is going to be about translation. The reason for that is I’ve been talking on my podcast on heretics about translation, and I started out on a whim, because this is a nerdy thing that I really like. I love languages; I love translating things into different languages. Gradually, I realized there were all these things about translation — moving from one language to another and expressing something in a new way so different people can understand it — that I take totally for granted because they’re just part of my daily bread and butter. It’s like shoptalk for me, and if I meet other people that are interested in translation and languages, then we talk about that. We all know that there are these things about language that are kind of interesting, but there’s all this stuff that people in general have never had an opportunity to think about — like the ways in which our words are actually totally irreplaceable but also connect us to something totally universal that can be understood across time and space. There’s deep and untapped significance to the way that we all use this thing that everybody has. Everybody has a language, but moving from language to language is just this incredibly illuminating thing. I am definitely going to write a book about it. I’m just not sure yet what it’s going to look like. I’m currently nibbling around the edges of it, reading stuff, and deciding what's interesting and what I think.

Spenser shares that, in all of our struggles and victories, battling our own personal challenges, “it’s actually the getting up again that is the whole of life.” Can you relate to this statement? How have you experienced life more fully through the struggle of getting back up again after a failure? What does Scripture have to say about perseverance?

Spencer A. Klavan is a scholar, writer and podcaster. A graduate of Yale, he earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. He is the author of the acclaimed book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises and Light of the Mind, Light of the World: How New Science is Illuminating Ancient Truths about God. He is editor of Gateway to the Stoics, host of the Young Heretics podcast, and an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He lives near Nashville, Tennessee.