The Swarthmore Mayor

Professor Mark Wallace, James Hormel Chair of Social Justice (credit: Swarthmore College)

Professor Mark Wallace is a professor in the Religion Department, specializing in “the intersections between religious thought, critical theory, Indigenous studies, and postcolonialism“. This interview was conducted by Wyatt Brannon ’26 and Lou Williams ’27 of The Mayor‘s Editorial Board.

WB: How are you doing today?

MW: Today’s been a good day. I taught Philosophy of Religion, and I was able to spend some time with my wife this morning at home. You know, I’d like to get out more and see birds or walk around the Crumb. It’s just so cold right now.

WB: I think in the past, a lot of students knew who you were, and you were like a bigger presence on campus, but as Swarthmore has a high turnover with students constantly graduating and entering, we have to ask, what do you study? Can you share with us a little bit about what it is you teach and what classes you’re teaching?

MW: So I’m in the Religion department and also Environmental Studies, meaning that many of my courses cross-pollinate between those two areas of study. One first-year seminar that I teach is called Apocalypse: Hope and Despair in the Last Days. It explores how to come to terms with the end of life as we know it and how to prepare ourselves spiritually for the end of time. Next, I do a lot of mid-level courses, like Philosophy of Religion. I also teach a course called Radical Jesus, and another course in the intersection between religion and the environment called Religion and Ecology. Finally, on an upper level I primarily teach an upper-level two-credit seminar called Angels that looks at the history of angels in different cultures and other spiritual beings.

Around the beginning of 2024, I got a terrible diagnosis of a blood cancer that I have been struggling with in treatment and so forth. I taught Angels for the first time right after I got that diagnosis. And it was, intellectually and personally, a very therapeutic experience for me, and I really enjoyed teaching it. Angels are beings that care for us, but because they’re not empirically available to us, it’s easy to not think that there are invisible beings who care for us. So to look at the possibility of angels or other spirit beings in different cultures was very nurturing for me as a person who had a recent cancer diagnosis.

After I taught that seminar I got really sick and I went through a transfusion of my stem cells. I got sepsis in the hospital. I came really close to dying, but then I survived. I was too damaged by that experience and couldn’t teach in the fall, but now I’m able to come back and teach again, so I’m looking forward to teaching that seminar in the hopes that it’ll be therapeutic for all of us again.

WB: We look forward to taking it with you. And thank you for being willing to share a little bit about what happened, because I know a lot of students are wondering where you went for that year.

MW: For pretty much a year I just disappeared. I was in the hospital for months on end and for long periods of time I couldn’t read or think. I was hopelessly hopeful that I’d survive, but when you’re in the midst of that kind of trial – Psalm 23 calls it passing through the valley of the shadow of death – you don’t know what’s going to happen on the other side of that valley.

WB: We are very glad that you were able to make it back here to Swarthmore and that you are still able to teach. We’re very fortunate to have you with us.

LW: What is the benefit of taking religion courses for students who aren’t religious?

MW: I have a very specific response to that! We’re reading a book in Philosophy of Religion called Religion for Atheists. So the philosopher who wrote the book is named Alaine de Batton. He says, “I don’t believe in God”. He thinks it’s a preposterous idea. But he thinks religion is incredibly important in becoming a whole person, because, he says, religion is the only human activity that cultivates what he calls soul making. Not that he knows that there is a soul, but that the process of cultivating one’s inner life through various spiritual disciplines, whether it’s meditation or prayer or caring for other people or engaging in worship or undergoing rites of passage like baptism – these personal and social activities help us to nurture our inner lives. That’s what he thinks religion is really committed to. And I agree with him about that.

So what I say to students in Philosophy of Religion is that everyone needs to find a spiritual practice to live by. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re a religious person or not, whether you believe in God or not, or whether you go to church or synagogue or whatever. But find a practice that can center your life, especially at Swat, because otherwise here you’re caught up in the buzzing confusion of the place without a center. So that’s where I think religion is critical.

WB: You’ve recently written a book: When God Was a Bird. Can you tell us a little bit about that book, and the experience of writing it and what the basic premises are?

MW: Years ago, I realized that basically everything I had been taught about religion, and especially Christianity – my special focus is on the Christian religion – was wrong.Christianity had been presented to me as an otherworldly religion where God is distant and abstract. I call that the sky god, unmoved and divorced from the muck and the mire of everyday material existence. What I realized was that that’s fundamentally wrongheaded. God isn’t a sky god, God is an earth god. God lives here, if there is a god in our midst. In the Christian religion, this is expressed in the form of God presenting God’s self in three different forms –  the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And God as the Spirit, or Holy Spirit in the Bible and in the Jewish and Christian traditions – is consistently pictured as a bird, oftentimes as a dove. You see this a lot in churches and so forth. But that’s always been seen as an empty metaphor, kind of like a figure of speech. Not an actual description of who God is. What I realized is, especially in the New Testament, when God is described as a bird, as a dove, the Spirit of God – that this is done with literal force. Early followers of Jesus understood that God could take on many different forms. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, God takes on the form of a bush. Moses stands before God and the bush speaks to him and says, “This is holy ground. Take off your shoes.” That’s Moses and the burning bush. God becomes a plant. That’s not an empty metaphor. That’s a description of God being vegetal and encountering Moses in plant form. And I realize that the same thing is happening both in the Hebrew text and the Christian texts, in so far as God is presenting God’s self in bird form as the Spirit of God, as the Holy Spirit.

So what I say in When God Was a Bird is that the Christian religion fundamentally is a religion about flesh and material life and bones and in the case of birds, bones and beaks and feathers – that, according to Christians, God enfleshed God’s self in the person of Jesus, but what they forget is that God also, so to speak, “enfeathered” God’s self in the form of a dove, the Holy Spirit. And that has been neglected because Christians are anxious about God in animal form. They’re kind of okay with the idea of God taking on human form. But they’re not that comfortable with God taking on the form of a nonhuman animal, specifically a bird, because that makes Christianity, and this is what I argue in that book, an animist religion. (Animism is the belief that the spirit of God infuses itself in all life forms: rocks, trees, plants, birds, landscapes, etc.).

When God Was a Bird returns, in my judgement, Christianity to its original roots, as an animist religion, as an animal-based and specifically bird-based religion.

WB: Now that your book is finished, what kinds of research are you up to? Where are you taking things next?

MW: So, the next stage is the new book I’m writing now, entitled Can Beauty Save the World? This is a phrase that I borrowed from Dostoyevsky’s book The Idiot, which is a retelling of the life of Jesus, and one of the characters in the book asks  whether beauty can save the world. My answer is that it’s the only thing that will save us and the future of the planet. Can we envision our everyday lives as encountering the beautiful? The sublime, the sacred, the holy? And so like the book on the bird god, this would be rethinking our daily life, especially in communion with nature, as a life of beauty. And we start to re-envision our existence as walking a beautiful path amidst the horror and the terror and the inhumanity of our time.

Can we bring that double awareness, the beautiful and the terrifying together, and if we can, could we re-envision – and this gets back again to the Christian religion – could we re-envision the Christian religion as a religion that actually worships nature? Again, Christianity defined itself over and against vernacular religions as something that worship the natural world. Christianity doesn’t do that, it worships God who is out there somewhere.

But the book is an argument for restating Christian worship within the natural world. And that would mean going outside the confines of churches and so forth into forests and into beaches and deserts and other natural places and finding the sacred within everything that’s there. That’s the new focus.

WB: We look forward to that, and we hope perhaps to be able to read that book at some point.

MW: It’s coming into focus.

LW: I was wondering if you have any advice for students with political anxiety on how to stay grounded and stay sane in today’s political climate.

MW: That is such a good question, because that goes back to my kind of dogmatic insistence that all of us, including Swatties, whatever our spiritual orientation is or lack thereof, to find a spiritual path that keeps you grounded amidst the chaos and the turbulence.

What I have found is that when I abandon my path, I burn out. It might not be in a day or a week or a month or a year but at some point, if I start to live in a way that is consequentialist, I pay too much attention to the outcome of my actions politically, and I get frustrated over and over and over again about my inability with others to realize any of the things that I hope for. And especially now in the current political climate in the United States, I can’t continue and I give up on my public political commitments and I retreat into myself in a way that’s really unhealthy. What a spiritual path provides someone is a non-consequentialist commitment to the integrity of being true to one’s deepest convictions, whatever the outcome will be.

So it’s hopeful without being optimistic. And that’s really important because I’m not optimistic about current political outcomes and what they will look like, but I live in hope, sometimes the hopeless hope, that by staying true to my convictions and being grounded through a spiritual path I can along with others help the universe bend towards justice. And that spiritual path can be almost anything for anyone. It can be a walk in the woods, it can be practicing prayer, it can be a mindfulness discipline, it can be massage, it can be music.

The possibilities to me are infinite, but what it consists of is a daily practice, five minutes, ten minutes, a half hour, whatever, a daily practice that isn’t utilitarian, that isn’t focused on developing a skill set or engaging in activity that serves some other end: it is an end in itself. And it allows one, to paraphrase T. S. Elliot, to discover a still point around which the world turns. Without that path, and this is what’s happened to me, I just spin with the world as it spins and I become more depressed, more anxious, more hopeless and despairing. The path gives me the possibility for hope, even though in the face of it, things don’t feel hopeful.

WB: Would you say that a spiritual practice, in the sense that you are using the term, is almost an act of resistance against those systems that would bring us down?

MW: I think that’s extremely well said, I think that’s exactly it. But it’s much more difficult than a public form of resistance, which gets the support of the particular collective one is identified with. It’s a private, interior, non-utilitarian exercise. It’s not done because it’s useful. It’s done because it’s a joy and a delight unto itself. You find one thing in the day that you can commit to consistently over time, that is a joy and delight unto itself and you practice that. And that’s the ground of the hope. It’s not a cognitive exercise itself. It’s not a head-based exercise, but a heart-based exercise. And that’s a powerful form of resistance to the dictates of a toxic political culture and a toxic consumer culture that would like to deny you the right to initiate such a practice.

WB: One final question. Is there anything you’d like students to know about the Religion department that we can share?

MW: I think the most important thing about an undergraduate education is to discover meaning and purpose for oneself. I don’t think liberal arts education should be primarily designed to equip young adults with particular pre-professional skill sets or to make them self-consciously competitive in the professional marketplace. I think the ideal of the liberal arts is to free young adults and aim them towards the possibilities of envisioning for themselves a life of joy and commitment that they couldn’t have come to without passing through the joy and the trauma of an undergraduate education. So, the religion department celebrates that ideal of full becoming. It’s not unique in that regard. Many, if not most departments have that as their orienting paradigm, but the study of religion in particular highlights the quest for meaning and purpose as central to one’s education and one’s full human becoming. And that’s what I’d like people to know about.

WB: Thank you so much, Professor Wallace. We really appreciate it.

LW: Thank you so, so much.

WB: Hope that you have a lovely semester, and of course we’ll see you around.