Dr. Scott Sanders: "Discovering the Daily Divine: How Sociological Perspectives Illuminate the Numinous of Everyday Life"

Lance Erickson:

I welcome you to our third semiannual Disciple-Scholar Lecture, and we’re pleased to hear from Professor Scott Sanders here in a few minutes. I’m Lance Erickson, and I’m conducting today. I’m a professor in the sociology department, and I’m conducting because I am chair of the committee—the Undergraduate Outreach Committee—that, among other things, organizes this lecture series. As we get started, I want to thank our department secretary, Margaret McCabe and our student assistants Tessa Swensen, Cooper King, and Katja McClendon for the work they’ve done in helping us get this organized and prepared. There’s going to be some refreshments afterwards, so we’ll appreciate them for that as well. I want to recognize the other members of the committee, including Dr. Jane Lopez and Dr. Stan Knapp, who made important contributions to this series. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Stan; as many of you know, he is having a health issue, and we pray for his family that things will go well.

I just want to say a few words about the lecture and why we’re doing this. Our department chair, Curtis Child, came up with this idea a couple years ago, and it wasn’t because of Elder Holland’s University conference talk in the fall of 2021, but it dovetails really well with that and the timing’s fairly similar, so we’ll kind of use that as a jumping-off point. If you forgot what his talk was about, he said in so many words—in not so many words, I should say—that the Brethren needed the faculty at BYU to not take shots towards Salt Lake, but to be supportive and to help students develop their testimonies as they learn their disciplines. Now some of the faculty at the time were a little upset by his talk, and they felt like he was taking shots at them. As a department, as a department of faculty, we got together, and we talked about this. As we did, we felt like he must have been talking to somebody else. We felt like we were doing exactly what he was suggesting we should be doing: helping our students develop testimonies and deal with issues they encounter as they learn sociology.

Now we realized as we did this that, for the most part, this happens in informal ways in our offices, often one-on-one. So our development of a lecture series to talk about discipline and scholarship and discipleship is at least a tacit admission that we need to do something formal and do something a little more organized. That is what we’re doing here today. It gives, on a semester-by-semester basis, one of our faculty a chance to express in a public forum how they have grappled with discipleship and scholarship, and how they continue to grapple with it. I think…I deliberately use a present tense here in terms of grappling with these two things because I don’t think we’ll ever be done grappling with the secular and the spiritual in our lives—our scholarship and our discipleship.

We hope that as you listen today, you’ll learn something. Professor Sanders has a lot to offer us in this regard. So that’s what I wanted to say. We hope that you join us as well in this life-long pursuit of becoming disciple scholars. Riley Hate has agreed to offer our opening prayer today. After the prayer, Melissa Jones, who was our last Disciple Scholar [Lecturer], will introduce Professor Sanders. Following her will be the lecture, and we’ll go to that point.

[Prayer given by Riley Hate]

Melissa Jones:

Hi everyone. It is my sincere pleasure to introduce this semester’s Disciple-Scholar Lecturer, Dr. Scott Sanders. Dr. Sanders is an associate professor of sociology. He received his PhD in sociology from Cornell University in 2013. His research interests focus on at-risk populations, particularly manifested in rural populations in both the US and globally, including access to services and labor in global production markets. Dr. Sanders is also interested in evaluation methods for international markets…sorry, evaluation methods for international development programs. He is currently the director of the Project Evaluation and Team Assessment—also known as PEAT—here at BYU. PEAT trains students in evaluation and assessment techniques that contracts their services to non-governmental organizations across the globe. He has assisted with program evaluations in 23 countries. Dr. Sanders is also the executive director and treasurer of the Rural Sociological Society.

Beyond his research expertise and experience, Dr. Sanders and his wife Jen have three children and a really cute dog. He enjoys cycling, skiing, running, and traveling. And for some fun facts: Dr. Sanders has been blessed by the Dalai Lama—twice—with peace. Like, that’s a pretty big deal. He once stage dived into a mosh pit at a punk rock concert. [Turns to Scott Sanders] And this was just last year, right? [Nodding] Yeah, Friday, that’s right.

I have known Scott for almost five years, and I can truly say that he is one of the kindest, most thoughtful people you will ever meet. I believe he truly exemplifies what it means to be a true disciple of Jesus Christ, and we are very blessed to hear from him today. I’m now going to turn the time over to Scott. Thank you.

[Applause from the audience]

Scott Sanders:

Can y’all hear me okay? Okay.

So, I served my mission in northern Philippines on the island of Luzon. [Shows a map of the northern region of the Philippines] I spent most of my days literally hiking through the jungle to go and teach in small little villages where the villagers were mostly subsistent farmers. It was there when I was talking one day with a villager—with a farmer—and he said something to me that just shook me spiritually and disrupted me intellectually for over 15 years—something I just couldn’t reconcile for a long time. That happened in the village of Salapasip. Now, Salapasip is about two miles outside the main town of Cabugao, and we would either hike or hitchhike about two or three miles out before we got to a dirt path. We’d take that path, and we’d go through a large bamboo forest, and after we got over a ridge, it would open up into a valley that looked like this: [Shows a picture of a rice field] a series of small rice paddies that household would grow for their food. There are two crops a year in Salapasip: the first crop was rice and that was entirely consumed by the household. It wasn’t something they would sell—that’s what they used to live off of. And the second would be the cash crop. [Inaudible 08:43]…is tobacco, so that was what they’d have for their second harvest, and then they would sell that for their income and money to buy other things.

Salapasip was a little village where you had these rice paddies, and you had the bamboo huts and some cinder block huts—about 150 people—before it opened up to the South China Sea. It was just a lovely place, full of kind-hearted, hard-working. When I was there, it was still water buffalo and manual labor for the agriculture; it wasn’t mechanized at the time. Again, just small yields, people working super hard just to make ends meet.

One day, we were coming into the valley, and it looked like this: [Shows a picture of a yellowing field] it was starting to turn yellow and brown. The problem was it was about a month before the harvest was supposed happen. So, I grew up—I was born in Delta, my grandfather was a sole tractor, so talking about the harvest was just kind of, like, what we did all the time growing up. And so talking to Bishop Aguilera (he was the farmer there and the leader in the village), I asked him, “So, you know what’s going on with the rice? What’s going on with the crop?” And he said, “Well, if it doesn’t rain soon, it’s going to fail.” I said, “Okay. Well, what’s going to happen then? Like, who’s going to come help?” He looked me in the eye, and he said, “The village will starve. No one will come help us. No one cares about us.”

I grew up in a world where if we worked hard, and we mixed a little faith and religion in, we were supposed to be successful. The people who weren’t successful were the ones who weren’t working hard enough or didn’t have enough faith. I couldn’t figure this out; how could people who were working so hard and so faithful, how come they’re not going to be taken care of? How come, when the rice fails, they’re going to starve? I also grew up in a world where, at church, we would talk about saying prayers to find keys and parking spaces. So how come a God that’s going to help me find my keys, that’s going to help me find a parking spot at Costco, won’t hear prayers for a village about water needed for their rice?

This bothered me, right? This bothered me a lot. I came back after my mission—I came here to BYU. I took a lot of classes, had a great time. I never really fully was able to understand what was going on or answered those questions both intellectually and spiritually.

Okay, fast-forward about six years after I talked to Bishop Aguilera: I’m starting my first semester at a master’s program, and I get one of those promptings. You know, those promptings where, like, “You should go look for your keys on the kitchen table,” right? I get one of those promptings that says, “I need to go look at my schedule—that there’s a class I need to take.” So, I start going through the book and start looking for—it’s a book back then because I’m old, right?—looking through the book for classes, and I come across one that says, “Economic, Political, and Social Development of Community.” I think that sounds great, right? That also happened to be the very first sociology class I ever took. I was 26 years old and a prompting on a whim, and I take this class. [Shows a side-by-side picture of two men] Okay, now one of these gentlemen is an Ivy League professor and the other is a Russian anarchist, right, but both of them are directly responsible for me being here today. Tom Lyson was the professor of that class, and we read Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist literature. It was the coolest thing, right? It was a new way of looking at the world. And then we read other literature about exploitation and about how people don’t necessarily—aren’t necessarily rational beings, and that sometimes they use power and privilege to oppress and don’t care about small villages like Salapasip.

Sociology was the first introduction that helped me explain the world that I’d seen and live, all—when I had other experiences to Southeast Asian and South Asia of exploitation. It allowed me to change that perspective, right? [The perspective] of “just working hard and being faithful is enough,” to expand in a world where there is exploitation, where things don’t work out even if you work hard. It brought me to a whole new world that allowed me to explain the day-to-day lives not just here in Utah, but in the day-to-day lives of people throughout the world.

But I still hadn’t had that spiritual understanding yet, so I still—I had the intellectual expansion, but there still wasn’t that justification to understand, “Well, how come you prompted me to take this class? How come you prompted me to find my keys, but you’re not going to take care of that village?”

So, let’s fast-forward about ten years after I take this class with Tom Lyson, and I’m actually doing sociology, right? I finished my degree, and I’m a professor. I get contracted to consult on a project on human trafficking in the Thai fishing industry. At the time, there was a genocide in Myanmar targeting the Rohingya population—they’re a minority Muslim population. So, they were moving down from Myanmar into Thailand, and we’re being caught up in the fishing industry. Due to global market pressures, a lot of them were being exploited for no pay or low pay, or very dangerous work. And so World Bank initially funded this to try to figure out “Well, how bad is it?” We’re starting to understand—getting reports and new stories regarding exploitations and deaths and other things. I was contracted to come in to use my sociology—to use that expanded understanding of the world to try to figure out “How do we talk to people without getting them hurt? How do we understand what their lives look like?”

I’m sitting on this dock in _____, Thailand, then take this picture right here [Shows a picture of two industrial fishing boats] where we’re talking with local officials and others. [Gestures to the blue boat in the background] It’s actually this boat back here. Had I known this experience was going to happen, I would have reframed the photo, but this is the one we get. So, I’m sitting on this dock, right, and I’m thinking sociology, I’m thinking about how to take care of these people, I’m thinking about the markers associated with someone who’s being trafficked and someone who’s a normal fisherman. And I see two fishermen, right, and they fit all the markers of trafficking: the Rohingya, they are deck hands, and one of them’s got a bottle of gin, the other one’s got a pack of cigarettes, and they are happy, right? They are super happy and for a moment—for a moment, I have a spiritual epiphany, and I see them how our Heavenly Parents see them, and they’ve helped me recognize that our Heavenly Parents love and see everybody. And that for those 15 years, what I thought was compassion was pity. I was looking down, saying, “How come I have so much, and they have so little? You should be blessing them, God, like I want them to be blessed.”

In that moment, I had this idea and this understanding of love—the divine love. That “Hey, we’ve got this. We know them. We’re there for them.” And that beauty, that divinity, that numinous surrounds them at all times, but we just sometimes lack both the intellectual and spiritual paradigms and frameworks to be able to understand it. And I’m so grateful for those two experiences, right, because this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and this is the main take-home for the class [Presents a triangle-shaped graph] is that—or the lecture, right—is that sometimes we start off our world, we have a paradigm, and we understand the world and that might work in Orem, Utah, right? And it makes every—all the sense in the world, in our existence. But through a study of sociology, we’re able to expand our world, expand our understandings, to realize it is very complicated and there’s so many people out there. We gain perspective, right; our sociological perspectives allow us to see other in a new light, just like I was able to start seeing exploitation and seeing the problems I’ve lived with in South and Southeast Asia in a new light after I started reading things like Kropotkin and other—and Wallerstein and Marx and Foucault. It helped me to first intellectually understand that, and once I had that intellectual expansion, then it could be illuminated with the numinous. And I like the word “numinous” because it’s this ethereal divinity, right? It’s always there, but sometimes I lack the perspective to be able to see it, and when we’re able to combine our scholarship and our discipleship, our world becomes this robust place where the Divine is always with us and is always there for others. We gain compassion. We gain love and a deeper understanding of the world around us and the people we are interacting with on a daily and regular basis.

[Gestures to the diagram] Okay, so this is the take-home, right? This is what I want you to remember: this amazing PowerPoint animation I spent a lot of time doing. That’s the take-home for today. I want to, first of all, go through this in a couple different settings. The first setting we’re going to do to help highlight this idea is with the Savior. [Slide changes to one depicting the story of the Good Samaritan] I love that we get to study the New Testament in Sunday School this year; it’s my favorite because we get to see this one-on-one teaching, and when you layer on that sociological perspective, you see a lot of Christ’s teachings and parables are about things like race and gender and family and inequality. To me, the Good Samaritan is a study of race, right? “Hey, Lord, how do I get to heaven?”; “Well, you got to love your neighbor.”; “Well, who’s my neighbor?”; “Okay, hold on, let me teach you about race, okay? We have this really complicated setting here in Galilee: we have all these sects, we have all these countries, we have all these religions, all these people come together. You might think you know who your neighbor is, but let me tell you a little story, and that story is going to expand your world about that, right, and your understanding of who your neighbor is—not only your neighbor the person you may despise, but they’re the good ones in that story.”

Completely changing the paradigm—not just that we should tolerate other people, but they’re the good ones. And how does the story end with Christ? He says, “Who’s the neighbor? Well, the one that showed mercy.” And then Christ, at the end [of Luke, chapter 10] in verse 37, says, “Them Jesus said unto him, Go and do thou likewise.” In that moment, he expanded the understanding and then helped to infuse divine understandings of that. The hope is, if we ever got, like, Good Samaritan 2.0, the follow-up, is that we’d see that that individual going out and understanding the world is more robust and more beautiful at the same time—that his understanding of the neighbor and his duty to love and care for them was much, much greater than before.

And you can do this with other settings for the parable, too. It highlights that it’s critical that we have an understanding of race. It’s not radical to have an understanding about gender or inequality. Christ is doing this in the same way, and our sociological perspectives give us a deeper insight into His teachings and what it means to be a disciple in our day and age.

We’re going to do one more example of this here with a contemporary one that, if you’re in my [Soc] 340 classes, you’ll be familiar with. [Slide changes back to the triangle diagram] Oh, see, the animation. It’s going to stick with you, right? [Gestures to the diagram] So, Christ explains it, understands it, and then we have this increased understanding and the ability to see the Divinity or numinous around us. [Slide changes to one of Amartya Sen] So, this example is—this is Amartya Sen, he’s a Bengali Nobel Laureate, and he won his Nobel [Peace] Prize talking about famines and food aid, okay? And he wrote this book about development as freedom, where he argues that poverty and being poor is more than an economic measure. Often times when we think about poverty, our first reaction or personal understanding is to think of a lack of income, a lack of food, a lack of some sort of economic well-being. But Sen says, “No, no, no. It’s so much more complicated than that—it’s much more robust. For us to be truly happy, we need to have things like economic, political, social freedom. How are we treated by others? Is our community protecting us?” All that goes together to have a more robust, better understanding of what it means to be poor. [Gestures to the bullet points listed on the slides] So, then I have my sociological perspective here, right? I read Sen, and it expands my understanding.

[Slide changes to a slide of Moses 7:18] And then I read things like Moses and the Lord calls these people Zion because they were of one heart and one mind and dwelt in righteousness and there was no poor among them. That changes how we think about “poor,” right? I remember reading this for most of my life and just thinking, “Well, I guess Zion’s a place where people just shared their food, and where they all had a house.” But, if we think about what this means for us today, to try and have Zion here on BYU’s campus, that changes a lot. The poor? That’s the students with anxiety, that they feel seen and supported. That the LGBTQ[+] students on campus feel protected by our community. That the Republican conservative students in sociology classes—yeah, their opinions matter, too—feel comfortable sharing their opinions. It goes all—both ways on the spectrum. We can’t just exclude one group at the cost of another. [Gestures to the Moses scripture] I love this. I love this about being a sociologist: that we have this deeper, this ability to really engage in the human element, and it inspires me. When I think about bringing Zion to campus, I’m so excited to think about—there’re so many people out there that need what I can help them with and that there’re so many people out there that can help me with what I need. Together, we can all bring about this more robust and more realistic Zion here on campus.

Okay, I want to go back to Salapasip for a second. So, weeks went by and there’s still no rain. The farmers got better and more creative about how they were going to pump the water into their fields to keep the rice going. [Drinks from water bottle] Ironic that I get a dry mouth at the same time I’m saying this. [Laughter from the audience] Anyway, I grew up in Utah with a family who were farmers, so I’ve done a lot of prayers about rain. But I was very, very grateful when the rain finally did come [to Salapasip] and there was a harvest. It wasn’t a great harvest, but there was enough. I’m sure many families had to go without and that there were sacrifices and there certainly wasn’t a surplus, but there was enough. The village got by. I want to share this also because it was 15-plus years—15-plus years where there were times where I was angry, times I didn’t want to pray, times I didn’t want to go to church, but I stayed. Not to brag, but I was the assistant to the president on my mission. [Laughter from the audience] I got married in the temple. I had to get interviewed twice by General Authorities to come get a job here. All the [while], those dilemmas, those problems, were there. A disciple-scholar understands it’s a long, hard path and that’s okay.

So, it you’re someone right now—especially the students—who are struggling with the gospel because there’s something you can’t figure out or something that you’re upset about, that’s being a disciple. That’s part of what it is—a long, hard road. And we don’t know when it’s going to be, but if we’re continually thinking about how we can expand our understanding of the world and humanity, then we’ll also be able to see the divinity in that as well, and it’ll be there. So it’s okay to not have—not to know everything. We use that language often too much in our church. I think it’s okay to have questions, it’s okay to not know things. We move forward with faith, hoping, searching, looking for the Divine in our lives and in the people around us. I like that idea with that—so when we think about this too…so I have this idea here where Salapasip, Ithaca, and ______, right, and I had these moments that helped to transform who I was and to really become that disciple-scholar.

And you’re going to have these same things, too. [Slide depicting a flow chart] You’ll have these momentous occasions—you’ll graduate BYU, you’ll start your career, and then you’ll of course have that highlight moment of when you beat Cocaine Bear in the Mid-South semi-elite pickleball tournament. [Laughter from audience] And in these individual moments, it’s often where we can stop, pause, and reflect. And the sociological perspectives help us to understand what’s going on, and then our discipleship and our prayer and our worship can help to infuse that, too—to have better understanding.

But here’s the trick about life: life and discipleship actually occur in between, and that’s when it gets hard. It’s the day-to-day. So, we need to create a fluency in these sociological perspectives, a fluency in discipleship that helps us get through the drudgery of every single day. After—somewhere on these dashed lines, [Slide changes to depict a line at a grocery store] you’re going to have an experience like this. You’re going to be coming home from your job, and you realize you don’t have any food, so you fight traffic, you get to the grocery store, only to discover that everyone else in town doesn’t have food at home and went to the grocery store, too. And you’ll get in line, and you’ll start to complain about how there are only two checkers and why that’s clearly way too many items for the express lane. [Points to a guy at the front of the grocery store line] What’s this dude doing, right? It’s so easy in those day-to-day moments to lose sight of the expansive understanding of humanity and the divinity and the numinous that is a part of this too.

So, that’s why I wanted to spend the next part talking about how do we cultivate an ability to do that. It’s similar, like, on a test you might be able to cram for a midterm or a final and remember Durkheim and Weber, but where is really excels is when we allow sociology to permeate our day-to-day lived life, so our world view, our understanding, the way we see and engage with others, even when we’re tired, even when there’s no more Coke Zero left at the grocery store and life is coming to an end, this is when we need to have that fluency in our sociology and our discipleship.

I want to propose to you one way to do that is to cultivate compassionate curiosity. Okay, and so I want to talk about, first of all, the “curiosity” part. Sociology is a wonderful field to do that. I looked up in the American Sociological Society, and there’re 53 sections. I randomly pulled this graph to show you the percentage of students in the different sections of interest. You see all the old faculty are in the history of sociology, which seems appropriate given the title of it, but it’s very broad. You can learn lots of things. I love that sociology has everything in it, from gender to occupations to population. There’s so much that we can do here and that’s part of what you need to actively go about doing. Curiosity is a muscle—we can strengthen it or it can atrophy. We need to look for opportunities to go and study new things that are going to change the way we’re going to look at it.

Find those Russian anarchists, right? Read things you wouldn’t have done before. I want to challenge all the students here to take what I’m going to call an “outlier class.” Go through the catalog and find a class you know nothing about and take it. You’re lucky the sociology department here is full of phenomenal teachers. You will not have a bad experience. They actually have to create new statistics for our department because, somehow, we’re all above average faculty [Laughter from audience], but I strongly encourage you to do it because those classes—those outlier classes—those are the ones I still remember. Those are the ones that stick with me decades later. Even if it’s not central to my job, those new ways of looking at really have helped me stretch and expand my understanding of the world. So take a chance and take a class that you normally wouldn’t take, and I guarantee it will pay a huge dividend for you. If you’re not doing it here in your studies, then do it on your own. [Slide changes to depict three books] Find books—here are three examples of books that I read literally because they seem so bizarre and so different from anything else I’ve read, and each of them rocked my world in a new way. Kafka on the Shore deals with gender and cultural issues in Japan. The Famished Roads: poverty and, like, religion and spiritualism in Nigeria. The Seven Moons of Maali Almedia is a New Book Award winner—it’s phenomenal. It deals with gender and genocide and everything going on in the Sri Lankan Civil War. None of these books are, like, “You know what’s me? The Famished Road. That’s totally who I am.” But it was an opportunity to stretch, and they’ve really helped me to see the world and try to better understand people in places and living lives, like Salapasip—different. My paradigm doesn’t understand it. I’ve got to spend some time just to grow to really understand what someone else’s world experience is like, and then infuse it with the gospel, too.

Okay, so we’ve got to consciously cultivate curiosity, right, because what we often have is our paradigms are insufficient for the question we may confront. And this is a challenge right now because in our society right now, in this post-truth world, confidence is seen as a strength: “No, I’m not wrong. I’m so right, I’m going to say the thing even louder this time.” And we build barriers around our paradigms because we want to be right. And we’ll go to our echo chambers, and they’ll reinforce that we’re right. It is this radical concept, this day in age, to reconsider our position. So be a rebel—be brave and courageous enough to reconsider your position.

We may not know everything, we may not have a full understanding, but we need to challenge ourselves to be constantly looking at “Why is my crazy uncle at Thanksgiving talking about those things? Clearly, I’m not understanding his lived experience. We have a different way of looking at things. “I need to push my boundaries.” I’m not saying you accept it; I’m saying we understand it. That’s really crucial that once we draw those barriers, we judge and we lose curiosity. We need to always be open for this opportunity to be brave and to challenge what we think we know already. Who were you 10 years ago? Do you want to be that same person? You’re a radically different person now; you’re going to be much, much different in 10 years, too, and this is how we do it: recognizing that we’re growing and when we confront a question we don’t quite understand and were missing something we need to understand that even deeper.

[Changes slide to another diagram] When we have that curiosity, we can then fuse it with compassion. That’s what I want to talk about next: how we take this Divine love, this Divine compassion, and we fuse it with our curiosity because then it becomes even. Then, we’re engaging with our eternal brothers and sisters, and we’re dealing with the Divine. For me growing up, when we talked about Divine and eternal love, it was often this temporal kind of idea—that our Heavenly Parents love us, and they’ve loved us since [our] pre-earth life. They love us now, and they love us for eternity. What I want you to do today, I want you to challenge and to think about this in another way. We’re cultivating our curiosity. If we can think about love, not as a measure of time, but as depth. Our Heavenly Parents know everything about us and that’s the kind of compassion we need to cultivate towards others: to see deeply into them and understand others and love them for where they are. Our Heavenly Parents know how hard we try. I see it with my students, too. I know how hard you try, and they know that sometimes—despite our best efforts—we’re just sad. Things are hard. Our Heavenly Parents love us, and they want us to keep going. They know that there’re things that we’re deeply ashamed of—things we bury deep down inside, and we feel if anyone found out about it, they wouldn’t want to be our friend. That they wouldn’t accept us. But our Heavenly Parents know that, and they love us and that’s that deep measure of infinite love. That’s that deep measure of deep compassion that, when combined with our curiosity, allows us to see a world full of the Divine in those around us and in the communities around us, too.

Peter Johnson in his devotional last November said this, too. He said our Heavenly Father knows our names, knows our personalities. He knows our weaknesses and strengths. Sometimes I forget that the things I’m ashamed of—the things that I feel are weak, that I don’t want you to know about—my Heavenly Parents know that, and they love me and accept me for that. And that is the love I desperately need. I may not deserve it, but I desperately need it, and I desperately want to give that to other people because I know personally how much that’s needed.

[Changes the slide back to the triangle diagram] So that’s this idea of compassion combined with our curiosity. I promise that this is the last time you’re going to see this amazing—unless you want the slides, right? You can get this and, like, use it for family home evening. [Laughter from the audience] So, we cultivate this compassionate curiosity. We’re able to see people more broadly and then we fuse it with that Divine love. Then that’s just a real deep meaning. Think about those relationships, those people, those places where that’s happened for you. And that’s the possibility we have on the day-to-day life. Not just when we beat Cocaine Bear at pickleball, right? [Slide changes back to the picture of the grocery store line] It’s when we’re here: stuck in line. We have the opportunity to think about “Man, I wonder what this guy is doing. Maybe he’s got a sick grandma, and he’s getting all these groceries for her. What a wonderful person.” We sometimes have to think to the absurd, to be able to recognize that there’s divinity and there’s beauty in the people and the world around us.

[Slide changes to one titled “Remember to Remember”] Okay, I want to just—last thing here is that in those moments, like the grocery store here, sometimes the hardest part is to remember to be kind, to remember to be compassionate. We all go to church on Sunday, and we’re feeling good about ourselves. Monday, we get that 7:30 in the morning, and we’re just cussing up a storm the rest of the week or—like, that’s me, right?—but you’re better than that. I want you to do this because, uh, Robin Wall Kimmerer—she wrote Braiding Sweet Glass—and she talks about rituals and that the elders in her tribe—our rituals are there to remember to remember, and I love that. I love that if I build rituals into my life, it helps me to remember to remember to be good and to love other people.

[Slide changes to one depicting Vermeer’s Little Street] So, I’m going to share with you one of my rituals that helps me to do this and then suggest one to you, okay? So, my ritual is this: I love this—I’m going to try not to cry because I love this painting so much. I’m sorry, um, Vermeer’s Little Street. So, Vermeer at the time—sorry, this is, like, I love this painting. At the time, painters were only looking at deities and leaders and royalty. Those were the people who were worthy of being painted, and Vermeer looks at this little street where there’s this house that’s clearly had better days—people just doing the everyday things, nothing spectacular, just being a person—and he says, “You know what? That is beautiful and that is wonderful and that is worthy of praise: just the day-to-day living of it.” And what I also love about Vermeer is he was known for bringing in light—we can’t really see it so much here, but he was able to take light and capture it and highlight things. And, so, if you see this in person, this woman here is illuminated, and she’s just doing something simple and that reminds me to remember to remember that there’s beauty in the everyday: an everyday common person—[Gestures to the painting] the person, the houses like this that have seen better days—are worthy of our praise, are worthy of our love and that we need to try to find out how we can bring that light in to help illuminate them and remind us of their worth and value. So, I love this painting and, again, every time I see it, I’m reminded of this, and I fail. I guarantee that I’ve sworn at somebody in this room driving down 9th East because I will see this painting and then I’ll get in a car [Laughter from the audience]—and my kids are here, they’ll tell you stories—and I forget to remember to remember, right? So, that’s my ritual. I have this in my office, and I think about this way too much, but I love this painting because it reminds me to try to have more Christ-like compassion, to use those sociological perspectives and see the numinous in the world around me.

[Slide changes to a picture of the BYU food court] So, this is the ritual I want to encourage you to do. This is the Cougar Creamery—or the Cougar Eat, okay, ready? Vermeer’s Little Street, Cougar Eat? [Laughter from audience] It’s so bad, you won’t be able to forget it. That’s part of why I did it. Okay, but next time you’re at—you go by the Taco Bell, take that moment to pause to remember to remember all the people there waiting for their food. Whether it’s a Chick-fil-a or a Taco Bell, they’re divine. They’re beautiful. They’re wonderful. We have this ability to see the world more fully. We can cultivate a deeper love for the gordita if that’s possible, right? But we walk past this on a regular basis and how wonderful is it if we could just pause and remember to remember that our training here as sociologists is helping us to see the world more broadly so that we can be infused with the light of Christ. It is my sincere hope and prayer that we can all become disciple-scholars and help to bring about Zion here on campus, and I’ll leave this with you, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

[Clapping from the audience]

Scott Sanders:

Thank you. Okay, there’s a number of faculty here that have been so gracious to delay their classes so if you’re in one of those classes, we’ll pause right now and let you all go to your class. Then we’ll take a few questions after that. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.