Podcast: Joel Kotkin Thinks About God and the Pandemic
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.6 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2021
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most of our podcast guests, especially those focusing on religious issues, tend to look at the world in a traditional way―meaning, their habits of mind tend to be traditional and conservative.
Many of our podcast guests, especially the rabbis and religious leaders who help us think about Jewish theology, tend to look at the world and speak out of the more conservative and orthodox orientation. But this week’s guest is—at least professionally—an outsider to that world. Joel Kotkin is not a rabbi or theologian but a social scientist, and he has turned his attention to the world of religion.
Kotkin recently published an essay in Quillette, “God and the Pandemic,” and he joins our Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to talk about that essay, and to assess what’s happening in American religious culture today as the pandemic continues to take its toll. Kotkin, looking at religious life empirically, examines the role of technology and human adaptability in the present religious environment, and he tries to think about the long-term effects COVID-19 will have on synagogues, churches, mosques and other religious communities across the country.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very often on the podcast, I get the chance to speak with rabbis and religious leaders who look at the world and speak out of the more conservative and orthodox side of the spectrum. |
| 0:17.7 | I don't mean that in a superficial way. |
| 0:19.6 | I'm not referring to partisan affiliation or political views.'t mean that in a superficial way. I'm not referring to partisan |
| 0:21.1 | affiliation or political views. I mean that their habit of mind tends to be a little more |
| 0:26.3 | traditional. And in as much as we discuss religious ideas and religious texts on the podcast, |
| 0:31.9 | I would hope that we try to inhabit the intentions of the author and read and converse |
| 0:37.0 | sympathetically and deferentially in order to really try to understand something intentions of the author and read and converse sympathetically and deferentially |
| 0:38.7 | in order to really try to understand something. That's a kind of conservative way of approaching |
| 0:43.2 | things. But this week, I'm joined by an outsider, turning his attention to a world that, |
| 0:48.6 | professionally at least, is not his own. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan |
| 0:53.3 | Silver. My guest this week is a student |
| 0:55.6 | of human behavior and social science, a distinguished geographer, and a student of social and economic |
| 1:01.1 | trends. My guest is Joel Kotkin. As you'll hear in our conversation, Kotkin is a religiously |
| 1:06.4 | conscious Jew, but not very observant. He's at home in the reform synagogue that his family belongs to |
| 1:11.4 | in Southern California. Now, what does such a person trying to look at American religious |
| 1:16.3 | culture empirically? How does this person assess what's going on? I was intrigued by an essay |
| 1:21.3 | that he published at Quillette a few weeks ago, God and the Pandemic. In the piece, he looks at the |
| 1:26.4 | role of technology and human adaptability and tries to think about the pandemic. In the piece, he looks at the role of technology and human adaptability |
| 1:28.8 | and tries to think about the pandemic's effect on our religious life. If you enjoy this conversation, |
| 1:34.0 | you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify. I hope you |
| 1:39.3 | leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community of ideas. I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other |
| 1:45.2 | podcast episodes at podcast at tikfafund.org. And of course, if you want to learn more about our work at |
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