Matthew Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University and a fellow in theOxford Centre for Animal Ethics. He wrote Compassionate Eating as Care of Creationand co-editedPhilosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating (with Andrew Chignell and Terence Cuneo). His latest book,Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan, was published in November 2024.In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "...
Matthew Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University and a fellow in theOxford Centre for Animal Ethics. He wrote Compassionate Eating as Care of Creationand co-editedPhilosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating (with Andrew Chignell and Terence Cuneo). His latest book,Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan, was published in November 2024.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"
Sentientism answers those questions with "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips
01:12 Welcome
- Our Sentientism guest mutuals: Jasmin Singer, Mariann Sullivan, Christof Koch, Elan Abrell, Christopher Sebastian, John Sanbonmatsu...
04:19 Matt's Intro
- "A kid from the mid-west - my people are agriculture people"
04:30 What's Real
- "A Mennonite boy... anabaptist tradition of the Christian faith"
- "A group... who focuses much more on... the ethics than the meta-physics"
- "I remember being really surprised... to realise that other kids had different versions of the Christian faith..."
- "The tradition I grew up in was really focused on... god is love and Jesus said... love god with all your heart... love your neighbour as yourself"
- "The question in my tradition... was 'are you loving people'... unconditional love, unconditional grace... are you being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ on the ground"
- "My family... the group of Mennonite scholars that gets tapped to write the book about Mennonites... my dad was the Mennonite economist... my aunt was the Mennonite feminist theologian..."
- "My uncle... wrote a systematic theology...the Catholics and the Protestants had been doing this for centuries and the Mennonites were always focused on what happens on the ground... being the hands and feet of Jesus showing unconditional love to a suffering world."
- "I've always thought that arguments about what is real tend to distract us from the real question... how do we show love to our neighbour... lifts up the people who are suffering... brings the people on the margins to the centre"
- "Culture wars... debates over worldviews... have not shown a very impressive track record of success in this regard"
- "We spend so much time fighting over what is real that we miss the fact that in a lived experiential way we have way more in common than we disagree about"
- "For finite, error-prone creatures like us the really interesting conversations are on the ground where we're grieving, where we're suffering, where we're celebrating..."
And more... full show notes atSentientism.info.
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