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Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Benjamin Phillips, your host today, and I'm joined with Chad Helmer of Ohio University. Welcome Mr. Helmer.
Thanks. Good to be here. Welcome. So we're here to discuss your new book with Brill and their studies in Systematic Theology titled, The Lord Who Listens, A Dogmatic Inquiry into God Is Here.
A very self-explanatory title. But thank you for writing this. Which of you mind telling us how did you come across this idea? Yeah, it was really providential.
I was listened to a series of lectures by Nicholas Wolberstorf, who was retired now. He was the Noa Porter Professor of Philosophy at University of VA. It was there for a couple decades, I believe. And he was actually talking about liturgical theology and reflecting on some of the liturgies of the Church, and particularly on the liturgical refrain that Lord hear us, that the congregation would say, Lord hear us after a congregational prayer.
And when he said he looked high alone and was unable to find anyone who had written systematically or theologically on what it means for God to hear us. And so I took that as a particular challenge. And so there aren't many things that no one has written on. And Wolberstorf was not entirely right.
A few people had written on it. Rachel Neuress, who's a feminist, Quaker the Allergy in the UK. And then Karl Barth had written a little bit on it because Karl Barth said a little bit of something about everything. And so, but there weren't many interlocutors to engage with.
But I began thinking about that. It was already attached to some questions I had about receptivity in God and what it might mean for God to be receptive if we could say that at all. So, thinking about hearing as a kind of receiving from another people's interest. Why do you think that is that hardly anyone who discussed this really hardly anyone, especially until the 20th century?
I mean, there's a few things that hit on right away in the introduction to the book. One is I think largely the history of the Christian tradition theologically has been occupied with God's word, God's speech, the logos of John 1, what it means for God to speak. And all that for good reason, I think there's important things going on theologically as we think about God's speech. So, I think that's been one of the animating questions and concerns of theologians and what it means that God speaks.
But then also, I mean, just a commitment to divine, going back to Aquinas, we would call divine actuality. God isn't passive. God doesn't receive. God's, what Aquinas called actist purists or pure act.
God doesn't gain something from another. He's the overflowing and superabundance of activity. And so, that sort of pushes against the idea of receiving something from another. And those are some of the questions I have to figure out how to adjudicate in the book too.
Right. And especially is that's something that's really re-entered the conversation in a very strong way in the last decade or so now. You take that up especially towards chapter three and four. How do you deal with that in brief form?
If you wanted the full form, you should buy the book. But in brief form. In brief form, I ended up relying on Aquinas. I'm looking at how Aquinas deals with that.
And it's complicated because Bart deals with it one way and Aquinas deals with it another. Even though Bart has historically been thought of as, I mean, really strongly emphasizing divine actuality. He does leave room for receptivity and sort of passivity in God. And you see an end doctrine of immutability or what he calls constancy.
You see it sort of as he kind of concedes a kind of qualified divine passability or the ability for God to kind of passadilly is complicated. But the idea that God might experience emotions or even suffering as a result of things that creatures do. And so, Bart deals with it one way. Aquinas deals with it another.
And I'm grateful that someone had just recently released a book with Cambridge University Press Tyler Whitman's book on God in Creation, looking at the way Aquinas and Bart deal with this differently. And was really able to learn a lot from that volume. And then look at how Aquinas deals with the question and say, okay, well, there's a kind of, there's a kind of, the thing I'd want to say is Aquinas has a really, really strong creator creature distinction. And that's something as you just alluded to has been picked up more in the last decade as people have gone back and retrieved some of Aquinas is where people have gone back and they're trying to retrieve classical theology.
And in doing that strong creator creature distinction, maintaining that God doesn't change, that God's not affected by the activity of creatures in eternity. And yet God wants to relate to us and relates to us in creature language and in creaturely ways. And so, some of the ways that I deal with that. One is, I think that rather than thinking of listening and God's listening as a kind of passivity or receptivity, one understanding as a kind of activity, it's something that one does, one listens to and attends to another.
And that's not something that happens, it's not something that happens independent of the speaker, but the activity of listening belongs entirely to the listener. And so, there is a way in which we think about hearing and listening that is active and not merely passive. So that's one thing the other is with that strong creator creature distinction thinking through the way that God relates to creation more generally. Like if the hearing is not the only way that scripture talks about God relating to us.
But understand that requires a strong doctrine of accommodation, which is understanding the way that scripture, God is chosen to reveal himself to us in scripture in creaturely forms and creaturely language that are both very real, but also requires to think about not just God as sort of the highest being of God's or the highest being on the great chain of being, but rather altogether different from us. And so, I want to say that God's hearing is active, I want to say that it's not purely passive, but I also want to say that God's hearing is uniquely God's, that God fears as God, and not as we do. Even if I need to unpack some of that for you, I think a bit more about it. One of the things I appreciated in that emphasis in particular on God is being a very active listener.
As a comment you make it very helpful in many ways God hears us into speaking. Can you expand that a little? Yeah, this is really important. And some of it's taking up some of the important work that feminist theologians have done.
Bart also picks up on this, that as we're, I mean, there's a creaturely sense, I mean with other people as we're heard, it then brings us to kind of better understand ourselves and even then be able to better articulate our own words and our own thoughts. So there's that sense of it that as I'm heard by another, I can then speak more. One of the ways that Bart talks about this though is that because of divine eternity, because God is timeless and knows creaturely things eternally, God hears, and hears before we even ask. And so for Bart, there's a really important sense in which because we've been heard by God, then we can speak to him.
And for Bart, this has to do with his Christology, his understanding of who Christ is that Christ is the answer to all of our prayers, in Christ all of our deepest needs and longings and questions have been answered. And that is the act of God having heard us. The sending, the person to work of Christ is God having heard us. And because we have been heard, now we can speak to God.
And so in that sense, we're heard into speaking and speak because we haven't heard. But maybe there's more that you want from that. No, it's beautiful and very encouraging. In many ways makes our speaking to God much more confident and sure as a thing we can do because we have precious and very great promise to borrow Peter's language.
And by can. And the scourging is that is, I guess we should do with another side of this, which I imagine some listeners or readers might think is, well, doesn't this emphasis on possibility and impossibility and accommodation mean we have to toss out the thing, which is scripture and ice cube in the sky and what that. I'll be brief because there's a lot of literature on this now. But how would you respond to that?
Well, I mean, I think it's, I want to say that the language of scripture is God's good gift to us and that it's certainly and reliably reveals God to us and that God's chosen to do that and to reveal himself to us in writing and in creaturely forms. So there are many ways that are true and but in the ancient distinction that goes all the way back to some of the earliest Christian theologians is this distinction between theology and economy. And so, so I think when we talk about God, we have to make a distinction between how we speak about God eternally, God eternally in God self as an eternal being transcendent, holy other, and then how we speak about the economy of God's work and salvation and how we experience God. And I would say that scripture reveals God to us reliably as God works in creation and in our experience in our lives.
And yet when we reach scripture too, we also see it and this is part of where I rely on Aquinas in contrast to Bart as we see scripture very reliably point to the eternal nature of God and tell us things about God's omnipotence and his eternality and his omniscience and these kinds of things that are not creaturely but are godly. There are things that have to do with the theology and not with the economy. Now, theologians have wrestled for a long time. How do you relate the theology and the economy?
How do you make sense of those two things? And what I do with hearing is I want to say, well, hearing, our experience of God's hearing, this is a creaturely phenomenon of being heard, as far as if God has ears or something like that. But the creaturely phenomenon of being here is rooted in God's presence. And God is eternally, God is eternal and God is outside of both time and space and to use Augustine's language, which I use in the book, that God is more near to us than we are to ourselves.
And he hears us in ways that are deeper and more real than others hear us and even that we hear ourselves. And so I would relate, I would say, well, the language of scripture talking about God hearing us is a particular kind of divine presence that's mediated in our experience. Right. Very good.
Very helpful. And one of the things I appreciate that you say at several points in here is that when God names himself in scripture, he does so out of his own freedom. And he is truly, though, perhaps not with absolute mathematical precision, naming himself and telling us about who he is and what he does on, including hearing us. Kind of backtracking a bit to earlier, and you've spoken of God being the one who hears us into being in the air to us in our own selves.
Again, pressure has been very great, but so understudied. Do you think that there's a particular way in which this speaks to our modern anxieties? This is such a recent, I mean, three people are on the last hundred years, right? Yeah, I mean, I really think it does.
And some of that's in the social scientific literature on what it means to be heard. And this is where my fourth chapter, which is exceedingly long, but I just think there's so much really interesting thing, many interesting things going on in the social scientific literature about being heard by others, what that does to us, and how important it is to be heard by another. And so I do a lot of work in chapter four, looking at that and then asking, well, if those things are true of those things occur when we're heard by another, for example, the experience of our literally neurologically, our prefrontal cortex or being strengthened as we're heard by another, we're tuned to by another. In other words, how much more might it be the case that being heard by God forms us in particular ways?
And I mean, one of the ways in particular is the experience of suffering really broadly. The loneliness and isolation that comes with pain and loss and death and suffering and so forth. One of the things that we see in the scriptures, the way the Psalmist, for example, or even Christ in Yosemite and on the cross, cries out to be heard by God. And so I do look at that a little bit and I think that the question about our own modern anxieties, I think, perhaps making some sweeping general cultural comments, but talking is popular and listening is hard.
And I think that there's probably a lot to be gained from both Christians and the church in general becoming better listeners. But in particular, as we minister to other people, I think learning to be better listeners. And then also the experience of people who are suffering and pain by heard by people who, and I appropriate this quote from Bonhoe for several times where he says, we ought to listen with the ears of God to others. And so I think if we're heard by God, we ought to then develop the skill of being able to listen to others in a godly kind of way that we're minister to them.
Absolutely. I hadn't noticed before, but he really quite convincingly pulled out in the first couple chapters. How often God's hearing in very explicit ways of times is associated with the wilderness, with moments of death and barrenness, and sorrow, quite remarkable. Yeah, it was one of the surprises to me on how often those correlated.
I mean, just when I began thinking about the topic, I just went through and found sort of just a basic lexicon. Working through a concordance and saying, okay, here are all the places where God's hearing or listening or inclining God's hearing, finding over 150 passages of scripture that talk about that. But most of the time, it's either segments that God has heard us or it's people crying out in really dire circumstances to be heard by God. And so that was surprising to me too.
Well, if you don't mind, I mean, we were talking so much about hearing, we should probably pull up your definition of hearing. Yes. Or I must admit, I never read or still haven't actually heard the word, Auskultation before. Oh, yes, yes.
Well, this comes from a quote by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. And so I use this quotation from him in the epigraph of the first chapter. It's a medical term. So it's pulling out the stethoscope.
It's what a doctor does with a stethoscope. And Nancy says that hearing itself ought to be Auskultated. And you get out the doctor's stethoscope and listen more carefully to hear it, which is what I'm trying to do in the first chapter. Yes.
And you do because I've got a quote here from the end of your first chapter and it's on page 51. But actually, this starts on page 50. And I say that injustice. It's not a T.M.
at all. But he says, does a request for God to hear is a request for loving and just attention that is accomplished by the means of the significant personal presence of the triune God, which entails a sure response. So obviously there's a lot to unpack there, which is the burden of the entire book. But the first thing that really jumps out to me, because it's the second thing in the sentence, but I know what loving attention is.
I have family, I have friends, I have students. I know loving attention. What do you mean by just attention? It's a great question.
I want to have been pushed on a little bit by others. I mean, one I think when we look at passages of God listening in Scripture, there seems to be the bringing about of a kind of justice by God's hearing. That there's a kind of making right wrongs. Making right of some wrongs.
Now, later when I say that there's a kind of hearing that God has eternally, I don't know what it would mean for God to hear in a just way and perfectly just circumstances. So perhaps it's not, maybe justice is not always accompanied by God's hearing or attached to God's hearing. But I do think there's something about God's hearing that is both loving and making explicit maybe that component of love is also working to make right something wrong. Anyways, coming back to the hearing is a very active thing.
And the wilderness comments as well. That's the big, you know, one of the major themes of that first chapter is that in so many of these circumstances, it's pain, hardship, dire circumstances that some biblical characters crying out to be heard by God and almost always with a desire for some wrong to be made right. And that brings us to the, let's get me over the middle to the end of your definition here, which entails a sure response. And we were talking a bit before we hit record and in many ways as advanced and sophisticated as our theology can be in fine-drained.
It has to help us answer the basic questions. One which is I'm praying and praying for a good thing, maybe even a necessary thing. And it does not seem like God's answering. So how does a theology of hearing help us in those moments?
Yeah. Well, there's kind of a Sunday school answer to this. On the one hand, we might say something like, well, you got always hears our prayers and sometimes the answer is just no. That might be one way of thinking about it.
But because I'm engaging with Karl Barth in the book, I think there's a slightly different way we might think about it. Because really there are two major words that characterized God's hearing that develop is a bit of a theme in the book. And one of them is always that we're always heard by God. And the other is that we're already heard by God.
And so those two words always and already become really important for me. And so I would want to say with Barth, on account of God's actuality, on account of the fact that there's God's omniscience, but also God's love. And because love is such an important part of my definition of what it means to hear in another. And I'm relying on somebody who talks about love as a form of attention, or rather attention as a form of love.
And so God's attending to our words in a loving way. And in that sense, I want to say there's always to God's hearing in the minimal sense that God is omniscience. But also in another sense that this is an activity of divine love. And that God is that as we cry out to him, either suffering or in hardship or whatever, we're crying out to him to be heard.
And there's something that's about God's presence, which is loving and his love toward us that's going to mean, well God always hears me. And yet I think, especially looking at the Psalms, you see this dynamic play out all the time in the Psalms. You see the crying out to be heard by God as though God were absent. And yet it's an absence that's experienced in relationship.
So it's almost still crying out to God, not to no one, not just to the universe, but it's crying out to God. And so there's this experience of being unheard in a conversation in something that feels interpersonal. And so I'd want to say something like, well, we're always heard by God, and yet we often have the experience of God's absence. And yet that's an absence that's experienced in relationship with God.
So I don't know if that will satisfy everyone, but I want to say a little bit more than this Sunday school answer. Right. Well, I'm glad you did too. Talk to us a little more.
What are the consequences or the debt treatments even of going unheard? Oh my goodness. Yeah. Oh, tragic in lots of ways.
I mean, I think in the book, I'm relying a little bit on British theologian, Alistair MacFaggon, who's written an incredible book on sin. And if there can be such a thing. But he looks at some of what happens when we're isolated or alienated or at worst going unheard or worse being silenced by another. So one of the things that happens is when we go unheard, when people don't hear us, we're cut off from what I would say, sort of the values and meaning making, our ability to make meaning of what it is we're thinking of our own words, meaning is made in community in some ways.
So you can imagine in the extreme case of someone who's suffering something horrible and has no one to talk to, is isolated and shut in and has only themselves. Their inability then to sort of situate their suffering and their words about their suffering in a larger frame. Being heard by another means that I then have someone else with whom I can, who can help me understand me and understand my own circumstances. And so in the extreme being cut off from my ability to make meaning of my own suffering, that's a horrible thing that half of us should be one example.
MacFaggon uses some really horrific examples of child sexual abuse in which the victim is often silenced. So he describes the way, this is a secret, you can't tell anyone about this. And he really traces through the really detrimental effects I have on the victim. So that gives a more concrete example, but a holographic one.
I'm just thinking even as you say this, the first two examples that come to my mind is someone that I've read about making sense of their suffering are Boethius and Job. And Boethius is obviously imagining this conversation where he's quite literally making sense of his suffering, where Job's is compounded because his friends do not hear. And so there's something our ability to make meaning is wrapped up with our ability to be heard. So we have poor now.
Job's friends don't do him any favors. And eventually he does have the experience of being heard. I draw that out. I engage with Job just a little bit in the conclusion.
Right. Very well. But going back to the conclusion, I usually do this at the start of the interview, but let's just the book by the cover for a second. And you have this picture here of Christ raising Lazarus.
Why this picture? Yeah, I mean, this is really the famous Rembrandt. And one of the things that was most astounding to me, kind of just doing just the biblical exegetical work thinking about God's hearing, is that in John 11, when Jesus comes to the grave of Lazarus, something really unique happens here. And even there's some elements of it that have puzzled scholars over the years.
But he delays for some time before he comes. He knows that Lazarus is dying, and yet he delays coming to Bethany. And almost as if he intends to give Lazarus time to die. And he arrives late to the tears of Mary and Martha.
And because he's performed signs up to this point in the Gospel of John, people are murmuring to themselves. Couldn't be saved. This man Lazarus if he had been here. And so Jesus heads to the grave site.
It's interesting. It's a prayer. And this is sort of the thing that's enigmatic about it. It's a prayer that's not really a prayer.
He just says, Father, speaking to his father, he says, Father, thank you that you hear me. I know that you always hear me. And I say this so that the people around me here will sort of know that you hear me. And then he just says, Lazarus, come out.
And so he doesn't say, God, please raise Lazarus from the dead. And he doesn't say, God, make Lazarus get up or something like that. He just, on his own authority, says Lazarus. Get up.
And raises Lazarus from the dead. So one French exegete, I mean, he says that this is a prayer for the gallery he calls in. Jesus is sort of just talking to his father, so other people can kind of hear him, something like that. But I think there's something more significant going on because Jesus is introduced to the beginning of the gospel of John as the word.
He's the word who is God and who was with God and who is God. And now when we get to chapter 11, we find that Jesus, the word, is the word who's always heard by the Father. There's something about Jesus as the word of God, who's, there's something about him that's then always heard. And on account of being always heard by the Father, he raises Lazarus from the dead.
And so I think that's interesting. And I think for me, I've been captivated by this image of Jesus as the always heard word. He's, and so as a, as Christians and as a work of Christian theology, as the book is, the always being heard by the Father coming back to that topic earlier, and perhaps I should have mentioned it then, the always being heard is on account of Jesus as the always heard word and being ignited to the one who is always heard. So I'm glad we came back to this.
Yes. I'd forgotten that part. Right. When I was an undergrad, I wrote, well, I thought it was a killer paper on Jesus as being the enunciated word, but I never thought of him being the heard word by the Lord.
So thank you for bringing that out. When I have credit to that, which I acknowledge in the book is really came out of a pithy comment made by Kevin Van Hooser, who's an American theologian in it, for the Evangelical of any school. I was having a conversation with him. He said, it's almost as if you could say, Jesus is the always heard word and that's not.
Well, I mean, if you're inspired by comments, throw away comments even if I will to sort from then who's here, probably in a good spot. Okay. Yes. Yeah.
Help us even, to some extent you could draw a shift between, testament between the coming of Christ. What difference does it make for us to have that confidence of being one with the always heard word? When you do see in the Old Testament, I mean, you see, especially in the prophets, you see a lot of contingency wrapped up with God's hearing. And so, I mean, there are places where God says to the people Israel, I will not hear you because of your sin.
No. Now, of course that doesn't mean that God doesn't know what they're saying. It doesn't mean that he's unaware or something, but it's a sort of pauches choice to not attend to their cries. At one point, God tells Jeremiah, don't even pray for these people because I will not listen.
And so, on account of sin. And so, but of course, as Christians, Jesus is dealt with our sin in a really kind of final and consonant way. And so, I do think that always of the always heard word, you know, that's what becomes manifest with the work of Christ. Now, on account of being united to the always heard word, that contingency, I think, is in some ways modified or you might even say entirely eradicated.
I do want to leave a place for, there are warnings in the New Testament about the way our sin, of course, is a sort of conscious choice to turn from God. And in doing that, I think there's something there in terms of the way my fellowship was got as then disrupted on account of sin. And so, we could say more about that. Peter warns us, you know, specifically, well, otherwise, in an understanding way that your prayers may not be hindered.
Yeah, as Mary Mann, now that one haunts me, but there's your answer to it too. And so, I do think about that one. But yet, there's something about being united to the always heard word that gives me a kind of confidence that what Christ has done through cross resurrection. That allows me to continue to be heard even in my fallenness and broken this on account of God's grace and on account of Christ's perfect work for us.
So, I do think there's a transformation that happens there between the Old Testament and the contingency we find there and then the New Testament. Again, not that I would say it's a different kind of contingency and a kind of certainty that we have as being united to Christ. Yeah. So, I just got to wonder, you've kind of alluded to this a little bit, but this took quite a while to write.
What was it like just meditating on this and studying this so deeply for years and years? Well, I really enjoyed getting to take it slow in some ways. And I think it gave me time to, one really kind of explore in the literature and find things like some of the social scientific literature on attunement and some of the neurological things that are going on when we're heard by another. So, that was helpful.
But I think it also forced me to ask many, many times over four years of research and writing, am I a good listener? And do I hear others well? And if I'm one who has been heard, am I listening to others well? I think it formed me in that particular way.
On a really personal note, one of the things that I found that was really significant was reading about the way we're heard in our hardship and in our suffering and just walking through something that was really personally challenging. Once I was already studying this and coming, kind of being thrown back on to these passages and talk about God hearing us or really identifying with biblical characters who were crying out to be heard by God. And I began to realize what an incredible consolation it is in our suffering to be heard by God. That there's something real and significant about the experience of being heard, even if that doesn't always mean I get all the things that I'm writing for in a sort of really crude sense.
And so you're the campus minister for crew at Ohio University. How do you think this has helped you minister in that context? Yeah, a couple of different ways. I mean, one is asking myself, am I a good listener?
I'm engaging with people all the time who are talking and often talking about challenging things in their lives. And so, one is being a good listener. I mean, two, I think that God hears us on account of Christ as part of the good news of the Gospel. And so, I mean, I think this is wrapped up with the work of Christ for us.
And so, when I think about the hardships and sufferings that others are walking through, one of the things I want to do is I want to listen to them well, but I also want to point them to the biblical truths that God hears them in their suffering and misery and that he's present with them and not well. They're not well. And so, that would be another way. And then I think too, and we haven't talked about this yet, but there's also something eschatological about God's hearing that even in our current suffering and pain, being able to point people to the eschat.
And being able to point people to the eschatological nature of God's hearing, which is that not only that we're always heard now, but that not only that we're always heard now, and not only that Christ is the fulfillment of all that we've asked for, but that his work will bring to completion our deepest longings. And so, there is a sense in which the entire sweep of the Christian's eteriology, the understanding of salvation, consummates with us being heard, in some way that all of our deepest longings and needs are met and that God knows what we're experiencing. And the other thing, perhaps surprisingly, and this comes out in the book in several places, but I want an understanding of God's hearing to push against really strong notions of divine empathy. And we haven't talked about this much, but it comes out in conversations with students all the time.
Often when someone is suffering, they think to themselves, what I really want is I want somebody who understands what I'm going through. And what that means is I really, when I'm suffering, that God really cares about me. God is suffering too. Now the hard part is, of course, in the incarnation Christ suffered according to his human nature.
That's the way the church has historically talked about. He suffers according to his human nature, but he's impossible according to his divine nature. And part of what that means is that, yes, in the incarnation, God has identified with us in our brokenness and in our need. But that doesn't mean God is eternally suffering with me.
And what I want to do is I want to lift students' eyes up. I mean, others' eyes up in their suffering in such a way that they're reminded that God isn't a fellow victim with them in their suffering. He's not just feeling what they're feeling. He's actually all powerful.
All good. And loves them. And is actually capable of conquering over their suffering, both in their present circumstances, but of course eschatologically. And so for those reasons, I really want people to know that they're hurt by God.
And that doesn't mean that God is just empathizing or feeling what they feel. Violating the history of doctrine and the empathetic. That is a wonderful, passionate implication of this. Thank you for writing it.
And again, if you've been listening and you've been intrigued, this is the Lord who listens, Dogmatic and Korean to God is here with Charles Sommer IV. If you can get it at a prill or through many libraries, I encourage you to pick it up. It's actually only 207 pages long. I will give you quite the compliment in grad school.
Obviously, I learned one of the first things you should be doing is bibliography. And this was at first a surprisingly small bibliography. But it is well for reasons to discuss. But also, as we convoluted it, it's very broad, ranging in multiple fields and engaging very deeply with those sources.
So well done on that. And again, we'd commend it to those who are intrigued and who can. Is there anything else we can look forward to seeing from you? Right now, the only thing I've got going is just a few short articles that I've published.
The most, the one that's forthcoming in October is with Crato Magazine. So, CratoMag.com, I believe. But I was an issue with the magazine coming out on Boethius. And so I'm really excited about the article because I'm for Boethius, you know, this kind of father of medieval thought in some ways.
And some of the distinctions that I'm drawing out in this book are really, really important to Boethius. And so particularly a strong distinction between God and creation. And not seeing those as two poles on a spectrum, but as two radically different ontological realities. And for Boethius, that has really a significant pastoral consequence.
I'm arguing that the consolation of philosophy is in fact that kind of consolation is in fact dependent on a strong, creative, creature distinction. So I'm really looking forward to that coming out. And I'm really looking forward to reading the other essays in the magazine as well. Now I am too.
Thank you. All right. Well, thank you all for listening. Thank you, Mr.
Helmer, for joining us. All right. That was your... So you have a great day.
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