An Interview with Travis Pickell, Author of “Burdened Agency”

Travis Pickell is an assistant professor of theology and ethics at George Fox University, where he also directs the Character Virtue Initiative and the Cornerstone Core curriculum. The University of Notre Dame Press is thrilled to publish his newest book, Burdened Agency: Christian Theology and End-of-Life Ethics (August 2024). He recently answered some of our questions about his research and writing processes.

What observations about the current cultural climate motivated you to write this book? 

The book really is rooted in one central observation that is named by the titular phrase “burdened agency.” Basically, what I began to notice—both as a student of medical ethics and as a patient in the hospital—was that increasingly people are being asked to make concrete choices about when and how they (or their loved ones) die, while at the same time also living in a pluralistic context where there is less and less stable cultural guidance about how to make such choices. This presents us with both a “burden of agency” and a “burden of reflexivity” on our agency that is very difficult to navigate both individually and socially.

The more I thought about this, the more I came to see it as the perhaps inevitable outcome of certain presuppositions baked into the broader culture and into modern medicine itself—basic assumptions about the nature of human agency, suffering, control and well-being that Christians have good reasons for questioning.

Certainly these are unprecedented times in the United States, Europe, and around the world. What can readers find in your book that will resonate with them during this era?

The experience I’ve described, and my analysis of it, seems to resonate with healthcare professionals on the one hand and with folks who have helped loved ones try to navigate the world of modern medicine at the end of life on the other. The book puts words to the perplexing nature of the situation, but also shines a light on how the predominant alternatives to medicalized dying (colloquially speaking: hospice and hemlock) both often share in the very presuppositions of the medical establishment named above.

There are broader dynamics at play, as well—dynamics like globalization and the rise of cultural pluralism and secularization, the rapid advancement of technology, and the ongoing economic drive toward efficiency and economies of scale. All of these drive the dual movement of burdened agency, not only in medicine and healthcare, but across a number of spheres of human life, including education, politics, and media and communications. I hope folks who resonate with the notion of burdened agency will apply it as a conceptual tool in these areas, and others as well.

How did you research this book?

I mentioned that the book began as an inquiry into things I was noticing as a patient in the cancer ward of my local hospital. It was this experience that made me realize how modern healthcare arises from basic assumptions about of human agency, suffering, control and well-being. My research began with sharing this realization with friends who are doctors, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners, and learning more about how my experience did (or didn’t) resonate with their own. I spent a lot of time in and around the hospital even after my own illness was over—as a palliative care ethics intern, as a member of the hospital ethics committee, and as an instructor in bioethics.

These assumptions, incidentally, were ones that I realized I myself had been holding for some time. It was not until I began to wrestle with my own sense of finitude and mortality that I came to deeply question the adequacy of my uncritical acceptance of the broader cultural framework, especially about independence and control as central aspects of human agency and well-being.

In searching for answers, I was led more and more deeply into my own Christian theological tradition. As I explored the history of Christian reflections on suffering and theological anthropology, especially, I realized that two things were paradoxically true at the same time: Christianity has been implicated in the development of the modern social imaginary that fuels burdened agency, but Christianity also has the seeds for a counter-formation into a different social imaginary, one that sees suffering as potentially meaningful, that does not idolize independence and control, and that is based in the understanding of the human condition as fundamentally receptive, rather than unilaterally active. 

What did you learn while writing?

I learned so much while writing this book! (As any writer knows, much of what I learned never made it into the book: you have to kill your darlings.) One thing I learned is that issues like this are complicated, and can be approached from many different angles. For this reason, most people tend to approach them from a fairly narrow academic disciplinary perspective—but there is real value to an interdisciplinary approach. This book draws on sociological and cultural analysis, medical anthropology, history of ideas, religious studies, moral philosophy, and systematic theology, just to name a few! For those who have the time and bandwidth to do this, it can allow for insights that cannot be had in a narrower disciplinary mode of inquiry. 

In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

This is my first book, and I am not sure I appreciated the difference between writing a book and writing a series of chapter-length essays. When I set out, I did not have the whole picture in view, but rather a number of parts that intuition told me were related to one another. It was not until I was deep into my research that I saw how the parts held together.  

Which theologians are the biggest influence on you and your work?

Coming out of seminary, I told my doctoral advisors my plan of study was to continue to immerse myself in the work of Augustine of Hippo and Karl Barth, and undoubtedly these two thinkers have had the deepest influence on me. Other influential theologians come up from time to time in the book, sometimes only in footnotes (folks like Sarah Coakley, Rowan Williams, John Paul II, C. S. Lewis, Frederick Buechner, Karl Rahner, John Calvin, Josef Pieper, Simone Weil, and Stanley Hauerwas).

What is your writing schedule like?

I teach at a university with a Christian liberal arts heritage, which means that teaching and administration responsibilities make regular writing difficult at times. I tend to write in spurts, especially when I experience the happy coincidence of extended free time and urgent writing deadlines. That said, I have tried to integrate academic writing into my preparation for the classes I teach and even into the administrative tasks, which often revolve around faculty development around issues related to the integration of faith and character virtue in the professions and in the academic disciplines.  

What advice would you give to a writer who wants to start a book founded on Catholic theology?

I am not a Catholic theologian, though I have a deep, deep respect for the Catholic theological and intellectual tradition. I would say that my book would likely resonate with a book on the topic founded on Catholic theology, but my own approach is more in the vein of C. S. Lewis’s “mere Christianity.” Of course, it would be impossible to ignore the specifically Catholic contributions to my theological account of “the spirituality of martyrdom” and “ethics of dispossession,” two key aspects of my proposed response to burdened agency.   

Who would you like to read Burdened Agency and why?

In addition to scholars of religious and theological ethics, I would be especially pleased if Christian healthcare professionals read the book, as they are the on the frontlines of facing the dynamics I describe. I think it would be consoling to them to know that the issues they face are rooted in deeper social and cultural movements, but that there is another way to inhabit this world, one rooted in a faithfully receptive posture toward God that witnesses to the truest way of being human—a way that we glimpse in Christ’s own way of being human. 

What books are you currently reading?

I’ve been working my way through Luke Bretherton’s A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well. I am also reading Watership Down with one daughter and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with another. Finally, I’ve been getting into fly fishing since I moved to Oregon, so I am reading David James Duncan’s collection of essays, My Story as Told by Water, as well as Madelynne Diness Sheehan’s Fishing in Oregon: The Complete Oregon Fishing Guide (12th ed). 

What project are you working on next?

I am working on a couple projects right now. One is an account of character virtue education that emphasizes the difference a specifically Christian theological approach makes, as opposed to the more widespread neo-Aristotelian model. The second, and larger, project is about what I am calling “Moral Friction.” My sense is that our world is much too driven by what Byung-Chul Han calls “the Smooth,” and that this is what is behind the drive toward things like Chat-GPT (in the academy) or biomedical moral enhancement (in the medical establishment). In response, I’m working out an account of the fundamental role of resistance and struggle (friction) in the development of character and in the moral, intellectual, and spiritual life more broadly. I’m taking an interdisciplinary approach that investigates the question from the perspectives of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, philosophy of attention, and, of course, Christian theology.

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