Making Peace with the Proximate: Vocation, Faithfulness, and the Questions That Shape a Life | Steve

What does it mean to give yourself fully to something — a marriage, a calling, a city, a cause — and still make peace with the fact that you won't get everything you hoped for? In this episode of The Upwards Podcast, host John Terrill sits down with professor, author, and longtime friend Steve Garber for a wide-ranging conversation about vocation, faithfulness in a particular place over time, and the trap of dualism.

Drawing on literature, theology, biography, and lived experience, Steve invites listeners into the central question of his new book, Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate - Is it worth doing something that matters, even when you don’t get everything you hoped for?

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

· Introduction: Steve Garber and the questions that have shaped his life and writing

· Steve’s father, plant pathology, and the question of germination: how a scientist’s work became a metaphor for vocation

· Dropping out of college, living in communes, and what those years taught Steve about the nature of learning

· “Common grace for the common good”: why a theology of common grace matters for how we work in the world

· “Vocation is integral, not incidental”: what it means to live seamlessly, without dualism

· Can you know the world and still love it? Making peace with the proximate: the essay that became a life philosophy

· Who is this book written for? How Steve’s audience has grown from university students to the whole world

· Telos and praxis: the fundamental question of the book — is it worth doing something that matters if you don’t get everything you hoped for?

· Already but not yet: Tolkien, Frodo, and what the last pages of The Return of the King taught Steve in his 60s that he missed at 20

· The Clapham Community, Wendell Berry, and why commitment to a people and a place matters

· NT Wright on joy and sorrow woven into the fabric of a life

· The perennial question: What does it mean to be human in 2026?

· What Steve may write next: pedagogy and learning “over the shoulder and through the heart”

ABOUT STEVE GARBER

Steven Garber was professor of marketplace theology and leadership at Regent College, Vancouver, and the principal of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture. A consultant to foundations, corporations, and schools, he is a teacher of many people in many places. His books include Visions of Vocation and The Fabric of Faithfulness, and he is a contributor to the books Faith Goes to Work: Reflections from the Marketplace and Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalogue.

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

· Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate by Steve Garber (Paraclete Press, 2026)

· The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior by Steve Garber (IVP, 1996; revised ed. 2007)

· Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good by Steve Garber (IVP, 2014)

· The Lord of the Rings (The Return of the King) by J.R.R. Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1955)

· The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (Knopf, 1961)

· Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)