New Materalism or Eco-Socialism

This forum features the presentation by Dr. Jan Rehmann during the spring 2025 Theology and Religion in the Capitalocene Working group, along with the responses by Joerg Rieger and George Schmidt. We are happy to reproduce this paper in its entirety here.

Contributors: Jan Rehmann, Joerg Rieger, George Schmidt

Jan Rehmann

30 May 2026

As indicated by the book title, Jörg Rieger’s project of an updated liberation theology has a particular “setting in life”: in the “Capitalocene”, a particular world-ecology characterized by the accumulation of capital, this seemingly unstoppable, crushing force that Marx characterized with the commandment: “Accumulate, accumulate, this is Moses and the Prophets” (C 1, 742). This does of course not mean that pre-capitalist Empires were innocent in terms of ecological destruction, but it was only capitalism that succeeded in locking the accumulation drive and its ecological destruction in the economic deep structure of society. As Jason Moore argues, the concept of the Anthropocene makes sense as a deliberate abstraction in the discipline of geology: geologists look for key markers in the stratigraphic layer (e.g. plastics, nuclear waste and chicken bones) that indicate when and how humanity in general became a predominant geological force; but it is useless when it comes to identifying the driving forces of ecological devastation; and it is even misleading insofar as it blames the victims of exploitation, violence, and poverty (Moore 2019; cf. Rieger 27). Rieger is right when he argues that the theological critique needs to pay more attention to the capitalist “treadmill of production” because the incentivization of consumerism is directly tied to the capitalist need for accumulation: “Blaming consumers for consumerism not only fails to address what drives the production of consumers’ desires; it also covers up the causes.” (37) Indeed, theology as a liberating, prophetic force is well advised to confront the voracious capitalist Moloch itself; it is tasked to challenge the “structural sins” of an idolatrous system, our institutionalized dance around the “golden calf” and its death-dealing ideological values.

I also agree with Rieger’s critique of “oppression Olympics” (15) and his strategic orientation towards a connective class politics. In order to identify and to develop the points of intersection, we need to overcome all kinds of reductionism -- be it class reductionism or race reductionism or gender reductionism – that essentialize a singular category of domination and make it trump all other categories (143, 159 et sqq.). When Rieger argues that “class analysis is necessary for a deeper understanding of the systemic natures of racism and sexism” (188), this applies to an understanding of the ecological destruction as well. The ecology movement needs to develop a sound and visible strategy of a social-ecological transformation that has the chance of being actively supported by the working class and labor movement. As long as ecology is predominantly perceived as an issue of an educated professional class, as long as half-hearted ecological policies are implemented from above and in the framework of neoliberalism, rightwing populism or even “fossil fascism” will win. It is working people who have the most direct and the most practical knowledge about the ecological impact of their labor and therefore the potential power of transforming the mode of (re-)production in a sustainable way. In this dangerous political conjuncture, Rieger’s book is an important contribution for the development of an eco-socialist movement and a broad popular front, in particular (but not only) addressed to theologians and people of faith.

An uneasy alliance

My critical remarks refer to Rieger’s discussion of so-called “New Materialism” in chapter 2, which I think is shot through by a contradictory assessment: On the one hand he praises the achievements of “New Materialism”, in particular its focus on “the parallels between human and nonhuman agency” (40), he accepts its narrative that “wildfires have some agency” (83), and he advocates for an alliance between the labor movement and “all the nonhuman movements of nature and the earth that new materialists have been exploring” (87); on the other hand, he finds it “surprising” that new materialisms “hardly mention labor or work” (68); all in all, “people who have to work for a living are oddly absent” (69). And he concludes that “the interaction of labor and nature needs further investigation” (72).

I’d like to take this concluding remark as a starting point in order to support Rieger’s criticism and to push it further. In fact, it is not “surprising” at all that “new materialists” are not interested in human labor. Most of them would argue that Rieger’s focus on labor and class is guilty of “anthropocentrism”, of a typical Western exceptionalism, of which Marxism and other varieties of “critical theory” are just an integral part. Tamsin Jones observes that new materialism aligns itself with a posthumanism that does not only advocate for the displacement of the human subject as the sovereign master, but also “challenges the notion that there is any longer such a discrete entity in nature as the human”. According to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, the ontological reorientation of new materialism is resonant with and informed by a new paradigm “that shunts us out of the realm of the human and into the realm of the posthuman” (2010, pp. 17, cf. 6 et sq.). As Andreas Malm quips, new materialists “would censure Marx for overlooking the agency of the cobwebs as such, their sticky silk, the crust on which they stand and, in the case of the bee, the agency of the honeycomb cells” (Malm 2018, 87). “New materialism” levels down the qualitative differences of emergent matter and thereby misses the specific materiality of human evolution and life centered on labor, without which humans could not survive. Such a reductionism is incompatible with Rieger’s theological endeavor to conceptualize productive and reproductive labor with the help of Paul Tillich’s concept of “ultimate concern” (pp. 99 et sqq.).

Given the tradition of their discipline, theologians are in danger of shifting all too easily from one variety of antihumanism to the next one, i.e. from an old-school pre-humanistic theism to a post-humanistic blurring of the differences between humans, things and non-human nature. Since I am convinced that that such a transition would jeopardize our specific ethical (and therefore also theological) responsibility, I would like to focus on what I believe is the main controversy between “new materialist” and eco-socialist approaches.

Marx’ particular “naturalism”

Let us begin where the point of controversy is not: Marx did not juxtapose the human and “nature”. The young Marx of The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 argues against Hegel’s idealistic philosophy that a philosophy of praxis must start from “real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature”, and he summarizes his approach by stating that “only naturalism is capable of comprehending the action of world history” (MECW 3, 336). The juxtaposition of humanity and nature is for him a symptom of social alienation from labor (both its products and process) and consequently from the creative potentials of our “species-being”, which is in constant interchange with non-human nature (276 et sq.). The dichotomy between humanity and “nature” can be overcome by “communism”, which he portrays “as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, […] the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man” (296 et sq.), so that the communist society realizes “the complete unity of man with nature—the true resurrection of nature—the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature” (298).

This is the romantic language of a young philosopher, who is just 26 years old. It might be interesting for theologians that this famous critic of religion does not even shy away from describing the reconciliation between humanity and nature with the religious term of “resurrection”. He imagines that the contradictions between the human and non-human nature can be overcome to a point where the two permeate each other and melt into one, to the effect that naturalism and humanism coincide. The romantic language of fusion and identity recedes in Marx’ later writings, but the notion of an intimate interweaving of humans and non-human nature is maintained. Most of Marx’ ecological observations circle around the concept of “metabolism”, which plays a key-role in eco-socialist research. Metabolism was the usual term for what we now call ecology. Marx took it from chemistry, in particular from Justus Liebig, but he transformed it: we as humans are not only part of metabolism by breathing, eating, digesting, excreting, but primarily through labor, by which we mediate and regulate the metabolism with non-human nature.

But this does not mean that the human stands “outside” or “above” nature. As Marx emphasizes in Capital, humans can only proceed “as nature does herself, i.e. […] only change the form of the materials”, and this modification “is constantly helped by natural forces” (C 1, 133 et sq.). The worker “confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands” (C I, 283). Evidently, there is no Cartesian dualism between humans and non-human nature: nature is on all sides of the interaction.

An in-built asymmetry of the metabolic interaction

After having shown that human labor is itself part of nature, Marx tries to capture its specifics as human labor with the famous comparison between the worst human architect and the best bee: the specific quality is that humans build the cell in their mind before they construct it in wax, the result of the labor process has already been conceived by the workers at the beginning (C 1, 284). According to Ernst Bloch, it is “precisely at this point” that human wishes and daydreams are being formed. We need to be aware that the human capacities of long-term anticipation, cooperation, intentionality, planning, daydreaming are still qualities within nature, the product of a long chain of biological evolution.

But this also means that there is an in-built asymmetry in the metabolism between humans and non-human nature. The specific human capacities of anticipation and planning create the possibility of a cultural evolution that proceeds in a much faster rhythm than the biological evolution from which it emerged. As the Berlin school of Critical Psychology has shown, this is connected to the human capacity of objectivization (Vergegenständlichung), by which labor locks anticipated goals and meanings into the things and instruments produced. Every generation builds a world of produced objects that carry objectified meanings, and every new generation that enters this world of things is learning these meanings by practically using these things. These capacities enable humans not only to adapt to given circumstances, but to proactively transform them -- certainly not “alone”, but in co-evolution with climate change and other forces of nature. Andreas Malm tries to conceptualize this complex relationship by the distinction between “substance monism” and “property dualism” or “property pluralism”: the former is directed against any dualism and means that we consist of the same substance as non-human nature; the latter means that human capacities of conscience, anticipation, intentionality are emergent properties that developed their own particular qualities (cf. Malm 2018, 52 et sqq.).

Awareness of a deep ambivalence of the human condition

Here we get to the decisive point of controversy between eco-socialists and “new materialists”, who suspect that Marx’s argument is just another regress to human exceptionalism, where humans are again the crown of creation or of evolution. This would certainly be the case if we understood the assessment of our own specific species-nature as a normative statement about our “superiority”. But the asymmetry in the metabolic interaction is not to be celebrated as a culmination of evolution –by what criterion would human’s labor be “superior”, for example, to the plants’ enviable capacities of photosynthesis? --, but to be analyzed in its deep ambivalence: the human capacities of transforming nature by labor can be a productive force and a destructive force, even at the same time (since the long-lasting effects of our metabolic interactions are usually unconscious). These capacities can in principle be embedded in cooperative relationships both among humans and with non-human nature in the sense of what Ernst Bloch described as an ‘alliance technique’ capable of building ‘alliances with nature’ that are mediated with the co-productivity of nature’; but in real history, in particular in the framework of class societies, these capacities have been narrowed down to what Horkheimer and Adorno criticized as “instrumental reason”: the “disease” that affects reason, that is, its instrumental character, is “inseparable from the nature of reason in civilization as we have known it’, because it was born from our “urge to dominate nature”. As long as we do not understand our own reason, as long as we are not capable of self-critically transform it into a medium of reconciliation, the subjugation of nature reverts into the subjugation of humans, and vice versa.

Capitalism’s metabolic rift

Marx’s Capital is to a large part an exploration of what happens when the metabolic interaction mediated by labor oriented towards use values is subjugated to the capitalist rule of exchange values and the accumulation of profit. Marx’s emphasis is clearly on the exploitation and immiseration of labor and the working class. But when he explores capitalist agriculture, he recognizes the ecological consequences of what Liebig has described as “robbery” (Raubbau) of the soil. He observes how capitalist agriculture destroys the “metabolic interaction between man and the earth”, that is, “it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing” and thus destroys “the lasting fertility of the soil”. The products of the earth move to the cities and concentrate there as waste polluting the rivers and filling the dumping grounds. The nutrients removed from the soil do not return to the soil, which is being depleted on the long run. Industrial agriculture enhances short-time productivity, but it is doing so “by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the worker” (C 1, 637 et sq.) We see here that Marx considers the exploitation of the working class and of the earth as a simultaneous and intimately connected process. Both are being placed on the same level.

Marx analyzes this rupture as an “irreparable rift” in the metabolic interaction (C 3, 949), which cannot be resolved in the framework of the capitalist system. One of the major eco-socialist schools, the “metabolic rift” approach around John Bellamy Foster and others, took up Marx’ analysis of industrial agriculture and showed that his diagnosis of an “irreparable rift” also applies to different areas of capitalist production and reproduction, whose devastating ecological consequences were not yet on the radar screen of Marx and Engels. When we are confronted today with the fact that already six out of the nine planetary boundaries are exceeded -- not only climate change, but also e.g. the loss of biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle --, this is ultimately caused by the contradiction between the capitalist juggernaut of endless accumulation and the limited sources and sinks of nature.

What gets lost in the flat ontology of “new materialism”

This allows us to get back to Rieger’s wished-for alliance with “New Materialism”. From the outset, New Materialists did not only position themselves against linguistic constructivism, but also against historical materialism and other varieties of critical theory. Attempts of a philosophy of praxis are countered in the name of Gilles Deleuze’s “affectivity of assemblages”, which unfolds its “agency” without any human intervention. In this vein, Jane Bennett analyzes the assemblages of garbage in the Pacific Ocean in terms of a “vitality of things”, without considering the corporate and consumerist practices that produce such garbage. Agency is transferred to anonymous, meta-historical forces like “matter” or “life”, which leaves no room for conceptualizing structural differences between human and nonhuman forms of agency nor for relations of power and domination among humans (Lettow 2017, 107, 111). Rieger appreciates new materialist approaches because they reclaim the “dialectical legacy” of materialism (135, 141). But this is a misunderstanding: similar to Bergson before, new materialism highlights that matter is in never-ending movement, but it takes out the contractions.

This does of course not mean that New Materialism is worthless. As far as it is based on scientific research, it reminds us of many procedures that connect us to non-human nature: for example, the permanent oscillation between particles and waves, between energy and matter, explored by quantum physics – processes that Karen Barad describes as “intra-active”. Based on the research of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway emphasizes that all cells with a core emerged from bacteria: “Every living thing has emerged and persevered (or not) bathed and swaddled in bacteria and archaea. … to be animal is to become-with bacteria” (Haraway 2016, 64 et sq.). Indeed, we are all in fact “holobionts” (entire beings), mixed creatures, who contain much more genetic information from bacteria than from our own DNA.

But these and many similar findings concern the dimension that Malm described as “substance monism” (2018, 52 et sqq). As far as new materialists align themselves with “posthumanism”, they do not only challenge the role of humans as the crown of evolution (which is a valid criticism), but they also deny any qualitative specifics of human life and labor. This is due to a methodological fallacy that I would characterize as ontological reductionism: the tendency to reduce the different levels of matter to one underlying level, be it physical or biological. By doing so, they miss out that human life – like other life forms -- is a specific emergent property that develops from complex relations between different components of an entity and at the same time constitutes a genuine novelty. Already Marx criticized an “abstract materialism of natural science”, because it excludes the process of human history (C 1, 494 FN). Human capacities do not exist outside nature, but they cannot be reduced to it – similar to a tree that cannot live without the soil it is rooted in, but can also not be reduced to that soil. Instead of an alliance with new-materialist posthumanism, we need a stronger alliance with a critical realism that takes the qualitative differences of emergent properties into consideration.

What is at stake? When we are confronted with capitalism’s devastating consequences for the climate, for biodiversity, for human labor and ultimately the survival of the human species and many other species, it is not sufficient to claim that we are part of ‘nature’, the same “vibrant matter” as worms, bacteria as well as cobwebs and things. Erasing human specificities “absolves humans from their responsibility for the way in which they co-construct themselves through nature” (Räthzel 2021, 798). The notion that humanity – after having destroyed large parts of the planet during the capitalist era – should or even could delegate their specific responsibility to the ants or the beavers indicates an ethical irresponsibility that does not deserve any theological support. “A humanity that has been rendered oblivious to its own responsibility to evolution—a responsibility […] to foster diversity and to provide ecological guidance […] --, is a humanity that betrays its own evolutionary heritage” and represses its ethical obligation to bring about “a creative, not destructive, metabolism with nature” (Bookchin 1995, 83f, 90). While being cognizant of the multiple entanglements between human and non-human life, we need to focus on our species-specific capacities of anticipation, thoughtful evaluation, analysis and transformative creativity. As Rieger aptly demonstrates, it is precisely the capacities of cooperation and democratic planning that are excluded from or hampered by the capitalist treadmill of production. Without the development of these capacities of conscient and proactive transformation, we won’t be able to confront or even adapt to the ecological crisis. We wouldn’t even be able to build the alliances with other parts of nature that are needed for our common survival.

Literature

Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press, 2007

Bloch, Ernst: The Principle of Hope, 3 Volumes, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen

Plaice and Paul Knight, Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press 1986

Bookchin, Murray: The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, Black Rose Books: Montréal, New York, London 1995

Coole, Diana, Samantha Frost (Ed.): New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Duke University Press: Durham & London 2010

Folkers, Andreas: “Was ist neu am neuen Materialismus? – Von der Praxis zum Ereignis”, in: Goll, Tobias, Daniel Keil, Thomas Telios (Eds.): Critical Matter. Diskussionen eines neuen Materialismus, Münster 2013

Foster, John Bellamy: Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature, Monthly Review Press: New York 2000;

Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, Richard York: The Ecological Rift. Capitalism's War on the Earth, New York 2010;

Fraser, Nancy: Cannibal Capitalism. How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and The Planet – and What We Can Do about it, Verso: London, New York;

Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chlutucene, Duke University Press: Durham and London 2016

Haug, Wolfgang Fritz: “Eine kopernikanische Wende der Ökologie? Jason Moores weltökologischer Ansatz und die Philosophie der Praxis”, in: Das Argument 334, 2020, 93-123

Holzkamp, Klaus, Grundlegung der Psychologie, Frankfurt/New York 1985

Horkheimer, Max: Eclipse of Reason (1946), Continuum: New York, 1974

Kahl, Brigitte and Jan Rehmann 2019: “The Ecological Crisis, the Bible, and the Green New Deal. A Theo-Political Analysis”, in: Religious Socialism.Org, Sept. 2019 [https://www.religioussocialism.org/the_ecological_crisis_the_bible_and_the_green_new_deal]

Lettow, Susanne: “Turning the turn: New materialism, historical materialism and critical theory”, in: Thesis Eleven 2017, Vol. 140(1), 2017, 106–121

Malm, Andreas: Fossil Capital. The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Verso: London, New York 2016

Malm, Andreas, The Progress of this Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World, Verso: London, New York 2018

Malm, Andreas and the Zetkin Collective: White Skin, Black Fuel. On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, London, New York 2021

Marx, Karl, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (1867), Penguin Books: London, 1990 (quoted as C 1)

Marx, Karl, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three (1894), Penguin Books: London, 1991 (quoted as C 3)

Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW)

Moore, Jason: Capitalism in the Web of Life. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, Verso: London, New York 2015

Moore, Jason “Who is responsible for the climate crisis?” In: Maize.IO, November 2019 (https://www.maize.io/cultural-factory/what-is-capitalocene/)

Räthzel, Nora: “Society–Labour–Nature: How to Think the Relationships?”, in: Räthzel, Stevis, Uzzell (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies, palgrave macmillan, 2021, 793-814

Rehmann, Jan: Theories of Ideology. The Powers of Alienation and Subjection, Haymarket: Chicago 2014

Rieger, Jörg: “Why Movements Matter Most: Rethinking the New Materialism for Religion and Theology”, in: Rieger and Waggoner (eds.) 2016, 135-156;

Rieger, Jörg and Edward Waggoner (eds): Religious Experience and New Materialism. Movement Matters, palgrave macmillan 2016

Saito, Kohei: Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge, New York 2022.

Professor Jan Rehmann holds two doctorates in Philosophy (Ph.D. and Habilitation) and is an internationally recognized critical theorist and social analyst. He has been teaching social theories, philosophy and modern languages (French and German) at Union Theological Seminary since 1998. He also teaches philosophy at the Free University in Berlin. His publications comprise several monographs, edited books and numerous essays, chapters and dictionary entries. In 2012, his book Max Weber: Modernisierung als passive Revolution received an award for the promotion of excellent publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences by the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels.

Joerg Rieger

30 May 2026

I am grateful to Jan Rehmann for his clear analysis of some of the growing edges of the current debates around the New Materialism. In his deliberations, he also gives important impulses for future conversations between theology and ecology, which deserve to become part of the discussion going forward. Discussions of both of these trajectories are, after all, still in their infancy.

To state it up front, Rehmann and I agree that we need more profound materialist approaches in the study of theology and religion. The still dominant idealist turns in theology are misleading us by pretending that answers to our questions and solutions to our problems spring from great theologians’ minds, both past and present, and that beautiful ideas will save us when someone puts them into practice. Idealist approaches also mistakenly tend to locate the divine in the realm of ideas rather than in the world. Rehmann and I are further in agreement about insufficient and therefore misleading materialisms, especially those that assume reductionist and determinist stances.

At stake in our exchange is the question of the role of the human in materialist thought, and especially in the New Materialism. In my own work, I have argued already a decade ago that the New Materialism needs to pay more attention to human agency and social movements. That is to say, I have never believed that while humanity is a material part of everything else, it is therefore merely another part of everything else. In fact, the only way beyond reductionist and determinist materialisms, it seems to me, is to acknowledge the legacy of dialectical materialism, according to which matter and spirit engage each other mutually. Rehmann doubts that this dialectical legacy applies to New Materialism, and perhaps he is correct. What he calls ontological reductionism is indeed a problem, whether it manifests itself in its physical or biological forms.

My goal here, however, is not to defend the New Materialism but to engage Rehmann’s pursuit of what is the specifically human agency that emerges in the more interesting materialist approaches. Karl Marx’s example of the difference between the worst human architect and the best bee is instructive: in contrast to the bee, even the worst human architect does some conceptual work. As a result, Rehmann asks us to consider the human capacities of long-term anticipation, cooperation, intentionally, planning, and even daydreaming. These capacities, he notes are of course also qualities within nature.

The challenge now, I would argue, is to reclaim these human capacities in the Capitalocene, which has managed to exploit commodify them and make them work for its benefit. In other words, how do we not fall back into the trap of idealism, an ever-present danger for theologians, which overestimates what people can do and thus creates unrealistic expectations for alternative agency, social movements, etc., which are not grounded in material developments and the material formation of power?

Take cooperation as an example. Worker cooperatives, as I have argued, can produce real alternatives to capitalism if workers make decisions about all aspects of work and production, including profit. But cooperative work can also be promoted by capitalism, for instance in reference to the worn paradigm that “everyone can be a leader,” while perpetuating exploitative relationships under the surface. The difference will have to be decided in terms of what Rehmann at one point aptly describes as the “connective class politics,” which I am pursuing in Theology in the Capitalocene. This connective class politics brings together people who have to work for a living—the so-called working class, which is the majority of humanity—but it might also extend to non-human work. The cooperative nature of trees, for instance, which are connected through their root systems and support each other in complex ways, should not be romanticized, but it might provide some guidance in deciding which cooperative process is preferable—the one employed by worker cooperatives or the one employed by somewhat enlightened corporations, where profit continues to trickle up rather than down.

A similar argument can be made for planning. There is the kind of planning that supports the flourishing of life and another kind of planning that is designed to float more and more profit to the top. While the difference seems obvious, materialist thinking is needed to become clearer about the difference and—for theologians—to figure out what planning might be in sync with the divine at work in the world and what planning might not be.

This brings us back to Rehmann’s argument that humans have a particular kind of responsibility that differs from the responsibility of other-than-human nature. While I agree with this statement, I wonder how we can reclaim human responsibility without falling back into the traps of those who want to make all humans responsible for climate change by talking about the Anthropocene. A materialist assessment of the Capitalocene can help here because it reminds us of who is ultimately responsible for the greatest destruction of the planet, without letting anyone of the hook. What can emerge here is an awareness that those of us who are not part of the executive class will only make a difference if we work in solidarity—the solidarity of those who share some collective responsibility but, for this reason, also share some collective power which needs to be reclaimed and organized along class lines if it is to make any difference.

Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.