 Richard, the title of your book offers an intriguing metaphor, tilling the church. Of course in a garden, tilling involves readying the soil for planting, breaking up hardened soil, turning it over, maybe watering it to make it ready. How should tilling be understood vis-a-vis the church? Thanks, Steve. Definitely with all those intentions really. So it's a title I've taken from Pope Francis's Laudato, so he's document on the environment, so he's obviously talking explicitly about care for the earth. I apply that to the church in the sense of, as a church we need to break up those things that become obstacles to growth, we need to provide the best possible conditions for the thriving of the Christian community. But also the other thing I've added to it is we need to look ahead. So how does tilling prepare us for what we don't even know is to come yet? And yet we are able as a church to be adaptive to the circumstances that we face. So all of those are the points I try to develop in the context of the book. You have been teaching ecclesiology for 30 years. How have your own perceptions of the church changed over that period? And how is the maturation of your thought manifest in this book? Teaching for 30 years, you get less for murder in some places. So I try to remember lately, what did I feel when I first started doing this? I was straight out of doctoral studies. I think what was true then, as is still true now, is a sense that the church is nowhere near that the finish of what it needs to be, if it's genuinely to be about the gospel and engaging creatively with the world. I think what's significant about this book that I've come to realize has been also influential in my teaching is the subtitle, which is an unfinished project. And that, I think, is probably my dominant sense of the church, that it's a project that we need. It's not something you get to the end of. But what I think we can offer as theologians and what I try to do in my teaching and in other times I speak to people about the church is provide resources for how you go about that project. So I think that the thing is the thing that has become most clear for me over the years is that theology is about resourcing the life of the church rather than providing answers to the life of the church. Pope Francis and Carl Rahner are both referenced many times in this book's pages. How have they inspired your work and this work? Well, Rahner has, of course, been the most significant figure on my work for more than 30 years, 40 years probably. And I still think that Rahner's work, Rahner's understanding of the life of faith, the place of the church in society and so on, has an enormous amount to offer. Again, in the sense of being a resource, not an answer, but a resource for how we think about it. With Pope Francis, even though he's only been Pope now for almost 10 years, I think he has shifted the life of the church. I think he has shifted the way we engage with the society beyond ourselves. I think he's also shifted, particularly through his emphasis on synodality, how we think about the inner dynamics of the church. So I didn't set out deliberately to marry the two of them, but it seemed to me that the longer I worked on this book, that there are so many natural convergences between Rahner's thought and what Francis is trying to do, that it made sense to me to try and bring the two into, if not explicit conversation, but at least to show how they might be, those convergences and the mutuality between them might become clearer. And that's not an explicit project of the book, but certainly a subtext of the book. One cannot read telling the church without recognizing the centrality that you afford to grace, which you refer to as the vascular system of the church. What message about grace is most important for your audience to understand? Now, this, of course, is where the Rahner influence is most strong, because grace is central to his whole theology. In terms of what it means for the life of the church and why I describe grace as being the vascular system of the church, I have learned over the years with students, particularly, often they come at the church as an object, as a thing, and particularly in terms of structures and institutions and so on. So I want them to try and understand that the church is part of our life of faith and grace is, of course, central to that life of faith. It's the encounter with God that opens us to a sense of possibility, to something more than we have at the moment. And that is very explicitly how I'm thinking about the life of the church in this book, that God is constantly calling us to be more than we are at the moment, to engage in new ways in our society, to reflect on our own failures. And because much of the book is written in the light of the abuse crisis. So what does that mean in terms of the church's own need for forgiveness, but also in terms of our need to commit to different ways of acting? So for me, all of those are associated with grace and with the whole notion of pilgrimage, that's also central to the book, that it's grace that draws us in the Holy Spirit on that pilgrimage into a future where we have to live evermore by faith. On page 153, you write, and I'll quote directly here, Openness to Grace is crucial as the church in its various locations contemplates new circumstances and questions, all of which bring with them the possibility of change in the ecclesial community's self-understanding and practice. Is the church, especially in Western Europe and the United States, ready for this grace-inspired openness to change? That's the $64,000 question, isn't it? I think it'd be safe to say that as a whole, the answer would probably be no. In parts, the answer would definitely be yes. What I think is inescapable is that the circumstances in which we operate as a church change. That for me is incontestable, that the world does not look the way in 2022, the way it looked in 1992 when I started teaching. And even in the last few years, take COVID, for example, COVID changed the world and had a profound impact on the life of the church. And my thesis about all of this in terms of the book is unless we're at least willing to let in that these are questions to us that we need to address, then I think as a church, we would increasingly fail to be able to talk to our own time. So what I try to do is to name some of the things we need to address as church in our present time and then to go back to my first answer, to think about the resources that we have that a theology of church can provide. Not to give us the answers to us, to those questions and those new needs, but to encourage us to keep engaging with them. So if there's one sort of sub theme in this whole book that I'd want to emphasize in response to your question, it's the need to keep engaging with the world that we are part of. Now, I think Pope Francis and Synodality is moving us even farther down that road. And we know that the response to that has been uneven across the church, but where it has been positive, where people have begun to pick it up and run with it, we see that the creativity that there is in the life of faith can really begin to emerge. So and that's certainly what I'd wish for the church as a whole across all of its contexts. Going back to the concept of telling, you seem to deliberately avoid designating any special group within the church, for example, that you ordained as the tillers is telling, as you see it, a mission involving the entire ecclesial community. And if so, how might the church manifest this common mission among people of God? The short answer to that is definitely yes, that that that tilling is for everyone. I did very deliberately want to develop a theology in this book that emphasizes that the church is the whole people of God. Now, that's obviously not a new concept. That's not particular to me. But whenever we narrow church down to structures or particular ministries, it means lots of other people simply become passengers. Again, one question I often use with students when talking about the church is, does the way you use the term the church, just that description, does it include yourself? And if it doesn't include yourself, why not? Because then if it if we're not included in how we talk about the church, the church simply becomes somebody else and not me. So there's a way in which I can be the church for the people who are part of my life that nobody else can be. You know, Pope Francis is not going to do that, but I can do that. So I think to develop our understanding of church that puts the emphasis on the whole community of the baptized, and not to necessarily do things that are spectacular and get in the news, but to to be people of faith who translate that faith into action and how they engage with the people in their life. That is being church and that is what all of us can do. And even more particularly, it's what grace calls all of us to do. And Richard, this is your final question. What is your hope for this book? I said to someone the other day, there's, you know, sales are nice, people buy the book, I'll be happy. But there's something more fundamental than sales and that for me is engagement. You know, I wrote this book out of, as I reflect in the introduction, the preface, out of 30 years of teaching, but also 30 years of engaging with the life of the church in lots and lots of different contexts. And what all of that has come to mean for me is that to hear a lot of people's unhappiness about the church, their hopes about the church, their frustrations. And what I want to provide through this book, again, use my word of the day, is resources for how you might think about and deal with some of those frustrations. So it's engagement with what the book seeks to be about, not even with the book itself, but with how the book sees the church as an unfinished project, how it offers guides for thinking about that project, and how if we collectively are engaging in that project, we do have a different church, not a perfect church, not a church that will never need to change again, but a church that is on a path that is the path of pilgrimage, of being able to respond to the challenges, confident that the Lord is with us, that we are being led by the Holy Spirit, and that therefore we have something to offer to our world. So there are my hopes for the book. Well, Richard, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.