Luke Burgis: belief

Transcript context

…Now, your own Cluny Institute, do you think of it as closer to a monastery, a salon, a talent network, a way of organizing a Christian counter elite, all of those? How’s the way you would present what it is or what it does? I would think of it as trying to build a talent network and forming a kind of artist colony and workshop for people that have a religious sense or sensibility, that are open to the transcendent, that are smart, that care about serious ideas, and that want to build real things in the world, that really care about the vector of innovation. It’s not just building, but it’s like a step back, what should we be building? Trying to find as many of those people as possible in the world. It’s got a couple of different functions. One of them is it’s trying to operate as a bat signal, putting things out into the world that bring the right people out of the woodwork. That’s certainly happening. Then there’s a part of it where I want to work with people that are able to work at the intersection of what I call Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. We don’t have to silo those things. I think that Silicon Valley, for instance, would be healthier if it actually wasn’t as allergic to religious thinking, for instance. I think religious thinking could do Silicon Valley a lot of good. I’m betting that if we can begin to find that network, and invest in that talent network, that 10 or 20 years from now, it will be building some of the most important things in the world. I don’t just mean companies. I mean cultural things, aesthetic things, workshops, things that will produce new forms of community, maybe even a model for a new institution. The reason that I am so struck by the story of the original Cluny is that it was an entirely new kind of institution in its day. Even legally speaking, right? Its original charter, the guy that gave all of the money renounced his right to have anything to do with the way that it operated. It formed a network of over 1,200 Cluniac monasteries. My imagination is struck by, “Well, what does that look like today if we can have networked workshops of people that are all drawing inspiration, and talking about ideas that are open to the religious sense?” The original Cluny was also a pioneer of accounting techniques. Is that correct?…

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