As one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, a New York Times bestselling author and a featured speaker on Oprah’s 2014 "Life You Want" tour, Rob Bell knows how to reach an audience about spirituality. He hopes to do just that at the Carolina Theatre of Durham on Monday night as part of his "Everything is Spiritual" tour.
Bell spoke to Arts & Culture Editor Sarah Vassello about his voice, Christianity and the need to create.
The Daily Tar Heel: I read that you’re trying to approach Christianity as an eastern religion. Is that true? What’s the intention behind that?
Rob Bell: I have no idea what that means. I don’t know who said that, and I don’t really have much interest in Christianity — it sounds like a big, bulky word, you know what I mean?
When I was young, I first heard a lot of stories about Jesus, and I found Jesus utterly compelling, and I still do. And his message of grace and love and compassion and nonviolence has shaped me, and I believe it’s something the world needs more than ever. Learning how to worry less, learning how to forgive, learning how to live intentional lives of love and compassion — I think we need his life and teaching and message more than ever. I always found Jesus terribly, terribly compelling, and I still do more than ever, but as far as trying to promote a particular religion or something, I just think he’s way bigger than any sort of label or category.
DTH: What brought you to this path?
RB: I love to make things, whether it’s talk or a podcast or a film or a book or to create an event. I love to create spaces where people can hear whatever it is they need to hear.
It started a long time ago with me. It started with a sermon — I wanted to recapture the sermon as the art form that it is as the guerrilla theater that meets performance art. It’s just beautiful. When Martin Luther King does “I Have a Dream,” that’s just beautiful and provocative and unsettling and visionary and disturbing and healing, you know what I mean? That’s a sermon, and for so many people this spoken word art form in our culture has been hijacked — hijacked for politics, hijacked to raise money to build bigger empires, hijacked with just basic religious propaganda, just telling people what they’ve already heard a thousand times and thinking that’s new life.
So I started out, and then I got the chance to write some books, and then we started going on tour and doing clubs and theaters, and so it’s all been sort of the endless evolution because I think we want to be inspired. We want language that helps explain our experiences. We want to understand our interior life better so we can act in the world with more intentionality. That’s what I do, and I love the work. I love it now more than ever.