What causes political polarization, and what can we do about it?

As we head into another (dreaded) year of presidential campaigning, I want to share with you something I read recently that helped me feel just a little less helpless in the face of the widening chasm between political parties.
There’s a lot of data showing that Americans are losing the ability to find common ground across political parties. In the 1970s, legislators of the two parties overlapped on a lot of issues. An impressive 37% of legislators in the House of Representatives were…

What if evangelical Christians lived according to their own declarations?

This week I received the gift of eating dinner with a veritable who’s who of socially conscious evangelical Christians. Jim Wallis, former spiritual advisor to Barack Obama and founder of Sojourners magazine, was in the room. Ruth Lewis Bentley, cofounder of the National Black Evangelical Association. Ruth Padilla DeBorst, reconciliation activist and daughter of liberation theologian René Padilla. Ben Lowe, executive director of A Rocha. Kimberlee Johnson, activist and dean of Palmer…

How to listen for another chapter in your story

This weekend my long-time friend Chris invited a dozen people into a time of guided story-telling at my house. Chris approaches conversation like an artist to a canvas. He brings out the depths in people, whether he’s teaching poetry to middle schoolers, cooking cafeteria meals, or greeting neighbors in the little French town where he now lives. I knew this was going to be good.
As we finished up heaping plates of pork and rice lovingly prepared by our Dominican-American friend, Chris passed…

Skills for productive conversations

In the summer of 2020, David Timmerman, Provost of Carthage College in Kenosha Wisconsin, was scrambling. When the pandemic closed classroom doors across the country, the college was already among the many liberal arts colleges feeling the squeeze of shrinking applicant pools and rising costs. He needed to respond to the politically polarized concerns of parents, students, and staff, all while protecting enrollment numbers and keeping everybody safe.
Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty…

AI, madness, and the future of society

Outliers are the only thing standing between us and madness.”
I scribbled this quote in my notebook during a talk I attended last weekend. The event was a conference on “Living as humans in the machine age.”
I heard about the conference from my son, a college student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He attended the conference with me, and at lunch time, he swiped me into his cafeteria. As we sat eating our enchilada bake and fruit salad, our conversation meandered back through what…

My latest talk: hearing our neighbors’ stories

So I’m sitting in my friend Carla’s kitchen, when in walks a giant pig.
Carla with her son.
At the time, I’m just a year out of college, and I’ve just moved from the Midwest where I grew up to this beautiful Nicaraguan village. The room has dirt floors, and a wall open on one side to let out smoke from the cooking fire. And in walks this giant pig.
Carla reaches over from her bucket seat and slaps that pig on the rump. And she says, “This hog is for Jesus!”
So I ask, Carla, “What do you…

Have you adopted a posture of listening to history?

Last week the college where I work—Wheaton College—released a 122-page report on “the history and legacy of Wheaton College from 1860-2000 with respect to race relations.”
Excerpt from the charter of Wheaton College’s predecessor, the Illinois Institute, 1855. Image from the Historical Review.
As I reflect on what that document means, I am struck by the contrast between two approaches to history: flight or courage. Which is your approach to history?
This report required a massive effort….

There’s something gross you’re not aware of

This week I invite you to think for a minute about… where meat comes from.
I know it might not sound like a topic you asked for when you signed up for this newsletter (especially you vegetarians), but hear me out. We’ll get there.
I live on a property with a field that is too big to make into a garden and too small to warrant buying a tractor, so a few years ago we decided the best use for it would be to raise a few pigs. Which means we’d have to figure out how to kill pigs. And then eat…

Let’s talk about racial capital

Ok, so imagine you’re part of a predominantly white organization. Imagine you’d like that organization to become more diverse. Cool. Now imagine you’re choosing photos for the organization’s website. Whose faces do you include? What percentage of people of color should appear?
Including a higher percentage of people of color in communications than in the organization itself has been shown to sometimes be an effective way to push a company in a helpful direction. But there’s a risk. That’s…

What piano accompaniment taught me about cultural humility

Recall for a moment a time when you entered an unfamiliar cultural setting. What emotions did you feel? Were you hyper-aware of your body and your words? What did you hope would happen, and how did that differ from what actually happened?
One of the most important steps in learning cultural humility is not just to enter new cultural settings, but to reflect on those experiences afterward.
Recently I was remembering one of my first experiences in an unfamiliar culture. During college a…

This Juneteenth, take a next step based on where you’re at

This Monday, Americans celebrate Juneteenth to commemorate the day in 1865 when the news of emancipation reached the last group of enslaved African Americans. Juneteenth has been called the longest-running African American holiday, but many non-Black people learned of Juneteenth only recently when it became a federal holiday in 2021. In this newsletter I’d like to offer suggestions especially for non-Black readers to mark Juneteenth this year with a meaningful step toward addressing…

A technology for social miracle-making

Every year around the longest day of the year, a miracle happens right in front of my house. Beneath long strings of twinkle lights draped across the the oldest black walnut on the block, music rings into the night. Not just any music. The music of miracles.
Technically speaking, you might say it’s not miraculous, it’s just what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence, this week’s fancy term to change the world. But collective effervescence is one of those…

Here’s a gift that can change your life

First I have to tell you about the best gift I ever received,” my friend and colleague Tiffany Eberle Kriner said as she handed out seed packets for my students during a field trip to her family farm. She told how just after they moved to this property, her husband spent months incapacitated from an injury. She had carried the physical and emotional burden of raising their first sheep, pigs, and cows while turning an utterly run-down farmhouse into a home, all as a full-time professor. She…

A world changing less-fancy term

Today I’m continuing our series on fancy terms to change your world with a next term: gift. Not fancy or world-changing enough? Think again.
Anthropologists have written volumes on gift-giving, but rather than force feed you analyses of shell exchanges in Papua New Guinea, I’d like to tell you about the ugliest shirt I’ve ever worn.
When my husband and I were bright-eyed 23-year-olds, we lived in a village in Nicaragua. Most of what we attempted failed—we taught literacy classes that…

Introducing: Fancy terms to change the world

Probably the surest way to greatness as a social scientist is to come up with a new fancy term. Some fancy terms seem like an excuse to sound smarty-pants and give college students something to memorize for an exam. But now and then you come across a fancy term that really can change the world.
More than my new tool to dig out dandelions or even the latest electric car, ideas are powerful. Barry Schwarz, the renowned psychologist, says:
Idea technology may be the most profoundly important…

MLK was not optimistic about the white church, but he was hopeful

A few months ago I sat down for a conversation with a woman of color who is in leadership at a Christian organization. She responded to my research questions about what she hopes racial justice would look like in her community. When I asked what she sees white Christians doing (or not doing) toward those ends, she paused and took a breath before she spoke, choosing her words carefully.
Honestly, like, the most gracious thing I could say is, I think they care.” She explained, “For the most…

A song of lament, for the next child we know will fall

Sometimes when there are no words, we turn to music.
As you likely know, the last weeks have brought heavy news. We are mourning three mass shootings committed during the Lunar New Year weekend in California as well as the fatal beating of Black citizen Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers. The grief falls especially heavy among Asian American and Black brothers and sisters. And while I typically don’t plan to use this newsletter to respond to the latest news, this time I wanted to share…

Lessons from MLK on dispelling the myth of time

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
The quote is often attributed to Martin Luther King, who used the quote in several speeches, though King quoted it from the nineteenth century abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker.
Often as I’ve interviewed people about what gives them hope about the future of race in America, this quote comes up. There’s something very comforting in believing that whatever we experience now, if we wait long enough, eventually it’s…

Lessons from MLK on stirring up good tension

Today in recognition of the holiday commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., I decided to read some of his writing. I began with a piece that is rightly among his most famous: the Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
I especially love reading this letter from the scan of King’s original typed copy. Seeing the yellowed edges and occasional hand-written corrections to typos (which are shockingly few, considering), I can imagine this brow-furrowed leader sitting with a borrowed typewriter in a bare…

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