IS 101: IS 101 Coursepack 9660202018022

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Section 1 – PRELUDE 1 3 7 9 13 15 17 21 23 29 31 37

Wartburg Mission, Statement on Vocation, Statement on Diversity & Inclusion, Common Learning Outcomes A Guide to Critical Reading – Rebecca Blair Sample Citations Registration and Advising FAQs Academic Deadlines Time Management Grid Note Taking Tips Test Taking Tips Political Choices and Educational Goals – Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne Prayer Is Not Enough – Dalai Lama Finnegas – Paul Kingsnorth Danger of a Single Story – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Section 2 - LEADERSHIP AND SERVICE 43 47 57 71 77 87

Excerpt from Leadership Can Be Taught – Sharon Dolaz-Parks Knowing Yourself – Warren Bennis Rumbling with Vulnerability – Brené Brown A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart – Martin Luther King, Jr Crucible Moments – Craig, George, Snook Still I Rise – Maya Angelou

Section 3 – LIBERAL LEARNING 89 97 101 107 113

Only Connect – William Cronon Earthly Use of Liberal Education – A. Bartlett Giamatti The Allegory of the Cave – Plato On Education and E.T. – Peter Kreeft The Banking Concept of Education – Paulo Freire

Section 4 – FAITH AND LEARNING 119 125 133 147 161 167

Faith Machine – Jackson Reynolds The Lutheran College/University: Two Models – Thomas Christenson Identity Politics – Eboo Patel Unholier Than Thou – Chris Stedman Thanks ELCA! – Nadia Bolz-Weber Acknowledgements

MISSION STATEMENT Wartburg College is dedicated to challenging and nurturing students for lives of leadership and service as a spirited expression of their faith and learning.

STATEMENT ON VOCATION Wartburg College helps students discover and claim their callings—connecting their learning with faith and values, their understanding of themselves and their gifts, their perspective on life and the future, and the opportunities for participating in church, community, and the larger society in purposeful and meaningful ways.

STATEMENT ON DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION The Wartburg College community is committed to creating and maintaining a mutually respectful environment that recognizes and celebrates diversity among all students, faculty, and staff. Wartburg values human differences as an asset; works to sustain a culture that reflects the interests, contributions, and perspectives of members of diverse groups; and delivers educational programming to meet the needs of diverse audiences. We also seek to instill those values, understandings, and skills to encourage leadership and service in a global multicultural society. Wartburg College does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, genetics, sex, creed, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability in employment, programs, or benefits.

COMMON LEARNING OUTCOMES Wartburg College is a learning community built upon an integrative curriculum, a rich variety of learning-focused co-curricular activities, and intentional opportunities for reflection and discussion. Broad and Integrative Knowledge Students will demonstrate breadth of knowledge and the ability to make connections across a range of disciplines. Deep and Distinctive Knowledge Students will demonstrate depth of knowledge and the ability to use and apply the distinctive methods and forms of inquiry within the disciplinary area of the academic major. Collaboration Students will work effectively in collaboration with others, being respectful and civil toward others.

Ethics and Engagement Students will articulate the ways in which faith and ethics inform their decisions, actions, and engagement as community members. Communication Students will communicate effectively and appropriately in writing and speaking. Cultural Competence Students will demonstrate the ability to appropriately, respectfully, and effectively communicate and work with people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives. 1

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A GUIDE TO CRITICAL READING By Rebecca Blair Perception Effective critical reading really depends upon how we view the world around us. Each of us makes sense of what we see using information that we gather from previous experiences. We construct the beliefs and knowledge we hold from these experiences. We organize, interpret and file the sensations we experience and thereby form lenses through which we perceive future information. For example, if a person develops a skin rash, irritated eyes, and a headache on repeated occasions after swimming, this experience may well affect how he or she views swimming as an activity. Moreover, this experience contributes to how that individual constructs his or her beliefs about this activity, which may be expressed in statements such as, “Swimming makes people sick” or “Those who choose to swim are foolishly taking part in a waste of time.” If these beliefs remain unchallenged by new experiences or unexamined by the individual, then they become fixed as a part of the individual’s constructed knowledge, a “fact” about the world: “Swimming is a harmful activity.” So, as you begin to critically read, think about how the lenses of your beliefs and knowledge affect how you interpret the ideas on the page. Now let’s take a close look at the process itself.

involves looking for the meaning implied by the language of the text, how the actual meaning can have alternate or deeper meanings within a larger context. This kind of reading may relate to the period or culture in which the text takes place or to the occasion for its being written, and it certainly relates to our own experiences — the context in which we are reading the text and the experiences we have had that relate to the text. Reading beyond the lines prompts us to think about how the text can have a deeper meaning applied to the world at large. As we do so, we should think carefully about what words and sentences mean, how ideas connect, and how the larger concepts contained in the text fit into various contexts both in the world of the text and in our own worlds as readers. While each one of us shares human experiences in common with other people, we also have accumulated a specific personal combination of experiences, beliefs, and knowledge. Each of us uses both of these sets of information to create a unique web of meaning as he or she reads any text. It is important, therefore, for any critical reader to take notes in the text and on separate sheets of paper as he or she reads in order to record personal reactions, questions, and interpretations. By doing so, each of us as a reader constructs a record of his or her own web of meaning as it is made. This kind of reading is very different from the surface reading we do when we skim a magazine article or glance over a cereal box. It may even differ from the reading process that you used to read textbooks and other materials in high school. Critical reading requires close, sustained attention, thorough reading and re-reading of the text, and jotting down reactions, ideas, and questions

What Is Critical Reading? Critical reading is a term used to describe the kind of deeply engaged reading expected of students in college. It depends upon our being intellectually wide awake while we read, reading on the lines, between the lines, and beyond the lines as you make sense of the text. Reading on the lines means that you decode what the actual text says to find the meaning. Reading between the lines 3

as they occur. It also involves stopping to look up new words rather than reading over them. Since this process is somewhat intense, it is wise to read chunks of the text, focusing your attention completely on what’s there. Read for a short period of time — about 20 minutes works well for many readers. Then, stop and allow yourself to absorb the meaning of what you have read. Make notes about the thread of the narrative (who are the characters and what are they doing that seems significant); the motivations, flaws, and misunderstandings that drive the action; the patterns of images, actions, themes, and ideas that you identify from one chunk to the next; the questions or responses raised by that critical voice in your head that reads along with you. It is a good idea to use a system of symbols to mark what kind of note you are making. For example, a question mark for questions, an exclamation point for responses, an asterisk for important ideas, etc. After you have finished every three or four chunks, stop for a moment to think about the larger issues and questions raised by the text. What key ideas or questions does the author urge us to consider? What patterns of ideas, images, or actions reinforce these key ideas? Make notes of what you discern here.

that seem significant will provide crucial information to help you explain and support your viewpoint. In your own mind, you believe your statements are valid, even obvious, but remember that others do not share your particular reading lenses, so you will need to provide textual evidence along with a supporting explanation for your assertion. You will want to look in the text for evidence that support your assertions about this central idea, evidence that you cite in support of your assertions. The text offers us an opportunity to ask a number of questions, and the above response becomes incomplete without posing such questions. After asking such questions, you can discover portions of the text which address them. You can then use those portions of the text to revise and strengthen your assertion. Note that your response should contain three parts, sometimes called The 1-2-3 Rule: 1) the assertion itself, 2) textual evidence and explanation in support of the assertion, and 3) a direct statement of how the evidence reveals the significance of the assertion. All three parts of this equation must be present for the critical response to be complete. Putting forward a connected, supported series of assertions coherently — whether in discussion or in writing — is one of the essential skills we will work on in IS101.

Textual Evidence Critical reading, thinking, and writing processes don’t stop here. Once you as a reader have determined what you believe to be the text’s total meaning and reflected a bit on its implications, you are then ready to respond to the text in a variety of ways. Whatever the form of your response — whether in class discussion, formal argument, or written reflection — you will need to use evidence drawn from the text to support why you hold a certain point of view. Note here that your marginal notes in the text as well as the other longer reading notes you have made about ideas

A Final Note About Textual Authority For various reasons — lack of confidence, laziness, lack of knowledge — high school students often first look to outside sources such as Cliff’s Notes, Spark Notes, Monarch Notes, or other sources which provide interpretive readings of texts when these texts are assigned to be read. Sometimes students even use these sources as substitutes or short-cuts for reading the actual primary text itself. While this approach may achieve some successful results in high school, it is inadequate and unacceptable in college-level work, 4

particularly in a liberal arts college which focuses on the use of critical process in learning. These outside sources are tempting to use in part because they contain an authoritative view and voice, a confident textual authority. The voices in these texts proclaim, “This work means this and here’s why.” Instead of simply accepting the prescriptive authority of these sources, which present the meaning of the text rather than a meaning (yes, texts can have more than one valid meaning), our focus in IS 101 and in other Wartburg courses will be placed on developing our own authoritative readings of the texts we read. If we read each text carefully, using the reading and annotation processes detailed above, think carefully about how and why we respond to the text as we do, and use the 1-2-3 Rule in

expressing our viewpoints, each of our responses can contain just as much authority as any outside published interpretation. More importantly, our responses possess the distinctive strength of being authentic, of being “ours,” rather than someone else’s belief. In short, the point is not reaching the destination of getting the assignment done by whatever means, but rather the journey itself — how we go about making sense of the texts we read. As each of you begin to engage in critical reading and thinking, don’t worry if you feel unsure of your abilities. As with any process, these also require practice. During your college experience in this first year, we will work together in this class and in others to sharpen your critical skills and abilities.

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IS 101 READER SAMPLE CITATIONS Citations are important for two main reasons. First, they allow you to give credit to the author who created the resources that have influenced your thoughts. Second, it gives your reader the information they need to locate the sources for themselves. Different fields of study use different citation styles to communicate within their profession. While the order and formatting changes depending on what the discipline wants to emphasize within their style rules, the information remains pretty consistent (who created the resource, when was the resource created, what is the resource called, and where was it published). Below you will find sample citations for a work that appears in an edited book, which is what the IS 101 Reader is considered. Always check with your professor to make sure you are using the citation style they prefer.

APA 7 Reference Citation Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year of publication). Title of chapter. In E. E. Editor & F. F. Editor (Eds.), Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle (pp. pages of chapter). Publisher. In-text Citation (Author Surname, Date, Page number) Sample from IS 101 Reader Reference Citation Bennis, W. (2020). Knowing yourself. In IS 101 Teaching Team (Eds.), IS 101 Reader: Asking Questions, Making Choices (pp. 53-71). Akademos. In-text Citation (Bennis, 2020, p. 57)

Chicago/Turabian Bibliography Citation Author Surname, First Name. “Title of Chapter.” In Title of Book, edited by Editor Name, page range. Place of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Note First Name Surname, “Chapter,” in: Title, ed. Editor (Publishing Data), Page Range. Sample from IS 101 Reader Bibliography Citation Bennis, Warren. “Knowing Yourself.” In IS 101 Reader: Asking Questions, Making Choices, edited by IS 101 Teaching Team, 53-71. Norwalk, CT: Akademos, 2020. Note Warren Bennis, “Knowing Yourself,” in IS 101 Reader: Asking Questions, Making Choices, ed. IS 101 Teaching Team (Norwalk, CT: Akademos, 2020), 57.

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MLA 8 Works Cited Citation Last name, First name. "Title of Essay." Title of Collection, edited by Editor's Name(s), Publisher, Year, Page range of entry. In-text Citation (Author Surname, page number) Sample from IS 101 Reader Works Cited Citation Bennis, Warren. “Knowing Yourself.” IS 101 Reader: Asking Questions, Making Choices, edited by IS 101 Teaching Team, Akademos, 2020, 53-71). In-text Citation (Bennis 57)

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NEW STUDENT REGISTRATION AND ADVISING FAQ Q: How often should I meet with my academic advisor? Your academic advisor is your guide on your Wartburg journey, assisting you in navigating through the resources available for you to succeed. You should not hesitate to reach out to them as concerns arise throughout the term. Email or contact your advisor during their office hours or after class to set up an appointment. Each advisor has their own procedures for setting up appointments. To remind you to meet with your academic advisor, Wartburg has declared October 26 – October 30 as Advising Week. During Advising Week, as a first-year student, you are expected to meet with your advisor to discuss how the term is going and make any changes to your schedule. Q: What should I do if I want to change my schedule? Remember, your academic advisor is your guide on your Wartburg journey. Not only should you discuss schedule changes with your advisor, but they also need to sign-off on a schedule change card which you will submit to the Registrar’s Office. Schedule change cards are available in the Registrar’s Office and with advisors. Before dropping a class, check the academic deadlines to know how the schedule changes may affect your degree progress and financial aid. The Registrar’s Office and Pathways can assist you; however, your advisor needs to sign the schedule change card. Q: How do I know the academic deadlines such as when to drop a class? The academic deadlines can be found at http://info.wartburg.edu/Academics/AcademicCalendar.aspx The academic deadlines are also posted outside the Registrar’s Office in Luther Hall 216. And remember that the cover of your SOAR registration book also includes the academic deadlines for Fall 2020. Q: How will I know what courses are available? You can always view the courses for each term online through Course Search or Course Finder on My Wartburg. You can access My Wartburg at https://my.wartburg.edu. Then, select the Academics tab, and log in with your Wartburg username and password. (Do not include @wartburg.edu with your username.) Your advisor and the Registrar’s Office can assist you in navigating My Wartburg. Q: When should I declare my major? We believe that all new students are searching for their passion when they begin college. So, you begin your college journey with an Advising Preference based on the academic interest you expressed on you SOAR application. At SOAR, with the assistance of an academic advisor, you created your schedule based on your Advising Preference. To continue on-track for graduation in four years, all students are expected to declare their major by the end of the first term of their sophomore year or when they have earned 16 course credits. But you may be ready to declare your major when you meet with your advisor during Advising Week. Remember, you only need one major to earn a Wartburg degree.

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Q: How do I know what requirements are needed to complete my degree? You will be meeting degree requirements under the 2020-21 catalog which can be found at http://catalog.wartburg.edu/. Select the Programs of Study link in the black band on the left to find your major requirements or explore other majors, minors, and endorsements Select the General/Essential Education link to find the requirements for the degree associated with your major. The section titled Essential Education Courses by Requirement identifies the courses that meet each requirement for the Wartburg Plan of Essential Education. You can personalize your online catalog by creating an account through the My Portfolio link at the bottom of the black band on the left. The Registrar’s Office can assist you in creating your My Portfolio. Q: Are there any required courses that I need to take by the end of my second year? Your Advising Worksheet which is available on My Wartburg includes the following four sections to identify when essential education requirements should be completed:  MUST BE COMPLETED BY END OF FIRST YEAR  MUST BE COMPLETED BY END OF SECOND YEAR  TO BE COMPLETED ANYTIME DURING FIRST THROUGH FOURTH YEAR  MUST COMPLETE AS THIRD OR FOURTH YEAR STUDENT To stay on track for graduation, you should complete the following courses by the end of your second year or when you have earned 16 course credits.  IS 101  PE 100  IS 201  Mathematical Reasoning Requirement  RE 102  Scientific Reasoning Requirement  EN 112  Foreign Language Requirement  COM 112 *If you plan to complete the foreign language requirement with the language studied in high school, you should plan to complete the requirement in your first year. Q: How is my foreign language placement determined? You were assigned a foreign language placement based on the number of years you studied a specific foreign language in high school. Students who did not study a foreign language in high school can enroll in the entrance level of any foreign language. All students are required to take one term of a foreign language at Wartburg. Your foreign language placement is identified on your Advising Worksheet which is available on My Wartburg. The courses for foreign language placement levels are as follows: French 0-2 years 2-3 years 3-4 years

FR 104 FR 106 FR 204

German 0-1 years 1-2 years 2-4 years

Spanish 0-2 years 2-3 years 3-4 years

GER 104 GER 106 GER 204

SP 104 SP 106 SP 204

Q: How many courses should I take each term at Wartburg? 4+4+1=9 – a simple math equation. To complete your degree in four years, it is recommended that you enroll in 4 course credits each Fall Term and Winter Term and 1 course credit in May Term. Thus, 9 x 4 years = 36, the minimum number of credits needed to complete a Wartburg degree. 10

To be a fulltime student at Wartburg requires a minimum of 3 course credits in each Fall Term and Winter Term. As you may have noticed, the Wartburg course value is course credits, not semester hours. While most courses are equivalent to 1 course credit, courses are also available for .5 course credit or .25 course credit. In most instances, a .5 course credit will be offered during a first- or second- seven-week session. PE 100 and COM 112 are examples of courses offered during seven-week sessions for a .5 course credit each. Q: I earned college credit. What should I do to confirm that my previous coursework and the credits earned are applied toward my Wartburg degree? College credit is not awarded based on information on your high school transcript. Therefore, you need to request that an official transcript be sent to Wartburg from the other college that issued the credits for previous college coursework. After reviewing your transcripts, the Registrar’s Office will send you an email identifying how the courses have transferred toward your Wartburg degree. You will also be able to review the transfer credits on My Wartburg in a transfer term. College credit is not awarded based on information on your high school transcript. Q: What do I need to do to register for classes? Wartburg students register for the entire academic year and must contact their advisor to make any changes. Registration for the next academic year will be in March and April with registration dates assigned based on your classification. Your classification is noted on your Advising Worksheet which is available on My Wartburg. Your advisor also has that information and will need to clear you for registration.

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ACADEMIC DEADLINES DAY Wednesday Monday

DATE Aug. 26 Aug. 31

Thursday

Sept. 3

Friday Friday

Sept. 4 Sept. 18

Wednesday

Sept. 23

Wednesday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Friday

Oct. 7 Oct. 12 Oct. 13 Oct. 14 Oct. 16

Mon. - Fri. Wednesday

Oct. 26-30 Oct. 28

Thursday

Nov. 5

Tuesday Wednesday

Nov. 24 Nov. 25 TBD Nov. 30 – Dec.3 Dec. 7

Mon. – Thurs. Monday

DEADLINE Fall Term Classes Begin 1st-Seven Week Course: Last day to drop without a “W” to add, to change between audit to credit. Full-Term Course: Last day to drop without a “W”, to add, to change between audit and credit; includes Arranged Study, Independent Study and Internships. Roster Verification – Course rosters due at 11 a.m. 1st Seven Week Course; Last day to declare P/D/F or withdraw with a “W” (no letter grade). Incompletes for Winter/May/Summer 2020 due to instructors. (Grades from instructors for incompletes due to registrar by Wednesday, Oct. 7) Instructors D/F reports due. 1st Seven Week Courses End 2nd Seven Week Courses Begin Full Term Course: Last day to declare P/D/F. 2nd Seven Week Courses: Last day to drop without a “W”, to add, to change between audit and credit; includes Arranged Study, Independent Study and Internships. Advising Week Full Term Course: Last day to withdraw with a “W” (no letter grade). 2nd Seven Week Course: Last day to declare P/D/F or withdraw with a “W” (no letter grade). Fall Term Classes End (5:35 p.m.) Thanksgiving Break Begins (7:45 p.m.) Fall Commencement Fall Term Exams or Final Activity Fall Term Grades Due at 4:00 p.m.

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TIME MANAGEMENT SCHEDULE Fill In: Classes, Meals, Work/Sports/Rehearsal/Orgs, Free-time, Study blocks Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

7:00am 8:00am 9:00am 10:00am 11:00am 12:00pm 1:00pm 2:00pm 3:00pm 4:00pm 5:00pm 6:00pm 7:00pm 8:00pm 9:00pm 10:00pm

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Friday

Saturday

Sunday

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NOTETAKING: THE CORNELL METHOD _____________________________________________________________________________________

Today’s Date

Layout and where to write

Using the Cornell Method, you draw a line down the left side of your paper, leaving about 2.5 inches to the left and 6 inches to the right. On the right-hand side of the line, write down your notes from the lecture or class discussion. Use the left-hand side to summarize your notes with a key word, phrase or question.

Organization of main points

When the instructor or the discussion moves to new topic, skip a line to signal that transition. Bullets, indents, underlining can provide additional structure to these right-hand side notes.

Filling in the blanks

Sometimes lectures move fast! Leave extra space around a topic that’s incomplete to fill in after class (find a classmate or use your course text to fill in missing parts).

Using notes to study

This method also provides a study guide. Test your learning of course material by covering the right-hand side notes, reading the cue words and trying to remember as much detail as possible.

Advantages

The Cornell Method is a simple way to record and recall important information in lectures, while also organizing concepts and ideas under basic headings.

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NOTETAKING: THE OUTLININ G METHOD _____________________________________________________________________________________

Page #

Today’s Date Class Topic: How to outline notes!

I.

II.

The first level is reserved for each new topic/idea and is very general. a. This concept must always apply to the level above it (I) i. This concept must always apply to the level above it (a) ii. This is a second supporting piece of information (a) but is equal to the previous information (i) iii. This information is a sister to (i) and (ii) b. This concept applies to the level above it (I) and is “sister” to (a) You don’t have to use roman numerals, letters and numbers – try only indents, dashes, and bullets! See below for examples of this structure.

Outlining requires listening and writing in points in an organizational pattern based on space indentation -Advantages to outlining   

It is well-organized It records relationships and content It reduces editing and is easy to review by turning the main points into questions (i.e. What are the advantages and disadvantages of outlining?)

-Disadvantages of outlining   

It requires more thought during class for accurate organization It does not always show relationships by sequence It doesn’t work well if the lecture is moving at a quick pace

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NOTETAKING: THE CHARTING METHOD _____________________________________________________________________________________

How? Set up your paper in columns and label appropriate headings. The headings could be categories covered in the lecture.

Advantages Helps pull out the most relevant information. Also reduces the amount of writing necessary.

Insert information (words, phrases, main ideas, etc. into the appropriate category).

Provides easy review for memorizing facts and studying comparisons and relationships.

Disadvantages Can be a hard system to learn to use. You need to know the content that will be covered during the lecture before it begins.

When to use it? If you’ll be tested on facts and relationships. If the content is heavy and presented quickly – think dates, people, events, etc. If you want to get an overview of the whole course on one big paper.

Example: Campus Building White House Business Center

Abbreviation WBC

Date built 1984

Wartburg-Waverly Sports & Wellness Center Bachman Fine Arts Center

The W

2008

The FAC

1991

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Department business administration, economics, and accounting athletics and recreation services music and art

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TEST TAKING: TIPS AND STRATEGIES It’s “go” time!   



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Write your name or student ID. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this is missed. Read all the directions. Tests are designed differently based on subject and instructor. Be sure to take some time to carefully read instructions. Consider the “brain dump”. Before reading or answering any questions, write down formulas, definitions, tables, acronyms, etc. on an open space of the exam. This “brain dump” helps you offload all you’ve studied into an easily accessible reference manual. Preview questions in order to budget time. Quickly review the test to see what type of questions are asked and how points are distributed. Use this information to monitor how much time you spend on each question or section. Start with the easy questions. Take several passes through the exam, with your first pass only to respond to questions that are easy for you.

Multiple Choice Questions 

    

Answer questions in your mind before reading the options. Place your hand over the choices to see if you can recall the answer; if a choice matches your answer, you can be relatively confident that you were correct. Mark questions you skip. A good strategy is to make many passes through an exam, but clearly mark questions you have skipped. Cross out wrong answers. Eliminating answers you know are wrong improves the probability that you get the correct answer in the end. Read all options carefully. Instructors may use tricky language or options with similar wording to make sure you are paying attention. Look for clues in other questions. The wording of one question might contain the answer to another. Notice conditional or unconditional language. Frequently, mostly, and typically tend to be correct. While always, never, and only tend to be incorrect.

Essay Questions    

Read the questions carefully! The prompt will often include one or more of these terms: define, summarize, explain, compare/contrast, describe, justify. Be sure you are answering the question being asked. Organize your responses. Outline your response in the margin so that your response is well organized and clear. Proofread your essay. Make adjustments to grammar/spelling with any extra time you have. If ideas need to be rewritten for accuracy, flow or content, strike out problem areas and neatly write your revisions above or beside crossed out material. Use facts and logic. Avoid giving your opinion (unless specifically directed to give it.)

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Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne Joel Westheimer is a university research chair in Democracy and Education, and CoDirector of Democratic Dialogue: Inquiry into Democracy, Education, and Society at the University of Ottawa. His research and teaching interests include democracy and education, school reform, citizenship, and social justice. Joseph Kahne is the Abbie Valley Professor of Education, chair of the Department of Education, and research director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at Mills College. Kahne’s professional interests include democracy and education, urban educational change and school policy, sociology of education, service learning, and youth development.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. Is it really the job of educational institutions to teach people how to be good citizens? 2. What does it mean to be a good citizen? 3. Given the multiple understandings of what good citizenship means, how could educational institutions hope to teach for all of these understandings? 4. How does teaching for one kind of citizenship help or hinder the development of other kinds? 5. How does Westheimer’s and Kahne’s research on citizenship relate to Wartburg’s definitions of civic engagement and leadership? What kind of Citizen?

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POLITICAL CHOICES AND EDUCATIONAL GOALS (Excerpt) by Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne What Kind of Citizen? Philosophers, historians and political scientists have long debated which conceptions of citizenship would best advance democracy (see, for example, Kaestle, 2000; Smith, 1997; Schudson, 1998). Indeed, as Connolly (1983) has argued, conceptions of democracy and citizenship have been and will likely always be debated—no single formulation will triumph. Even though the work of John Dewey has perhaps done the most to shape dialogues around education and democracy, scholars and practitioners have interpreted his ideas in multiple ways, so no single conception emerges. In large part, this diversity of perspectives occurs because the stakes are so high. Conceptions of “good citizenship” imply conceptions of the good society (Parker, 1996). The diverse perspectives on citizenship and the significant implications of these differences are also quite clear when one examines dialogues that surround educational efforts to promote democratic aims. This vital intellectual discourse does not provide anything close to consensus. For example, Walter Parker (1996) describes three very different conceptions of citizen education for a democratic society: “traditional,” “progressive,” and “advanced.” He explains that traditionalists emphasize an understanding of how government works (how a bill becomes a law, for example) and traditional subject area content as well as commitments to core democratic values—such as freedom of speech or liberty in general (see, for example, Butts, 1988). Progressives share a similar commitment to this knowledge, but they embrace visions like “strong democracy” (Barber, 1984) and place a

greater emphasis on civic participation in its numerous forms (see, for example, Newmann, 1975; Hannah, 1936;). Finally, “advanced” citizenship, according to Parker, builds on the progressive perspective but adds careful attention to inherent tensions between pluralism and assimilation or to what Charles Taylor labels the “politics of recognition” (1994, cited in Parker). Others place a greater emphasis on the need for social critique and structural change. They argue that educators should promote what Jesse Goodman (1992) calls “critical democracy,” Ira Shor (1992) calls “empowering education,” and Paulo Freire (1970) calls a “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”1 In striking contrast to these perspectives is the relatively conservative vision of citizenship education put forward by those who emphasize the connection between citizenship and character (Bennett, 1995; 1998; Bennett, Cribb, & Finn, 1999). Rather than viewing the problems in need of attention as structural, they emphasize problems in society caused by personal deficits. This view harkens back to what Schudson (1998) describes as a vision of colonial citizenship “built on social hierarchy and the traditions of public service, personal integrity, [and] charitable giving” (294). Three Kinds of Citizens Our framework aims to order some of these perspectives by grouping three differing kinds of answers to a question that is of central importance for both practitioners and scholars: What kind of citizen do we need to support an effective democratic society? In mapping the terrain that surrounds answers to this question, we found that three visions of “citizenship”

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were particularly helpful in making sense of the variation: the personally responsible citizen; the participatory citizen; and the justice-oriented citizen. These three categories were chosen because they satisfied our two main criteria: 1) they aligned well with prominent theoretical perspectives described above, and 2) they articulate ideas and ideals that resonate with practitioners (teachers, administrators, and curriculum designers). To that end, we consulted with both the ten teams of educators whose work we studied and with other leaders in the field in an effort to create categories and descriptions that aligned well with and communicated clearly their differing priorities. A caveat: although these three categories were chosen to highlight important differences in the ways educators conceive of democratic educational aims, we do not mean to imply that a given program might not simultaneously further more than one of these agendas. These categories were not designed to be mutually exclusive. At the same time, we believe that drawing attention to the distinctions between these visions of citizenship is important. It highlights the importance of examining the underlying goals and assumptions that drive different educational programs in design and practice.

contribute time, money, or both to charitable causes. Both those in the character education movement and many of those who advocate community service would emphasize this individualistic vision of good citizenship. Programs that seek to develop personally responsible citizens hope to build character and personal responsibility by emphasizing honesty, integrity, self-discipline, and hard work (Horace Mann, 1838; and currently proponents such as Lickona, 1993; Wynne, 1986). The Character Counts! Coalition, for example, advocates teaching students to “treat others with respect…deal peacefully with anger…be considerate of the feelings of others…follow the Golden Rule…use good manners” and so on. They want students not to “threaten, hit, or hurt anyone [or use] bad language” (Character Counts!, 1996). Other programs that seek to develop personally responsible citizens hope to nurture compassion by engaging students in volunteer activities. As illustrated in the mission of the Points of Light Foundation, these programs hope to “help solve serious social problems” by “engag[ing] more people more effectively in volunteer service” (www.pointsoflight.org, April 2000). The Participatory Citizen Other educators see good citizens as those who actively participate in the civic affairs and the social life of the community at the local, state, and national level. We call this kind of citizen the participatory citizen. Proponents of this vision emphasize preparing students to engage in collective, community-based efforts. Educational programs designed to support the development of participatory citizens focus on teaching students about how government and other institutions (e.g., community based organizations, churches) work and about the importance of planning and participating in

The Personally Responsible Citizen The personally responsible citizen acts responsibly in his or her community by, for example, picking up litter, giving blood, recycling, volunteering, and staying out of debt. The personally responsible citizen works and pays taxes, obeys laws, and helps those in need during crises such as snowstorms or floods. The personally responsible citizen contributes to food or clothing drives when asked and volunteers to help those less fortunate, for instance in a soup kitchen or a senior center. She might

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organized efforts to care for those in need or to guide school policies, for example. Skills associated with such collective endeavors— such as how to run a meeting—are also viewed as important (Newmann, 1975; also see Verba, et al., 1995 for an empirical analysis of the importance of such skills and activities). While the personally responsible citizen would contribute cans of food for the homeless, the participatory citizen might organize the food drive. In the tradition of De Tocqueville, proponents of participatory citizenship argue that civic participation transcends particular community problems or opportunities. It also develops relationships, common understandings, trust, and collective commitments. This perspective, like Benjamin Barber’s notion of “strong democracy,” adopts a broad notion of the political sphere—one in which citizens “with competing but overlapping interests can contrive to live together communally” (1984, 118). Similar themes have been emphasized throughout this nation’s history. Dewey (1916) put forward a vision of “Democracy As a Way of Life” and emphasized participation in collective endeavors. To support the efficacy of these collective efforts, he also emphasized commitments to communication, experimentation, and scientifically informed dialogues. Such commitments were also prevalent in the educational writings of the nation’s founders. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others viewed informed participation in civic life as a fundamental support for a democratic society and saw education as a chief means for furthering this goal (Pangle & Pangle, 1993).

the justice-oriented citizen because advocates of these priorities use rhetoric and analysis that calls explicit attention to matters of injustice and to the importance of pursuing social justice. Although educators aiming to promote justice-oriented citizens may well employ a curriculum that makes political issues more explicit than those who emphasize personal responsibility or participatory citizenship, the focus on social change and social justice does not imply an emphasis on particular political perspectives, conclusions, or priorities. Rather, justiceoriented citizens critically assess social, political, and economic structures and consider collective strategies for change that challenge injustice and, when possible, address root causes of problems. The vision of the justice-oriented citizen shares with the vision of the participatory citizen an emphasis on collective work related to the life and issues of the community. Its emphasis on responding to social problems and on structural critique makes it somewhat different, however. Building on perspectives like those of Freire, Shor, and Goodman noted earlier, educational programs that emphasize social change seek to prepare students to improve society by critically analyzing and addressing social issues and injustices. These programs are less likely to emphasize the need for charity and volunteerism as ends in themselves and more likely to teach about social movements and how to effect systemic change (See, for example, Isaac, 1995; Bigelow and Diamond, 1988). While those who support the development of participatory citizens might emphasize developing students’ skills and commitments so that they could and would choose to organize the collection of clothing for members of the community who can’t afford it, those who seek to support the development of justice-oriented citizens would emphasize helping students challenge structural causes of poverty and devise

The Justice-Oriented Citizen Our third image of a good citizen is, perhaps, the perspective that is least commonly pursued. We refer to this view as

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possible responses. In other words, if participatory citizens are organizing the food drive and personally responsible citizens are donating food, justice-oriented citizens are asking why people are hungry and acting on what they discover. That today’s citizens are “bowling alone” (Putnam, 2000) would worry those focused on civic participation. Those who emphasize social justice, however, would worry more that when citizens do get together, they often fail to focus on or to critically analyze the social, economic, and political structures that generate problems. The strongest proponents of this perspective were likely the Social Reconstructionists who gained their greatest hearing between the two world wars. Educators like Harold Rugg (1921) argued that the teaching of history in particular and the school curriculum more generally should be developed in ways that connect with important and enduring social problems. George Counts (1932) asked, “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” He wanted educators to critically assess varied social and economic institutions while also “engag[ing] in the positive task of creating a new tradition in American life” (262). These educators emphasized that truly effective citizens needed opportunities to analyze and understand the interplay of social, economic, and political forces and to take part in projects through which they might develop skills and commitments for working collectively to improve society.

However, some conflicts may arise, and these conflicts are likely to be significant ones. The emphasis placed on individual character and behavior can obscure the need for collective and often public-sector initiatives. A vast majority of school-based programs embrace a vision of citizenship devoid of politics; they often promote service but not democracy. They share an orientation toward volunteerism and charity and away from teaching about social movements, social transformation, and systemic change. These programs value individual acts of compassion and kindness over social action and the pursuit of social justice. We find personal responsibility an inadequate response to the challenges of educating a democratic citizenry. First, the emphasis placed on individual character and behavior obscures the need for collective and often public-sector initiatives; second, this emphasis distracts attention from analysis of the causes of social problems; and third, volunteerism and kindness are put forward as ways of avoiding politics and policy. As a way of illustrating what we see as the limitations of personally responsible citizenship, recall the central tenets of the Character Counts! Coalition. Certainly honesty, integrity, and responsibility for one’s actions are valuable character traits for good neighbors and citizens. But on their own, these traits are not inherently about democracy. To the extent that these traits detract from other important democratic priorities, they hinder rather than make possible democratic participation and change. For example, a focus on loyalty or obedience (common components of character education as well) work against the kind of critical reflection and action many assume are essential in a democratic society. Personal responsibility must be considered in a broader social context or it risks

Conflicting Priorities Is it possible to pursue all three of these visions? Perhaps. Might there be conflicts? Yes. Certainly participatory citizens or those committed to justice can simultaneously be dependable or honest—at least we hope so—therefore, some priorities among these groups and those focusing on personal responsibility will not conflict.

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advancing mere civility or docility instead of democracy. Indeed, government leaders in a totalitarian regime would be as delighted as leaders in a democracy if their young citizens learned the lessons put forward by many of the proponents of personally responsible citizenship: don’t do drugs; show up to school; show up to work; give blood; help others during a flood; recycle; pick up litter; clean up a park; treat old people with respect. Chinese leader Jiang Zemin along with George W. Bush (and Al Gore, for that matter) would argue that these are desirable traits for people living in a community. But they are not about democratic citizenship. Reinforcing these criticisms of an exclusive focus on personally responsible citizenship, a study commissioned by the National Association of Secretaries of State (1999) found that fewer than 32 percent of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 24 voted in the 1996 presidential election (in 1972, the comparable number was 50 percent), but that a whopping 94 percent of those aged 15–24 believed that “the most important thing I can do as a citizen is to help others” (also see Sax, et al., 1999). In a very real sense, youth seem to be “learning” that citizenship does not require government, politics, or even collective endeavors. In contrast to advocates of personally responsible citizenship, some political theorists, sociologists, historians, and educators have championed the importance of civic participation. In Making Democracy Work (1993), for example, Robert Putnam argues that participation in civic life and the development of “social capital” are essential. Harry Boyte and Nan Kari make similar arguments in their case for the “democratic promise of public work” (1996). They join a growing number of educators who want to teach the knowledge and skills necessary for civic engagement in community affairs. Advocates of participatory citizenship want

students to be schooled in both the broad and minute challenges specific to democratic participation. Placing social justice at the center of their arguments, other educators and theorists stress that critical analysis and liberatory pedagogy are essential for democratic education. Citizens, according to this view, need not only skills associated with participation but also those required to critically analyze and act on root causes of social problems and inequities. These actions include forms of participation that challenge existing power structures and focus on social change (see, for example, Shor, 1992 and Ayers et al., 1998). Often, democratic theorists blend commitments to participation with commitments to justice. From the standpoint of supporting the development of democratic communities, combining these commitments is rational. Developing commitments for civic participation and social justice as well as fostering the capacities to fulfill these commitments will support the development of a more democratic society. We should be wary of assuming that commitments to participatory citizenship and to justice necessarily align, however. These two orientations have potentially differing implications for educators. While pursuit of both goals may well support development of a more democratic society, it is not clear whether making advances along one dimension will necessarily further progress on the other. Do programs that support civic participation necessarily promote students’ capacities for critical analysis and social change? Conversely, does focusing on social justice provide the foundation for effective and committed civic actors? Or might such programs support the development of armchair activists who have articulate conversations over coffee, without ever acting?

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Dalai Lama His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, describes himself as a simple Buddhist monk. He is the spiritual leader of Tibet. He was born on July 6th, 1935, to a farming family, in a small hamlet located in Taktser, Amdo, northeastern Tibet. At the age of two, the child, then named Lhamo Dhondup, was recognized as the reincarnation of the previous 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso. The Dalai Lamas are believed to be manifestations of Avalokiteshvara or Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion and the patron saint of Tibet. Bodhisattvas are realized beings inspired by a wish to attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings, who have vowed to be reborn in the world to help humanity. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a man of peace. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent struggle for the liberation of Tibet. He has consistently advocated policies of non-violence, even in the face of extreme aggression. He also became the first Nobel Laureate to be recognized for his concern for global environmental problems.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. What does the Dalai Lama mean by “emotional disarmament”? What are some specific examples of how you might use this practice in your own life—in regards to the pandemic and to any other situation? 2. US culture places great value on independence rather than interdependence. In what ways is the world “interdependent,” as the Dalai Lama notes? We are used to thinking about the virtues of independence, but what are the virtues of interdependence? 3. How does the Dalai Lama use the concept of “impermanence” to motivate hope and constructive action? 4. In what ways are we responsible to others? How do religious and philosophical traditions other than Buddhism handle this concept? What ethics of responsibility have you been raised with, and how do you plan to build on those as you learn and grow?

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‘PRAYER IS NOT ENOUGH.’ THE DALAI LAM A ON WHY WE NEED TO FIGHT CORONAVIRUS WITH COMPASSION By Dalai Lama This crisis shows that we must all take responsibility where we can. We must combine the courage doctors and nurses are showing with empirical science to begin to turn this situation around and protect our future from more such threats. In this time of great fear, it is important that we think of the long-term challenges—and possibilities—of the entire globe. Photographs of our world from space clearly show that there are no real boundaries on our blue planet. Therefore, all of us must take care of it and work to prevent climate change and other destructive forces. This pandemic serves as a warning that only by coming together with a coordinated, global response will we meet the unprecedented magnitude of the challenges we face. We must also remember that nobody is free of suffering, and extend our hands to others who lack homes, resources or family to protect them. This crisis shows us that we are not separate from one another—even when we are living apart. Therefore, we all have a responsibility to exercise compassion and help. As a Buddhist, I believe in the principle of impermanence. Eventually, this virus will pass, as I have seen wars and other terrible threats pass in my lifetime, and we will have the opportunity to rebuild our global community as we have done many times before. I sincerely hope that everyone can stay safe and stay calm. At this time of uncertainty, it is important that we do not lose hope and confidence in the constructive efforts so many are making.

Sometimes friends ask me to help with some problem in the world, using some “magical powers.” I always tell them that the Dalai Lama has no magical powers. If I did, I would not feel pain in my legs or a sore throat. We are all the same as human beings, and we experience the same fears, the same hopes, the same uncertainties. From the Buddhist perspective, every sentient being is acquainted with suffering and the truths of sickness, old age and death. But as human beings, we have the capacity to use our minds to conquer anger and panic and greed. In recent years I have been stressing “emotional disarmament”: to try to see things realistically and clearly, without the confusion of fear or rage. If a problem has a solution, we must work to find it; if it does not, we need not waste time thinking about it. We Buddhists believe that the entire world is interdependent. That is why I often speak about universal responsibility. The outbreak of this terrible coronavirus has shown that what happens to one person can soon affect every other being. But it also reminds us that a compassionate or constructive act—whether working in hospitals or just observing social distancing—has the potential to help many. Ever since news emerged about the coronavirus in Wuhan, I have been praying for my brothers and sisters in China and everywhere else. Now we can see that nobody is immune to this virus. We are all worried about loved ones and the future, of both the global economy and our own individual homes. But prayer is not enough.

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Paul Kingsnorth Paul Kingsnorth is a writer living in rural Ireland. In 2009, he created and launched Dark Mountain Project, a writers’ and artists’ movement designed to question the stories our culture is telling itself in a time of ecological and social unraveling. Paul has won various prizes for his poetry, including the 2012 Wenlock Prize. His first novel, The Wake, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Gordon Burn Prize and the Bookseller Book of the Year Award. Paul’s second novel, Beast, was shortlisted for the Encore Award for the best second novel. In 2017, Paul published his first collection of essays, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, and his most recent book, Savage Gods, was released in June 2019.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. In the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic, British ecologist Paul Kingsnorth reminds us of the importance of storytelling to help us make sense of overwhelming experiences. He embeds his own story within the sharing of the Celtic tale, “Finnegas.” How do both stories work together to express understanding about the pandemic? 2. Take a closer look at Kingsnorth’s use of repetition in this essay, particularly in the phrases, “I would like to say” and “We should be saying.” What effect does this narrative strategy have on your understanding of the author’s main ideas or points? 3. In telling his own story, at one point Kingsnorth reflects on what he sees as limits to his college degree from Oxford University. What limits does he cite? What does this say to you about the value of a receiving a college education? Do you agree with him? Examine one quoted passage from the essay to reflect your response. 4. What stories (past or present) have you read, viewed, or learned about that have helped you, or that you have drawn upon, to make sense of a situation that has involved great change or struggle?

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FINNEGAS By Paul Kingsnorth “God doesn't need to come down upon a mountain, for the mountain itself is the revelation. We only have to look at it and we will know how we should live.”—John Moriarty I would like to tell you a few things about this virus and the lessons it should teach us, all the things we should be learning. I would like to add my voice to the crowd and be heard above it. I would like to say: fish have returned to the Venetian canals now that humans have stopped polluting them. I would like to say: the clouds of air pollution over Italy and China have dissipated since people were prevented from causing them with their cars, planes, factories. I would like to say: up to 80,000 premature deaths which would have been caused this way have probably been prevented in China by the shutdown of the economy. I would like to say: carbon monoxide levels in the air above New York have collapsed by 50 percent in a single week. I would like to say: Nature recovers swiftly when we stop our plundering of Her bounty. I would like to say: lift your gaze, humans. I would like to say: we can learn from this, we can change. I am squatting in the sun on this day of the spring equinox, it is a cold sun, I am down by the pond with my children, we are watching the tadpoles squirm free of their jelly under the leafing poplars. The world is turning. Today is the day when shafts of dawn sunlight illuminate the passages of the old Neolithic tombs at Carrowkeel, at Loughcrew, at Newgrange. Today at Stonehenge, at Wayland’s Smithy, at West Kennet, all across these Atlantic islands—

today is the day the light of Sky pierces the darkness of Earth. Today is the day that aérios meets chthón. Neolithic : we think we know what this word means, but it is just another one of our categories. When we say Neolithic, we mean: forgotten people, unknown people, the first farmers. When we say Neolithic, we mean: who were they and what was their world and how was it so different from ours under this same sky? Their world, the world of those people long supplanted, was a world of tombs; a world of great barrows raised on high downs, barrows that became the pregnant belly of Earth, barrows into which, each equinox, a shaft of sunlight would pierce, enter the womb of the Mother, seed new life each spring. I am writing this on the day of the equinox in the time of the great, strange plague. I would like to say, as if I could tell you: This was what they knew. That each spring, Sky must meet Earth, that there is no life without both Sky and Earth, without both chthón and aérios. That if you live without one or the other, you will build a world that is bent on its axis, and that world may seem whole but will be only half-made, and one day it will fall over and you will fall with it. I would like to say: well, we had it coming. The Irish writer John Moriarty wrote a lot about chthón. His life’s search was for ways to re-embed us in what we have lost, to take us around and down again, to correct the Western Error. In his autobiography, Nostos, he writes: 32

Chthón is the old Greek word for the Earth in its secret, dark, depths, and if there was any one word that could be said to distinguish ancient Greeks from modern Europeans, that word chthón, that would be it. Greeks had the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the pieties and beliefs that go with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the wisdom that goes with the word, we haven’t. Greeks had the sense of spiritual indwelling that goes with the word, we haven’t. In the hope that they might continue in the goodwill of its dark but potentially beneficent powers, Greeks poured libations of wine, of honey, or barley-water sweetened with mint down into this realm, we don’t. I would like to say that we forgot all about chthón, we with our space stations and our stellar minds, our progress and our clean boots, our hand sanitizers and our aircon units, our concrete vaults and our embalming fluid; that for a short period we escaped into aérios, or thought we had, and now we are going to have to go underground again, and you can be sure we will be dragged there by the Hag against our will, and we will fight and fight as the sun comes down the shaft and we see again what is carved on the stones down there. You can forget about chthón, but chthón won’t forget about you. I would like to say that I know what to do about all this, or what to learn. I would like to teach it to you so that you may learn too. I would like to be a prophet in a time when prophets are so sorely needed. Unfortunately, I am not qualified for this role. I don’t know anything at all, and I am learning, painfully, that this was my lesson all along. I don’t know anything at all.

My society does not know anything at all. All the things I was brought up to label as learning: my A-levels, my Oxford University degrees, all the books I have read and written, all the arguments I learned how to formulate, all the ideas I learned how to frame, the concepts I learned how to enunciate. All this head-work, all these modern European ways of seeing, understanding, controlling, managing, directing the world: Nope. None of that was it. One of the best-known myth cycles of Celtic Ireland is the life story of the great warrior Finn McCool. Finn, in his boyhood, was apprenticed to an old woodland hermit by the name of Finnegas. Finnegas had spent his life fishing for an elusive salmon which dwelt in a pool under a group of hazel trees. The hazel trees contained a great old magic, and when their nuts dropped into the pool and were eaten by the salmon, they imparted to it all the knowledge and wisdom of the world. Up from the earth the wisdom came, through the trees, down into the water, and Finnegas knew that if he could catch and eat the salmon then all that wisdom would be his. One day, to his great joy, Finnegas finally caught the salmon. He laid it upon the ground and instructed Finn, his apprentice, to cook it for him while he took a walk in the woods to collect himself, to prepare for his great moment. Cook the salmon, he instructed Finn, but eat none of it. Yes, master, said Finn. When Finnegas returned and looked into Finn’s eyes, he saw immediately that everything had changed. He saw that the catastrophe had occurred. Did you eat the salmon? he demanded. No, master, replied Finn. But … 33

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, we could lay some ground for what is to come. Yours is the work. My work was to prepare for it. You cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. You cannot use your arguments and your concepts to access the chthón. You cannot use your Oxford University degree to build a world which regards Oxford University degrees with the bafflement they deserve to be greeted with. It is good to learn how little I know, and how little we matter. Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas. We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to. But Earth does, and it will. It turns out that we were never in control at all. Control is what civilizations do. Perhaps it is what they are. Perhaps it is their central story. If we can control the world, we can protect ourselves from the darkness it contains. We can protect ourselves from what lies under the ground, in the tombs. Who doesn’t want to be protected? But who, in the end, can ever be? Later in his autobiography, Moriarty writes that he is attempting to walk into culture. Into a culture so sure of itself that it wouldn’t ever need to become a civilization.

Cooking the salmon, Finn had seen a blister appear in its flesh. Perhaps wanting the meal to be perfect for Finnegas after his years of labor, he had pressed the blister down with his thumb and in the process had scalded his hand with hot oil from the cooking fish. Instinctively, he had raised his thumb to his mouth to suck away the pain. In Finn’s eyes now, Finnegas saw all the wisdom of the world, and he saw too that it was Finn, and not he, who was destined for greatness. Finnegas saw that his life’s dream, his life’s work, was not what he had thought it was. Everything he had learned, the moment he thought he had prepared for: Nope. Eat, master, said Finn, offering the fish to Finnegas, for this was your work. But Finnegas refused. No, he said. No, the fish is yours, Finn, and some part of me always knew it would be so. Yours is the work, Finn. My work was to prepare for it. Eat the fish, and use well what you learn. ENLARGE Maybe we thought we would one day eat that salmon, you and I. Maybe we thought that if we worked hard enough, learned enough, we could catch it and learn from it, we could save the world, change the world, teach the world some lessons. I thought that once. I probably learned it at university. Now I think that I, we, our generations, those of us brought up within the machine, brought up to breathe with it, rely on it, those of us tamed and made by it, those of us who crushed the world without thinking—the wisdom to come is not ours. We will never escape what we have made and what made us. We are not equipped. We are not the people who will eat the salmon. We are not Finn. But perhaps, if we’re lucky, we could be Finnegas.

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Cultures like that have existed before. They will again. But not yet. And when they come, people like us will not make them. We can’t. It is not our work. Who knows what happens next? Maybe the virus will come and carry me away, me with my weak chest, me with my winter coughs, deepened every year by the damp Atlantic land I am grounded in, and there will be nothing to be done about this. Then my atoms and light will go back where they came from, or forward to somewhere else, and this is the way of things, and when exactly did we forget that? When exactly did we decide that our tiny little temporary mass of atoms, named and suited and given a role, pumped up with words and stories, should have any right at all to persist in its small form when all else is change and motion? Nothing matters at all, and this is why everything does. Look: the sun pierces the tunnel; the belly of the Mother is seeded again as another year begins. Something will be born when the summer comes. You do not need to catalogue it, understand it. You do not need to learn anything at all from it. You can just watch it come. Cultures that last are cultures that do not build. Cultures that last are cultures that do not seek to know what cannot be known. Cultures that last are cultures that crawl into their chthón without asking questions.

Cultures that know how to be, that look at the sun on the mountain, and say, yes, this is the revelation. People last when they do not eat apples that were not meant for them, when they do not steal fire they do not understand. People last when they sit in the sun and do nothing at all. Let us learn from this! we say. Let us take this crisis and use it to make us better! Better people, more organized people, wiser people. Sleeker people, more efficient people. Let us become sustainable! Let us learn to tell new stories, for the old ones are broken now! We should be saying: stories were the problem. We should be saying: no more stories, not from us. We should be saying: break the stories, break them all. Nothing of this should be sustained. We should be saying: no more normal. Not now, not ever. We should be saying: we could die any moment, and this has always been true. Look at the beauty! We should be saying: see the sunlight crawl down the passage of the tomb. We should be saying: something is about to be illuminated. We should be saying: watch.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer of novels, short stories, and nonfiction. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book; and Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2013. Ms. Adichie is also the author of the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017. Ms. Adichie has been invited to speak around the world. The following is the transcript for her 2009 TED Talk, The Danger of A Single Story, which is now one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. Her 2012 talk We Should All Be Feminists has started a worldwide conversation about feminism, and was published as a book in 2014. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Ms. Adichie divides her time between the United States and Nigeria

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. Discuss your perceptions of Africa prior to reading Ngozi-Adichie’s story. Did your perceptions change after the reading? Why or why not? 2. Think back to the stories that you read as a child. What were some of those stories? Were you able to identify with the characters? 3. What role does the media play in forming our stereotypes of different cultures? Provide specific examples. 4. (In-class discussion) Your classmates have come to Wartburg from the Midwest, across the United States, and from other countries as well. Share what preconceived notions you may have about them based on their geographical backgrounds.

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DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. I come from a conventional, middleclass Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit. And his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket, made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them is how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call “the danger of the single story.” I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably closer to the truth. So I was an early reader. And what I read were British and American children’s books. I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. (Laughter) And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available. And 38

else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, wellmeaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals. I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn’t consciously identify as African. But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity. And in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country. The most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in “India, Africa and other countries.” (Laughter) So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too

would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved, by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to West Africa in 1561, and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,” he writes, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.” Now, I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West. A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet, Rudyard Kipling, are “half devil, half child.” And so I began to realize that my American roommate must have, throughout her life, seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not “authentically African.” Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel that it had failed in a number of places. But I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not

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starving. Therefore they were not authentically African. But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time, was tense. And there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world and it is “nkali.” It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.” Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the

simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called “American Psycho” -- (Laughter) -- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter) It would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. And now, this is not because I am a better person than that student, but, because of America’s cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America. When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. (Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our firetrucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that 40

that Nigerians don’t read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.

devalued education, so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo. And depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. And it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide’s family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls “a balance of stories.” What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Mukta Bakaray, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was

Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview. And a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, “I really liked your novel. I didn’t like the ending. Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ...” (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. Now I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music? Talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband’s consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds? Films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce. What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other 41

Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government. But also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer. And it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust. And we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist, and providing books for state schools that don’t have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter.

Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity. The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved to the north. She introduced them to a book about the southern life that they had left behind. “They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.” I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you. (Applause)

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Sharon Dolaz-Parks Sharon Daloz-Parks is Principal of Leadership for the New Commons and Senior Fellow at the Whidbey Institute in Clinton, WA. She holds a B.A. from Whitworth University, M.A. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and doctorate from Harvard University, the Divinity School. She has held faculty and senior research positions at Harvard’s Schools of Divinity, Business, and Government. She currently teaches in the Executive Leadership Program at Seattle University as well as the School of Theology and Ministry. She speaks and consults nationally in the area of leadership and ethics for corporate, nonprofit, and other professional groups across sectors, especially in business, higher education, and religion. She is the author of Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World (2005) and Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith (2011). Her other publications include co-authored Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World and Can Ethics Be Taught? She is the recipient of four honorary degrees.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. The author discusses a distinction between authority and leadership. What is your opinion about this distinction? How does one command authority without being a good leader? 2. Adaptive challenges “require new learning, innovation, and new patterns of behavior.” What adaptive challenges are you facing as a first-year college student? 3. The third area discussed is “power versus progress.” How can you be a leader if you have no power? 4. The author claims that even introverts can become great leaders, in spite of their personalities. Do you agree? Why or why not? 5. Based on the four critical distinctions of leadership, how do you view your personal leadership abilities? Which of the four most applies to you?

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Excerpt from LEADERSHIP IN A CHANGING WORLD From the book Leadership Can Be Taught by Sharon Dolaz -Parks requiring loss, grief, conflict, risk, stress, and creativity. Often, deeply held values are both at stake and under review. Seen in this light, authority becomes only one resource and sometimes a constraint in the practice of leadership, and often a leader must act beyond his or her authorization.

Four Critical Distinctions Case-in-point teaching provides a model in real time of the practice of leadership that is being taught in the course. This approach rests on a framework for understanding and practicing leadership that rests in four critical distinctions: authority versus leadership, technical problems versus adaptive challenges, power versus progress, and personality versus presence.

Technical Problems Versus Adaptive Challenges The second distinction at the heart of this approach flows from the first: the distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems (even though they may be complex) can be solved with knowledge and procedures already in hand. In contrast, adaptive challenges require new learning, innovation, and new patterns of behavior. In this view, leadership is the activity of mobilizing people to address adaptive challenges— those challenges that cannot be resolved by expert knowledge and routine management alone. Adaptive challenges often appear as swamp issues-- tangled, complex problems composed of multiple systems that resist technical analysis and thus stand in contrast to the high, hard ground issues that are easier to address but where less is at stake for the organization or the society. They ask for more than changes in routine or mere preference. They call for changes of heart and mind-the transformation of longstanding habits and deeply held assumptions and values. Today’s adaptive challenges may appear on any scale and within every domain. They include obvious global issues such as the growing vulnerability of all populations to untreatable epidemics, climate change, terrorism, and the widening social-economic divide. Adaptive challenges are equally likely to take the form of what is

Authority Versus Leadership Heifetz and his colleagues draw a distinction between authority and leadership. Most people tend to presume that a leader is a person in a position of formal authority—the boss, CEO, president, chair, captain, supervisor, director--the head, or, similarly, the expert. All organizations depend on such roles and the functions they provide to maintain equilibrium within the social group. The functions of authority include providing orientation and direction, setting norms, resolving conflict, and, when necessary, providing protection. The approach to leadership we describe here, however, recognizes that the functions of authority often play a vital but markedly insufficient role in the practice of leadership. In this view, the function of leadership is to mobilize people groups, organizations, societies--to address their toughest problems. Effective leadership addresses problems that require people to move from a familiar but inadequate equilibrium-through disequilibrium--to a more adequate equilibrium. That is, today’s complex conditions require acts of leadership that assist people in moving beyond the edge of familiar patterns into the unknown terrain of greater complexity, new learning, and new behaviors, usually 44

assumed to be a local, technical challenge but, in fact, requires a new mode of operating within a nonprofit agency, an engineering division, or a long-established product line.

Personality Versus Presence The fourth distinction is closely related to the third. When the focus shifts from authority and technical problems to leadership and making progress on adaptive challenges, the charisma and the traits of the individual personality may become less critical. In this view, acts of leadership depend less on the magnetism and social dominance of heroic individuals and more on the capacities of individuals (who may be located in a wide variety of positions) to skillfully intervene in complex systems. Thus, the multifaceted capacity to be present becomes a key factor in effective leadership: the quality of one’s capacity to be fully present, comprehend what is happening, hold steady in the field of action, and make choices regarding when and how to intervene from within the social group (from wherever you sit) in ways that help the group to make progress on swamp issues. With these four critical distinctions in hand, Heifetz and his colleagues have developed a framework for analysis and intervention within social systems to help make progress on tough, adaptive challenges.

Power Versus Progress When leadership is understood as an activity – the activity of making progress on adaptive challenges – there is less attention to be paid to the transactions of power and influence and more attention given to the question of whether or not progress is being made on swamp issues. Accordingly, making progress on critical adaptive challenges becomes the basic measure of effective leadership in this approach. Note the shift. When a distinction is made between “authority and technical problems” on the one hand and “leadership and adaptive challenges” on the other, the issue becomes less a matter of personal power – who has it and how they wield it – and shifts to making progress on difficult issues. This third distinction orients the practice of leadership to questions of purpose and reorders the criteria for determining whether or not one is exercising leadership effectively.

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Warren Bennis Warren Bennis (1925-2014) was an eminent scholar and distinguished professor of business administration for more than 30 years. He authored more than 30 books on leadership, a subject that grabbed his attention early in life, when he led a platoon during World War II at the age of 19. As a consultant, Professor Bennis was sought out by generations of business leaders, including Howard D. Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, as well as Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan. As an educator, he taught organizational studies at Harvard, Boston University and the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. The author states that we need to “pick one’s way around obstacles.” What do you see as your obstacles as you begin your academic career at Wartburg College? How can you overcome them? 2. Examine Akin’s roster of modes of learning. Which two would be the easiest for you? Which two would you find the most difficult? 3. Review Erikson’s eight stages of life. What is your stage of self-examination? How can you let the positive attribute of that stage outweigh the negative? 4. The author states that traditionally, it has been easier for men to achieve their dreams? Do you believe that is still true in today’s society? Why or why not? 5. What role have family, school, and friends played in developing the “true you”? 6. If true learning begins with “unlearning,” what will you need to unlearn as we move through this class, and the school year?

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KNOWING YOURSELF From On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensively active and alive. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me." William James Letters of William James By the time we reach puberty, the world has reached us and shaped us to a greater extent than we realize. Our family, friends, school, and society in general have told us – by word and example –how to be. But people begin to become leaders at that moment when they decide for themselves how to be. For some leaders, this happens early. Former Secretary of Education Shirley Hufstedler has spent her life in the legal profession, but she was something of an outlaw as a young girl. She told me, “When I was very young, the things I wanted to do were not permitted by social dictates. I wanted to do a lot of things that girls weren't supposed to do. So I had to figure out ways to do what I wanted to do and still show up in a pinafore for a piano recital, so as not to blow my cover. You could call it manipulation, but I see it as observation and picking one’s way around obstacles. If you think of what you want and examine the possibilities, you can usually figure out a way to accomplish it.” Brooke Knapp, a trail-blazing pilot and businesswoman, also fought her way out of the mold. She said, “I was raised in the South, and I was raised to be a wife. When I went to college, the definition of success was to get married to a gentleman and help him succeed and have children ... [but] I was a little savage, in the best sense of the word, because I was stronger than my mother, and there was no way to control me.”

As Knapp learned, however, breaking out, being yourself, is sometimes anything but easy. She said, “In high school, I realized that I was going to be voted the most athletic, but I didn't want the ‘lady jock’ label, so I decided to become the most popular. I learned the name of every single person casting a ballot and called them all by name and won.” Her popularity took a nosedive when “the mothers of the girls in my class started taking potshots at me. I concluded that success means that people don’t like you and you become a bad person, so I shut down for a lot of years. It wasn’t till after I got married that I began to experience my need to achieve again.” Know thyself, then, means separating who you are and who you want to be from what the world thinks you are and wants you to be. Author/psychiatrist Roger Gould also declared his independence very early. He said, “I remember, during arguments with my father, there seemed to be arbitrary rules, which I never understood. I used to ask ‘why’ all the time. One time, I must have been six, I was lying in bed and looking up at the stars and thinking, “There’re other planets out there, and maybe there’s life on some of them, and the earth is enormous, with millions of people, and everyone can’t be right all the time, so my father could be wrong, and I could be right.’ It was my own theory of relativity. Then, in high school, I began reading the classics, and they were my transition in my own life, 48

away from my parents. I had my own private life, which I could appreciate on its terms, and never talk to anyone else about it until I had digested it for myself.” Hufstedler, Knapp, and Gould clearly invented themselves, just as the other leaders I talked with did. They overcame a variety of obstacles in a variety of ways, but all stressed the importance of selfknowledge. Some start the process early, and some don’t do it until later. It doesn’t matter. Selfknowledge, self-invention are lifetime processes. Those people who struggled to know themselves and become themselves as children or teenagers continue today to explore their own depths, reflect on their experiences, and test themselves. Others – like Roosevelt and Truman – undertake their own remaking in midlife. Sometimes we simply don’t like who we are or what we’re doing, and so we seek change. Sometimes events, as in Truman’s case, require more of us than we think we have. But all of us can find tangible and intangible rewards in selfknowledge and self-control, because if you go on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll go on getting what you’ve always got – which may be less than you want or deserve. All of the leaders I talked with agreed that no one can teach you how to become yourself, to take charge, to express yourself, except you. But there are some things that others have done that are useful to think about in the process. I’ve organized them as the four lessons of self-knowledge. They are  One: You are your own best teacher.  Two: Accept responsibility. Blame no one.  Three: You can learn anything you want to learn.  Four: True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience.

Lesson One: You are your own best teacher. Gib Akin, associate professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, studied the learning experiences of sixty managers. Writing for Organizational Dynamics, Akin said that the managers’ descriptions were “surprisingly congruous. ... Learning is experienced as a personal transformation. A person does not gather learnings as possessions but rather becomes a new person. ... To learn is not to have, it is to be.” Akin’s roster of modes of learning includes:  Emulation, in which one emulates either someone one knows or a historical or public figure  Role taking, in which one has a conception of what one should be and does it  Practical accomplishment, in which one sees a problem as an opportunity and learns through the experience of dealing with it  Validation, in which one tests concepts by applying them and learns after the fact  Anticipation, in which one develops a concept and then applies it, learning before acting  Personal growth, in which one is less concerned with specific skills than with self-understanding and the “transformation of values and attitudes”  Scientific learning, in which one observes, conceptualizes on the basis of one’s observations, and then experiments to gather new data, with a primary focus on truth The managers Akin interviewed cited two basic motivations for learning. The first was a need to know, which they described, he said, “as rather like a thirst or hunger gnawing at them, sometimes dominating 49

their attention until satisfied.” The second was “a sense of role,” which stems from “a person's perception of the gap between what he or she is, and what he or she should be.” In other words, the managers, knew that they were not fulfilling their own potential, not expressing themselves fully. And they knew that learning was a way out of the trap, a major step toward self-expression. And they saw learning as something intimately connected with self. No one could have taught them that in school. They had to teach themselves. Somehow they had reached a point in life where they knew they had to learn new things - it was either that or admit that they had settled for less than they were capable of. If you can accept all that, as the managers did, the next step is to assume responsibility for your education as well as yourself. Major stumbling blocks on the path to self-knowledge are denial and blame.

the scripts as I could get my hands on, to see what made these particular movies great. I kind of invented my own university, so that I could get some sense of both the business and the art. ... I’ve always been in worlds where knowing the community has been important. In graduate school, when I was studying literature, to know the writers and critics was to know a universe. In Washington, I had to learn the political players, and here I had to learn the players. It became clear to me that there were about one hundred core writers, and I systematically set out to read a screenplay or two by each of them. When I got here, I was told it would take me three years to get grounded, but after nine months, the head of the studio told me I’d graduated and promoted me. Within a year I found – with some stumbles here and there – that I could perform the way my peers, who had spent their entire careers here, did. I attribute that partly to discipline, partly to desire, and partly to the old transferability of skills. You use many of the same muscles in molecular biology, politics, and the movies. It’s all about making connections.” “One thing I did when I first got here was to sit in the office of the studio head all day, day after day, and watch and listen to everything he said or did. So when writers would come, when producers would come, I would just be there. When he was making phone calls, I would sit and listen to him, and I would hear him contend with what a person in his position contends with. How does he say no to someone, how does he say yes, how does he duck, how does he wheedle and coax? I would have a yellow pad with me, and all through my first many months, any phrase I didn’t understand, any piece of industry jargon, any name, any maneuver I didn’t follow, any of the dealmaking business financial stuff I didn’t understand, I’d write it down, and

Lesson Two: Accept responsibility. Blame no one. The wisdom of this seems intuitively obvious to me. So I’ll let you listen to Marty Kaplan, who is the best example of accepting responsibility for oneself that I know of. At 37, Disney Productions’ Vice President Kaplan is embarked on his third career. He came to Disney with a wideranging background – from biology to the Harvard Lampoon, from broadcast and print journalism to high-level politics. He knew a lot about a lot of things, but very little about the movie business. His description of his self-designed university illustrates how he accepted the responsibility for creating his own success: “Before starting this job, I put myself through a crash course, watching five or six movies every single day for six weeks, trying to see every successful picture of the last several years. Then I read as many of 50

learn.... Part of it is temperament. It’s a kind of fearlessness and optimism and confidence, and you’re not afraid of failure.” “You’re not afraid of failure.” Keep that in mind, because we’ll get back to it later.

periodically I would go trotting around to find anyone I could get to answer.” “There was no situation that I could fail to learn from, because everything was new to me, and therefore no matter what it was, however obtuse the person I was meeting with, however stupid the idea, however lowpowered the agent pitching me something, it was a useful encounter, because I would be for the first time in that position. Every single thing was new, and so I had a complete tolerance for every conceivable experience, and as I learned from what other people would regard as real tedium, and stupid and avoidable experiences, I would then begin to filter those out of my input until I was ultimately only doing what I thought was useful and important for me, or things from which I could learn, or had to do.”

Lesson Four: True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience. Kaplan didn’t simply watch all those movies and read all those scripts and spend all those hours in the studio head’s office. He did all that, and then he reflected on what he’d seen and read and heard, and he came to a new understanding. Reflecting on experience is a means of having a Socratic dialogue with yourself, asking the right questions at the right time, in order to discover the truth of yourself and your life. What really happened? Why did it happen? What did it do to me? What did it mean to me? In this way, one locates and appropriates the knowledge one needs or, more precisely, recovers what one knew but had forgotten, and becomes, in Goethe’s phrase, the hammer rather than the anvil. Kaplan stated it forcefully: “The habit of reflection may be a consequence of facing mortality…. To begin to understand any great literature is to understand that it’s a race against death, and it’s the redeeming power of love or God or art or whatever the artist is proposing that’s the thing that makes the race against death worth racing. ... In a way, reflection is asking the questions that provoke self-awareness.” Nothing is truly yours until you understand it – not even yourself. Our feelings are raw, unadulterated truth, but until we understand why we are happy or angry or anxious, the truth is useless to us. For example, every one of us has been yelled at by a superior and bitten our tongues, afraid to yell back. Later, we yell at a friend who has done nothing. Such displaced emotions punctuate our lives, and diminish them. This is not to suggest that

Lesson Three: You can learn anything you want to learn. If one of the basic ingredients of leadership is a passion for the promises of life, the key to realizing the promise is the full deployment of yourself, as Kaplan did when he arrived at Disney. Full deployment is simply another way of defining learning. Learning, the kind Kaplan did, the kind I'm talking about here, is much more than the absorption of a body of knowledge or mastery of a discipline. It’s seeing the world simultaneously as it is and as it can be, understanding what you see, and acting on your understanding. Kaplan didn’t just study the movie business, he embraced it and absorbed it, and thereby understood it. In our discussion, I suggested that this kind of learning, has to do with reflecting on experience. Kaplan said, “I would add a component to that, which is the appetite to have experience, because people can be experience averse and therefore not learn. Unless you have the appetite to absorb new and potentially unsettling things, you don’t 51

yelling back at a superior is a useful response. Understanding is the answer. When you understand, then you know what to do. The importance of reflecting on experience, the idea that reflecting leads to understanding, came up again and again in my conversations with leaders. Anne Bryant, executive director of the American Association of University Women, has made reflection a part of her daily routine: “Every morning after the alarm goes off, I lie in bed for about fifteen minutes, going over what I want to get out of each event of my day, and what I want to get done by the end of the week. I’ve been doing it for two or three years, and if I don’t do it, I feel I’ve wasted the day.” To look forward with acuity you must first look back with honesty. After spending four days a week at her Washington, D.C., office, Bryant spends the balance of the week at her home in Chicago, where she reads, reflects on the week just past, and plans for the days ahead. Those, then, are the four lessons of selfknowledge. But in order to put these lessons into practice, you need to understand the effect that childhood experiences, family, and peers have had on the person you’ve become. All too often, we are strangers to ourselves. In his classic The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman wrote, “The source of direction for the individual is ‘inner’ in the sense that it is implanted early in life by the elders and directed toward generalized, but nonetheless inescapably destined roles,” while “what is common to all the otherdirected people is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual – either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted through friends and through the mass media. This source is internalized in the sense that dependence on it for guidance in life is

implanted early. The goals toward which the other-directed person strives shift with that guidance: It is only the process of striving itself and the process of paying close attention to the signals from others that remain unaltered throughout life.” In other words, most of us are made by our elders or by our peers. But leaders are self-directed. Let’s stop and think about that for a moment. Leaders are self-directed, but learning and understanding are the keys to self-direction, and it is in our relationships with others that we learn about ourselves. As Boris Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago, Well, what are you? What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself: your kidneys, your liver, your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory it is always some external manifestation of yourself where you come across your identity: in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now, listen carefully. You in others this is what you are, this is what your consciousness has breathed, and lived on, and enjoyed throughout your life, your soul, your immortality – YOUR LIFE IN OTHERS. How, then, do we resolve the paradox? This way: leaders learn from others, but they are not made by others. This is the distinguishing mark of leaders. The paradox becomes a dialectic. The self and the other synthesize through self-invention. What that means is that here and now, true learning must often be preceded by unlearning, because we are taught by our parents and teachers and friends how to go along, to measure up to their standards, rather than allowed to be ourselves. 52

Alfred Gottschalk, the president of Hebrew Union College, told me, “The hardest thing I’ve had to do is convey to children, my own and others, the necessity of coming to terms with themselves. Their interests aren’t deep. They don’t think about things. They accept what they’re told and what they read or see on TV. They're conformists. They accept the dictates of fashion.” Asked to define his philosophy, Gottschalk said, “I value the need for the individual to feel unique and for the collective to remain hospitable to diversity. I believe in unity without uniformity and in man’s capacity to redeem himself.” Given the pressures from our parents and the pressures from our peers, how does any one of us manage to emerge as a sane much less productive - adult? William James wrote, in The Principles of Psychology, A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.

Famed psychoanalyst Erik Erikson has divided life into eight stages that are useful to look at during our examination of selfinvention: 1. INFANCY: Basic. Trust vs. Basic Mistrust 2. EARLY CHILDHOOD: Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt 3. PLAY AGE: Initiative vs. Guilt 4. SCHOOL AGE: Industry vs. Inferiority 5. ADOLESCHENCE: Identity vs. identity Confusion 6. YOUNG ADULTHOOD: Intimacy vs. Isolation 7. ADULTHOOD: Generativity vs. Stagnation 8. OLD AGE: Integrity vs. Despair Erikson believes that we do not proceed to the next stage until each stage’s crisis has been satisfactorily resolved. Too many of us, for example, never overcome the inner struggle between initiative and guilt, and so we lack real purpose. A woman caught between motherhood and an urge for a career was thought only a generation ago to be at best selfish, at worst unnatural. Giving up motherhood was deemed unthinkable; trying to juggle her children and her career was a frustrating and usually unsupported choice. Whichever course she took, initiative and guilt struggled, unresolved. And, of course, these inner conflicts were made outwardly manifest, inflicted on the people in her life, as well as on herself. No one, including the hermit, suffers alone. Traditionally, it has been easier for men to make their way through these stages and their attendant crises, but all too often, prodded by well-meaning parents and teachers, men, too, do what they’re supposed to do in life, not what they want to do. In this way, the man who dreams of being a poet becomes an accountant and the would-be cowboy becomes an executive,

It’s hard to conceive of a more apt description of today’s yuppies, those most conspicuous consumers. But as James concludes, “...our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.” The leader begins, then, by backing himself, inspiring himself, trusting himself, and ultimately inspires others by being trustworthy.

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and both suffer the torments of the unfulfilled. And who knows what they might have done if they had chosen to follow their dreams? Former Beatle John Lennon, possibly the most influential songwriter of his generation, gave the aunt who raised him a gold plaque engraved with her oft-repeated dictum, “You’ll never make a living playing that guitar.” In the world according to Erikson, how we resolve the eight crises determines who we will be: 1. Trust vs. Mistrust = hope or withdrawal 2. Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt = will or compulsion 3. Initiative vs. Guilt = purpose or inhibition 4. Industry vs. Inferiority = competence or inertia 5. Identity vs. Identity Confusion = fidelity or repudiation 6. Intimacy vs. Isolation = love or exclusivity 7. Generativity vs. Stagnation = care or receptivity 8. Integrity vs. Despair = wisdom or disdain With all the power that the world has over us as we proceed through the early years of our lives, it is a wonder that any of us manages to resolve any of these crises in a positive way. Or, as a woman put it to me recently, “It seems to me that this chic new phrase ‘dysfunctional family’ is redundant. If there’s a functional family anywhere, I certainly haven’t seen it.” What she meant by that is that the Waltons and the Cleavers and, more recently, the Huxtables are far from the reality most of us experience. TV sitcom children are a good deal more likely to enjoy wise, nurturing parents and happy childhoods than the population at large. Analyst Gould is planning a new book, Recovering from Childhood, that will focus on “overcoming the adaptational warp that

takes place early in life. If you let it happen, you undergo an automatic recovery process in the course of facing and dealing with new realities. In order to respond to the challenges of each cycle of your life appropriately, you have to continually reexamine your defenses and assumptions, and in the course of that re-examination, you iron out the way.... Feelings are memories of past behavior. When you sort them out and see what’s current and what’s left over, you can literally begin to use your thinking process to change your behavior.” There is ample evidence that ego development does not stop with physical maturity, and so while we cannot change our height or bone structure, we can change our minds. A current ad campaign promises us that “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood,” I wouldn’t quite go that far. We cannot change the circumstances of our childhoods, much less improve them at this late date, but we can recall them honestly, reflect on them, understand them, and thereby overcome their influence on us. Withdrawal can be turned to hope, compulsion to will, inhibition to purpose, and inertia to competence through the exercise of memory and understanding. There are people who would argue with this, who claim that our destiny resides wholly in our genes, that each of us is a mere product of heredity. Others argue fervently that each of us is an offspring of his environment, so our fate is determined by our circumstances. Studies of identical twins who have been raised separately indicate that there is more truth to the first perspective. But the real answer to how we become who we are is more complex. Recent reports on DNA and our genetic chromosomal structure suggest that there is a strong hereditary component to disease. Nevertheless, some people argue that whether we succumb to various disorders can be ascribed to stress and temperament. 54

Similarly, some scientists see the brain and heart as mere organs, capable of nothing more than chemical reactions, while others see the brain and heart as the locus of reason and emotion, sophistication and poetry, all the qualities and capabilities that separate us from the apes. And recent studies suggest there is neurobiological evidence that part of the brain is hardwired prior to birth; while part is plastic in nature to absorb and collate experiences. Some scientists now claim that even personality traits – introversion, humor, and so on – are genetic in origin. Between the arguers for hereditary determinism and those for environmental determinism, not much room is left for self-determination. All of these arguments become just one more way to remove the responsibility for behavior from the individual, a new variation on the old Flip Wilson routine, “The devil made me buy that dress!” The truth is, we’re products of everything – genes, environment, family, friends, trade winds, earthquakes, sunspots, schools, accidents, serendipity, anything you can think of, and more. New Agers would add past incarnations. The endless naturenurture debate is interesting, even occasionally revelatory, but inconclusive. And it’s about as useful a guide to life as an astrological chart. Like everyone else, leaders are products of this great stew of chemistry and circumstance. What distinguishes the leader from everyone else is that he takes all of that and makes himself - all new and unique. Novelist William Faulkner told us that the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past yet. Each of us contains his entire life. Everything we did or saw, everyone we ever encountered, is in our heads. But all that psychic baggage can be turned into comprehensible and useful experience by reflecting on it. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I’d go

a step further: The unexamined life is impossible to live successfully. Like oarsmen, we generally move forward while looking backward, but not until we truly see the past – truly understand it – can we truly move forward, and upward. Until you make your life your own, you’re walking around in borrowed clothes. Leaders, whatever their field, are made up as much of their experiences as their skills, like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, they use their experience rather than being used by it. William James again; “Genius ... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” By the time we reach adulthood, we are driven as much by habit as by anything else, and there is an infinity of habits in us. From the woman who twirls a strand of hair when she’s nervous or bored to the man who expresses his insecurity by never saying “thank you,” we are all victims of habits. They do not merely rule us, they inhibit us and make fools of us. To free ourselves from habit, to resolve the paradoxes, to transcend conflicts, to become the masters rather than the slaves of our own lives, we must first see and remember, and then forget. That is why true learning begins with unlearning – and why unlearning is one of the recurring themes of our story. Every great inventor or scientist has had to unlearn conventional wisdom in order to proceed with his work. For example, conventional wisdom said, “If God had meant man to fly, He would have given him wings.” But the Wright brothers disagreed and built an airplane. No one, not your parents nor your teachers nor your peers – can teach you how to be yourself. Indeed, however well intentioned, they all work to teach you how not to be yourself. As the eminent child psychologist Jean Piaget said, “Every time we teach a child something, we keep him 55

from inventing it himself.” I would go a step further. Every time we teach a child something, rather than helping him learn, we keep him from inventing himself. By its very nature, teaching homogenizes, both its subjects and its objects. Learning, on the other hand, liberates. The more we know about ourselves and our world, the freer we are to achieve everything we are capable of achieving. Many leaders have had problems with school, particularly their early school experiences. Albert Einstein wrote, “It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry ... It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.” Among the leaders I spoke with, scientist and philanthropist Mathilda Krim said, “To the extent that school is regimented, I don’t like it.” And Edward C. Johnson III, CEO of Fidelity Investments, said, “Sitting in a classroom was never one of my strengths, but I’ve always been curious about ideas and objects.” Johnson instinctively knew the difference between

teaching and learning, between training and education. Obviously, we cannot do away with – or do without – families or schools or any of the instruments of homogeneity. But we can see them for what they are, which is part of the equation, not the equation itself. The prevailing equation is: family + school + friends = you But the only workable equation for anyone aspiring to self-hood is: family + school + friends you

= true you

In this way, rather than being designed by your experience, you become your own designer. You become cause and effect rather than mere effect. Self-awareness = self-knowledge = selfpossession = self-control = self-expression. You make your life your own by understanding it.

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Brené Brown Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington Foundation - Brené Brown Endowed Chair at The Graduate College of Social Work. Brené is also a visiting professor in management at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. She has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy and is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, and her latest book, Dare to Lead, which is the culmination of a seven-year study on courage and leadership. This excerpt is the first chapter of Dare to Lead. Her TED talk – The Power of Vulnerability – is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world with over 45 million views. She is also the first researcher to have a filmed lecture on Netflix. The Call to Courage special debuted on the streaming service on April 19, 2019. Brené lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve. They have two children, Ellen and Charlie.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. Consider who might be in your “square squad”. What did you learn from the process of thinking about who belongs in the square? 02. Do you, like most of us, find yourself steam-rolling over these important people in your life to gain the acceptance and approval of strangers? If so, what’s one commitment you can make to strengthen the squad and spend less time approval-seeking? 2. Thinking about the six myths of vulnerability, complete or answer the following: a. I grew up believing that vulnerability was… b. For me, vulnerability feels like… c. In my organization (friend group, family, etc.) the messages and expectations about vulnerability are… 3. When was the last time you (or someone you know) bravely faced uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure? 4. When you reflect on how you want to show up and be seen as a leader, what do vulnerability and courage look like for you?

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RUMBLING WITH VULNERABILITY From Dare To Lead by Brené Brown "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." – Theodore Roosevelt The moment the universe put the Roosevelt quote in front of me, three lessons came into sharp focus. The first one is what I call “the physics of vulnerability.” It’s pretty simple: If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall. Daring is not saying “I’m willing to risk failure.” Daring is saying “I know I will eventually fail, and I’m still all in.” I’ve never met a brave person who hasn’t known disappointment, failure, even heartbreak. Second, the Roosevelt quote captures everything I’ve learned about vulnerability. The definition of vulnerability as the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure first emerged in my work two decades ago, and has been validated by every study I've done since, including this research on leadership. Vulnerability is not winning or losing. It’s having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome. We’ve asked thousands of people to describe vulnerability to us over the years, and these are a few of the answers that directly pierce the emotion: the first date after my divorce, talking about race with my team, trying to get pregnant after my second miscarriage, starting my own business, watching my child leave for college, apologizing to a colleague about how I spoke to him in a meeting, sending my son

to orchestra practice knowing how badly he wants to make first chair and knowing there’s a really good chance he will not make the orchestra at all, waiting for the doctor to call back, giving feedback, getting feedback, getting fired, firing someone. Across all of our data there’s not a shred of empirical evidence that vulnerability is weakness. Are vulnerable experiences easy? No. Can they make us feel anxious and uncertain? Yes. Do they make us want to self-protect? Always. Does showing up for these experiences with a whole heart and no armor require courage? Absolutely. The third thing I learned has turned into a mandate by which I live; If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I’m not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their lives but who will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgment at those who dare greatly. Their only contributions are criticism, cynicism, and fearmongering. If you’re criticizing from a place where you’re not also putting yourself on the line, I’m not interested in what you have to say.

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We have to avoid the cheap-seats feedback and stay armor-free. The research participants who do both of those well have one hack in common: Get clear on whose opinions of you matter. We need to seek feedback from those people. And even if it’s really hard to hear, we must bring it in and hold it until we learn from it. This is what the research taught me: Don’t grab hurtful comments and pull them close to you by rereading them and ruminating on them. Don’t play with them by rehearsing your badass comeback and whatever you do, don’t pull hatefulness close to your heart. Let what’s unproductive and hurtful drop at the feet of your armored self. And no matter how much your self-doubt wants to scoop up the criticism and snuggle with the negativity so it can confirm its worst fears, or how eager the shame gremlins are to use the hurt to fortify your armor, take a deep breath and find the strength to leave what’s mean-spirited on the ground. You don’t even need to stomp it or kick it away. Cruelty is cheap, easy, and chickenshit. It doesn’t deserve your energy or engagement. Just step over the comments and keep daring, always remembering that armor is too heavy a price to pay to engage with cheap-seat feedback. Again, if we shield ourselves from all feedback, we stop growing. If we engage with all feedback, regardless of the quality and intention, it hurts too much, and we will ultimately armor up by pretending it doesn’t hurt, or, worse yet, we’ll disconnect form vulnerability and emotion so fully that we stop feeling hurt. When we got to the place that the armor is so thick that we no longer feel anything, we experience a real death. We’ve paid for self-protection by sealing off our heart from everyone, and from everything – not just hurt, but love.

No one captures the consequences of choosing that level of self-protection over love better than C.S. Lewis: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. Rumble Tool: The Square Squad When we define ourselves by what everyone thinks, it’s hard to be brave. When we stop caring about what anyone thinks, we’re too armored for authentic connection. So how do we get clear on whose opinions of us matter? Here’s the solution we shared in Daring Greatly: Get a one inch by one-inch piece of paper and write down the names of the people whose opinions of you matter. It needs to be small because it forces you to edit. Fold it and put it in your wallet. Then take ten minutes to reach out to those people – your square squad – and share a little gratitude. You can keep it simple: I’m getting clear on whose opinions matter to me. Thank you for being one of those people. I’m grateful that you care enough to be honest and real with me. If you need a rubric for choosing the people, here’s the best I have: The people on your list should be the people who love you not despite your vulnerability and imperfections, but because of them. 59

globe. I’ve asked fighter pilots and software engineers, teachers and accountants, CIA agents and CEOs, clergy and professional athletes, artists and activities, and not one person has been able to give me an example of courage without vulnerability. The weakness myth simply crumbles under the weight of the data and people’s lived experiences of courage.

The people on your list should not be “yes” people. This is not the suck-up squad. They should be people who respect you enough to rumble with vulnerability of saying “I think you were out of your integrity in that situation, and you need to clean it up and apologize. I’ll be here to support you through that.” Or “Yes, that was a huge setback, but you were brave and I’ll dust you off and cheer you on when you go back into the arena.”

Myth #2: I don’t do vulnerability. Our daily lives are defined by experiences of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. There is no opting out, but there are two options: You can do vulnerability, or it can do you. Choosing to own our vulnerability and do it consciously means learning how to rumble with this emotion and understand how it drives our thinking and behavior so we can stay aligned with our values and live in our integrity. Pretending that we don’t do vulnerability means letting fear drive our thinking and behavior without our input or even awareness, which almost always leads to acting out or shutting down. If you don’t believe the data, ask someone from your square squad this question: How do I act when I’m feeling vulnerable? If you’re rumbling with vulnerability from a place of awareness, you won’t hear anything you don’t know and that you aren’t actively addressing. If you subscribe to the idea of terminal uniqueness (everyone in the world but you), you will probably be on the receiving end of some tough feedback. And as much as we’d like to believe that wisdom and experience can replace the need to “do” vulnerability, they don’t. If anything, wisdom and experience validate the importance of rumbling with vulnerability. I love this quote by Madeleine L’Engle: “When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we

The Four Six Myths of Vulnerability In Daring Greatly, I wrote about four myths surrounding vulnerability, but since I’ve brought the courage-building work into organizations and have been doing it with leaders, the data have spoken and there are clearly six misguided myths that persist across wide variables including gender, age, race, country, ability, and culture. Myth #1: Vulnerability is weakness. It used to take me a long time to dispel the myths that surround vulnerability, especially the myth that vulnerability is weakness. But in 2014, standing across from several hundred military Special Forces soldiers on a base in the Midwest, I decided to stop evangelizing, and I nailed my argument with a single question. I looked at these brave soldiers and said, “Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Can you give me a single example of courage that you’ve witnessed in another soldier or experience in your own life that did not require experiencing vulnerability?” Complete silence. Crickets. Finally a young man spoke up. He said, “No, ma’am. Three tours. I can’t think of a single act of courage that doesn’t require managing massive vulnerability.” I’ve asked that question now a couple of hundred times in meeting rooms across the 60

would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability.”

make vulnerability easier by engineering the uncertainty and emotion right out of it. I’ve had people recommend everything from a texting app for hard conversations to an algorithm to predict when it’s safe to be vulnerable with someone. As I mentioned in the introduction, what sometimes underpins this urge is how we think about vulnerability and the way we use the word. Many people walk into work every day with one clear task: Engineer the vulnerability and uncertain out of systems and/or mitigate risk. This is true of everyone from lawyers, who often equate vulnerability with loopholes and liabilities, to engineers and other people who work in operations, security, and technology, who think of vulnerabilities as potential systems failures, to combat soldiers and surgeons, who may literally equate vulnerabilities with death. When I started talking about engaging with vulnerability and even embracing it, there can be real resistance until I clarify that I’m talking about relational vulnerability, not systemic vulnerability. Several years ago, I was working with a group of rocket scientists (actual ones). During a break an engineer walked up to me and said, “I don’t do vulnerability. I can’t. And that’s a good thing. If I get all vulnerable, shit might fall from the sky. Literally.” I smiled and said, “Tell me about the toughest part of your job. Is it keeping shit from falling from the sky?” He said, “No. We’ve created sophisticated systems that control for human error. It’s hard work, but not the part I hate the most.” Wait for it. He thought for a minute and said, “It’s leading the team and all the people stuff. I’ve got a guy who is just not a good fit. His deliverables have been off for a year. I’ve tried everything. I got really tough this last

Myth #3: I can go it alone. The third myth surrounding vulnerability is “I can go it alone.” One line of defense that I encounter is “I don’t need to be vulnerable because I don’t need anyone.” I’m with you. Some days I wish it were true. The problem, however, is that needing no one pushes against everything we know about human neurobiology. We are hardwired for connection. From our mirror neurons to language, we are social species. In the absence of authentic connection, we suffer. And by authentic I mean the kind of connection that doesn’t require hustling for acceptance and changing who we are to fit in. I dug deep into the work of the neuroscience researcher John Cacioppo when I was writing Braving the Wilderness. He dedicated his career to understanding loneliness, belonging, and connection, and he makes the argument that we don’t derive strength from our rugged individualism, but rather from our collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together. Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. He explains, “To grow to adulthood as a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it’s to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favor this outcome.” No matter how much we love Whitesnake – and, as many of you know, I do – we really weren’t born to walk alone. Myth #4: You can engineer the uncertainty and discomfort out of vulnerability. I love working with tech companies and engineers. There is almost always a moment when someone suggests that we should 61

Bloody hell. I’m not going anywhere. I took a deep breath and asked, “has anyone here ever stood up to a team or group of people and said, ‘this is outside our values’ or ‘this is not in line with our ethics’?” Most people in the room raised a hand. “And how does that feel?” The room got quiet. I answered for them. “There’s probably not a single act at work that requires more vulnerability than holding people responsible for ethics and values, especially when you’re alone in it or there’s a lot of money, power, or influence at stake. People will put you down, question your intentions, hate you, and sometimes try to discredit you in the process of protecting themselves. So if you don’t “do” vulnerability, and/or you have a culture that thinks vulnerability is weakness, then it’s no wonder that ethical decision making is a problem.” There was nothing but the sound of people getting out pens and journals to take notes and settling into their seats until a woman in front said, “Sorry about the umbrella shop. You’ll have to come back. London is lovely in the spring.” Regardless of how we approach systemic vulnerability, once we try to strip uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure from the relational experience, we bankrupt courage by definition. Again, we know that courage is four skill sets with vulnerability at the center. So the bad news is that there’s no app for it, and regardless of what you do and where you work, you’re called to be brave in vulnerability even if your job is engineering the vulnerability out of systems. The good news is that if we can successfully develop the four couragebuilding skills, staring with how to rumble with vulnerability, we will have the capacity for something deeply human, invaluable to leadership, and unattainable by machines.

time, but he almost started crying, so I wrapped up the meeting. It just didn’t feel right. But no it’s like I’m going to get in trouble because I’m not even turning in his performance sheets.” I said, “Yeah. That sounds hard. How does it feel?” His response: “Got it. I’ll sit down now.” Those fields in which systemic vulnerability is equated with failure (or worse) are often the ones in which I see people struggling the most for daring leadership skills and, interestingly, the ones in which people, once they understand, are willing to really dig deep and rumble hard. Can you image how hard it can be to wrap your brain around the critical role vulnerability plays in leadership when you’re rewarded for eliminating vulnerability every day? Another example of this comes from Canary Wharf – London’s financial district – where I spent an afternoon with some very proper bankers who wondered what I was doing there and weren’t afraid to ask me directly. They explained that banking is completely compliance driven and there’s no place for vulnerability. Neither the frustrated bankers nor the wonderful and forward thinking learning and development team who invited me expect my answer. I was honest: “Tomorrow is my last day in London, and I really want to visit James Smith & Sons” – famous umbrella shop that’s been around since the early 1800s – “so let’s try to figure out why I’m here, and if we can’t, I’m out.” They seemed a little miffed but interested in the deal. So I asked one questions; “What the biggest issue you’re facing here in your industry?” There was a pause filled with some back-and-forth between people before the self-elected spokesperson shouted out “Ethical decision making.” 62

Myth #5: Trust comes before vulnerability. We sometimes do an exercise with groups where we give people sentence stems and they fill out the answers on a Post-it note. An example: I grew up believing that vulnerability is: __________________________. If the group is big enough to ensure that comments will be anonymous, we stick them up for everyone to read. It’s incredibly powerful because, without fail, people are stunned by how similar the answers are. We too often believe that we’re the only ones wrestling with some of these issues. I’ll never forget the sticky note that someone shared a couple of years ago. It said, “I grew up believing that vulnerability is: The first step to betrayal.” I was with a group of community leaders and activists, and we spent an hour talking about how so many of us were taught that vulnerability is for suckers. While some of us were raised hearing that explicit message loud and clear, the others learned it through quiet observation, the message was the same: If you’re stupid enough to let someone know where you’re tender or what you care about the most, it’s just a matter of time before someone uses that to hurt you. These conversations always bring up the chicken-egg debate about trust and vulnerability. How do I know if I can trust someone enough to be vulnerable? Can I build trust without ever risking vulnerability? The research is clear, but not a huge relief for those of us who would prefer a scoring system or fail proof trust test. Or that app we just talking about. We need to trust to be vulnerable, and we need to be vulnerable in order to build trust. The research participants describe trust as a slow-building, iterative, and layered

process that happens over time. Both trustbuilding and rumbling with vulnerability involve risk. That’s what makes courage hard and rare. In our work we use the metaphor of the marble jar. I first wrote about this in Daring Greatly, but I’ll tell the story again here. When my daughter, Ellen, was in third grade, she came home from school one day, closed the door behind her, looked at me, and then literally slid down the front door, buried her face in her hands, and started sobbing. My response, of course, was, “Oh, my God, Ellen, are you okay? What happened?” “Something really embarrassing happened at school today, and I shared it with my friends and they promised not to tell anyone, but by the time we got back to class, everyone in my whole class knew.” I could feel the slow rising of my internal Mama Bear. Ellen told me that it has been so bad that Ms. Baucum, her thirdgrade teacher, took half of the marbles out of the marble jar. In her classroom, there is a big jar for marbles – when the class collectively makes good decisions, they get to put marbles into the jar; when the class collectively makes bad decisions, marbles come out. Ms. Baucum took marbles out because everyone was laughing, apparently at Ellen. I told my daughter how sorry I was, and then she looked at me and said: “I will never trust anyone again in my life.” My heart was breaking with hers. My first thought was, Damn straight – you trust your mama and that’s it. And when you go to college I’m going to get a little apartment right next to the dorm and you can come and talk to me. An appealing idea at the time. But instead, I put my fears and anger aside and started trying to figure out how to talk to her about trust and connection. As I was searching for the right way to translate my own experiences of trust, and what I was

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learning about trust from my research, I thought, Ah, the marble jar. Perfect. I told Ellen, “We trust the people who have earned marbles over time in our life. Whenever someone supports you, or is kind to you, or sticks up for you, or honors what you share with them as private, you put marbles in the jar. When people are mean, or disrespectful, or share your secrets, marbles come out. We look for the people who, over time, put marbles in, and in, and in, until you look up one day and they’re holding a full jar. Those are the folks you can tell your secrets to. Those are the folks you trust with information that’s important to you.” And then I asked her if she had a friend with a full marble jar. “Yes, I’ve got marble jar friends. Hanna and Lorna are my marble jar friends.” And I asked her to tell me how they earn marbles. I was really curious, and I expected her to recount dramatic stories of the girls doing heroic things for her. Instead, she said something that shocked me even more. “Well, I was at the soccer game last weekend, and Hanna looked up and told me she saw Oma and Opa.” Oma and Opa are my mom and stepdad. I pushed Ellen for more details. “Then what?” “No, that’s it. I gave her a marble.” “Why?” “Well, not everyone has eight grandparents.” My parents are divorced and remarried, and Steve’s parents are divorced and remarried. “I think it’s really cool that Hanna remembers all of their names.” She continued, “Well, Lorna is also my marble jar friend because she will do the half-butt sit with me.” My very understandable response: “Lord have mercy, what is that?” “If I come in too late to the cafeteria and all the tables are full, she’ll scoot over and just take half the seat and give me the other half of the seat so I can sit at the full table.” I had to agree with her that half-butt

sit was really great, and certainly deserving of a marble. Perking up, she asked me if I have marble jar friends and how they earn their marbles. “Well, I think it might be different for grown-ups.” But then I thought back to the soccer game that Ellen was referring to. When my parents arrived, my friend Eileen had walked up and said, “Hey, David and Deanne, it’s great to see you.” And I remember feeling how much it meant to me that Eileen had remembered their names. I tell you this story because I had always assumed that trust is earned in big moments and through really grand gestures, not in the more simple things like a friend remembering small details in your life. Later that night, I called the doctoral students on my team, and we spent five days going through all the research around trust. We started looking into trust-earning behaviors, which enforced what Ellen had taught me after school that day. It turns out that trust is in fact earned in the smallest of moments. It is earned not through heroic deed, or even highly visible actions, but through paying attention, listening, and gestures of genuine care and connection. My job as a grounded theory researcher is to figure out what the data say and then jump into the literature to see how my findings fit or don’t fit with what other researchers are reporting. Either way, the theory that emerges doesn’t change, but if there’s a conflict – which happens often – the researcher has to acknowledge it. Most quantitative researchers go the other way, looking first at what existing research says and then trying to confirm whether it is true. In my approach, I develop theories based on lived experiences, not existing theories. Only after I capture the participants’ experiences do I try to place my theories in the existing research. Grounded theory researchers do it in that order so that our conclusions about the data aren’t skewed by 64

existing theories that may or may not reflect real experiences by diverse populations. The first place I turned to see what was in the existing literature was John Gottman’s research, which is based on forty years of studying intimate relationships. For those who are unfamiliar with Gottman’s work on marriages, he was able to predict an outcome of divorce with 90 percent accuracy based on responses to a series of questions. His team screen for what he called the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse – criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt, with contempt being the most damning in a romantic partnership. In an article on one of my go-to websites, the University of California, Berkley’s “Greater Good” (greatergood.berkeley.edu), Gottman describes trust-building with our partners in a manner totally consistent with what I found in my research. Gottman writes,

want to deal with her sadness tonight; I was to read my novel. But instead, because I’m a sensitive researcher of relationships, I decided to go into the bathroom. I took the brush from her hand and asked, “What’s the matter, baby?” And she told me why she was sad. Now, at that moment, I was building trust; I was there for her. I was connecting with her rather than choosing to think only about what I wanted. These are the moments, we’ve discovered, that build trust. One such moment is not that important, but if you’re always choosing to turn away, then trust erodes in a relationship – very gradually, very slowly. Trust is the stacking and layering of small moments and reciprocal vulnerability over time. Trust and vulnerability grow together, and to betray one is to destroy both. Myth #6: Vulnerability is disclosure. Apparently there is a misconception in some circles that I am a proponent of leaders disclosing personal experiences and openly sharing emotions in all cases. I think that notion stems from people having only a peripheral understanding of the key themes of my TEDxHouston talk on vulnerability and the book Daring Greatly, combined with the fact that 80 percent of that work I do today is about vulnerability and leadership. It’s a bad case of the 2+2=57 craziness that we see in the world today. We all know people (and we’ve all been the people) who add up a couple of things we think we understand and come to a clear, somewhat interesting, and totally false conclusion. Let’s dispel that myth right off the bat with two seemingly conflicting statements:

What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie Sliding Doors. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner. Let me give you an example of that from my own relationship. One night, I really wanted to finish a mystery novel. I thought I knew who the killer was, but I was anxious to find out. At one point in the night, I put the novel on my bedside table and walked into the bathroom. As I passed the mirror, I saw my wife’s face in the reflection, and she looked sad, brushing her hair. There was a sliding door moment. I had a choice. I could sneak out of the bathroom and think, I don’t 65

proud. Let’s each write down one thing we need from this group in order to feel okay sharing and asking questions, and one thing that will get in the way.

1. I am not a proponent of oversharing, indiscriminate disclosure as a leadership tool, or vulnerability for vulnerabilities sake. 2. There is no daring leadership without vulnerability.

This is a great example of rumbling with vulnerability. The leader is naming some of the unsaid emotions and crating what we call a safe container by asking the team what they need to feel open and safe in the conversation. This is one of the easiest practices to implement, and the return on the time investment is huge in terms of trustbuilding and improving the quality of feedback and conversations; yet I rarely see team, project, or group leaders take that time. Google’s five year study on highly productive teams, Project Aristotle, found that psychological safety – team members feeling safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other – was “far and away the most important of the five dynamics that set successful teams apart.” Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson coined the phrase psychological safety. In her book Teaming, she writes,

Both of these are true statements. I know there’s a problem when people ask me, “How much should leadership share with their colleagues or employees?” some of the most daring leaders I know have incredible vulnerability rumbling skills and yet disclose very little. I’ve also worked with leaders who share way more than they should and demonstrate little to no rumbling skills. During a time of difficult change and uncertainty, daring leaders might sit with their teams and say, These changes are coming in hard and fast, and I know there’s a lot of anxiety – I’m feeling it too, and it’s hard to work through. It’s hard to not take it home, it’s hard not to worry, and it’s easy to want to look for someone to blame. I will share everything I can about the changes with you, as soon as I can. I want to spend the next fortyfive minutes rumbling on how we’re all managing the changes. Specifically, What does support from me look like? What questions can I try to answer? Are there any stories you want to check out with me? And any other questions you have? I’m asking everyone to stay connected and lean into each other during this churn so we can really rumble with what’s going on. In the midst of all of this we still need to produce work that makes you

Simply put, psychological safety makes it possible to have tough feedback and have difficult conversations without the need to tiptoe around the truth. In psychologically safe environments, people believe that if they make a mistake others will not penalize or think less of them for it. They also believe that others will not resent or humiliate them when they ask for help or information. This belief comes about when people both trust and respect each other, and it produces a sense of confidence that the group won’t embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up. 66

Thus psychological safety is takenfor-granted belief about how others will respond when you ask a question, seek feedback, admit a mistake, or propose a possible wacky idea. Most people feel a need to “manage” interpersonal risk to retain a good image, especially at work, and especially in the presence of those who formally evaluate them. This need is both instrumental (promotions and rewards may depend on impressions held by bosses and others) and socioemotional (we simply prefer approval over disapproval). Psychological safety does not imply a cozy situation in which people are necessarily close friends, nor does it suggest an absence of pressure or problems.

questions and reality-check the rumor mill. What I really appreciate about this approach is one of my favorite rumble tools: “What does support from me look like?” Not only does it offer the opportunity for clarity and set up the team for success, asking people for specific examples of what supportive behaviors look like – and what they do not look like – it also holds them accountable for asking for what they need. When you put this question into practice, expect to see people struggling to come up with examples of supportive behaviors. We’re much more accustomed to not asking for exactly what we need and then being resentful or disappointed that we didn’t get it. Also, most of us can tell you what support does not look like more easily than we can come up with what it does look like. Over time, this practice is a huge grounded-confidence builder (we’ll talk about that concept later).

In our container-building work, the team would review all of the items that they wrote down, then work together to consolidate and match items to come up with some ground rules. Items that frequently show up as things that get in the way of psychological safety in teams and groups include judgement, unsolicited advice giving, interrupting, and sharing outside the team meeting. The behaviors that people need from their team or group almost always include listening, staying curious, being honest, and keeping confidence. Dare to lead by investing twenty minutes in creating psychological safety when you need to rumble. Make your intention of creating safety explicit and get your team’s help on how to do it effectively. What I also love about this example is how the leader is being honest about the struggle, staying calm while naming the anxiety and how it might be showing up, and giving people the opportunity to ask

In this rumble example, the leader is not oversharing or disclosing inappropriately as a mechanism for hotwiring connection or trust with other people. There's also no fake vulnerability. Fake vulnerability can look like a leader telling us that we can ask questions but not taking the time to create the psychological safety to do it, or not offering a pause in the conversation for anyone else to speak at all. This leader is also not shirking the responsibility of attending to the team’s fears and feelings by oversharing and sympathy seeking with statements like “I’m really falling apart too. I don’t know what to do either. I’m not the enemy here." Basically, Feel sorry for me and don’t hold me accountable for leading through this hard time because I’m scared too. Blech. Not only is fake vulnerability ineffective--but it breeds distrust. There's no faster way to piss off people than to try to manipulate them with vulnerability. 67

Vulnerability is not a personal marketing tool. It's not an oversharing strategy. Rumbling with vulnerability is about leaning into rather than walking away from the situations that make us feel uncertain, at risk, or emotionally exposed. We should always be clear about our intention, understand the limits of vulnerability in the context of roles and relationships, and set boundaries. Boundaries is a slippery word, but I love how my friend Kelly Rae Roberts makes it simple and powerful. She’s an artist, and several years ago she wrote a blog post about how people can and can’t use her copyrighted work. The post had two lists: what’s okay and what's not okay. It was crystal clear and completely captured what had emerged from the data we collected on effective boundary setting. Today, we teach that setting boundaries is making clear what’s okay and what's not okay, and why. Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability. It’s confession, manipulation, desperation, or shock and awe, but it’s not vulnerability. As an example of what vulnerability is not, I sometimes tell the story of a young CEO who was six months into his first round of investment funding. He came up to me after a talk and said, “I get it! I’m in. I’m drinking the Kool-Aid! I’m gonna get really vulnerable with my people.” My first thought was Oh, man. Here we go. First, when people talk about “drinking the Kool-Aid,” I get skeptical. It’s a pretty terrible reference, and if you have to turn off your critical thinking and chug the groupthink juice to be down with an idea or get on board with a plan, I’m already concerned. Second, if you run up to me excited about becoming more vulnerable, you must not really understand the concept. If, on the other hand, you come up to me and say, “Okay. I think I get it and I’m going to try to embrace the suck of vulnerability,”

I’m pretty sure you understand what’s involved. The conversation started with multiple flags. Not enough for a parade, but close. I gave him a nervous smile and said “Say more.” Another favorite rumble tool. Asking someone to say more often leads to profoundly deeper and more productive rumbling. Context and details matter. Peel the onion. Stephen Covey’s sage advice still stands: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” The excited CEO explained, “I’m just going to tell the investors and my team the truth: I’m completely in over my head, we’re bleeding money, and I have no idea what I’m doing.” He paused and looked at me. “What do you think?” I took his hand and led him to the side of the room, and we sat down. I looked at him and repeated what I had said in the talk, but what he apparently missed: “What do I think? I think you won't secure any more funding and you’re going to scare the shit out of some people. Vulnerability without boundaries is not vulnerability. It might be fear or anxiety. We have to think about why we’re sharing and, equally important, with whom. What are their roles? What is our role? Is this sharing productive and appropriate?” Before I go any further when I’m telling the story to a group, I always ask the audience this question: We probably all agree that standing in front of your employees and investors with this confession is not smart. But here’s a question for you: If everyone here had a full year’s salary invested in this guy’s company, how many of you would be hoping he was sitting down across someone saying, “I’m completely in over my head, we’re bleeding money, and I have no idea what I’m doing?” If there are a thousand people in the room, two or three might nervously raise 68

their hand as they become increasingly aware of being in a tiny minority. The only exception was a room of fifty venture capitalists. They all raised their hand. I break the tension by raising my hand and explaining my thinking: “If I’ve got money invested in his company, I pray that he’s sitting down with a mentor or an advisor or a board member and being really honest about what’s happening. Why? Because we all know the alternative. He keeps pretending and bustling and grinding on the same ineffective changes until everything is gone.” Now, if I were the guy, I wouldn’t stand up in front of all of my investors or my team of friends and colleagues who left great jobs to come work with me to turn my vision into a reality and spill my guts like that – that’s not good judgment. When I asked him why he’d share that with them rather than an advisor or mentor who might be able to help without becoming personally panicked, he revealed what I call the stealth intention and the stealth expectation. The stealth intention is a self-protection need that lurks beneath the surface and often drives behavior outside our values. Closely related is the stealth expectation – a desire or expectation that exists outside our awareness and typically includes a dangerous combination of fear and magical thinking. Stealth expectations almost always lead to disappointment, resentment, and more fear. He said, “I’m not sure. I guess I want them to know I’m trying. I want them to know that I’m doing the best I can and I’m a good guy, but I’m failing. If I tell them the truth and get really vulnerable, they won't blame me or hate me. They’ll understand.” Stealth intention: I can protect myself from rejection, shame, judgment, and people turning away from me and thinking I’m a bad person. Stealth expectation: They won’t turn away from me and think I’m a bad person.

Trust me when I tell you that stealth intentions and expectations are things I have to wrestle with often in myself, sometimes on a daily basis. I’ve wanted to shout the same type of thing to my team for the same reason, but I’ve had enough practice to know that vulnerability is not a sympathyseeking tool. As a leader, he needs to stay honest with this team and investors, and this vulnerable conversation needs to happen with someone who can help him lead through it. Sharing just to share without understanding your role, recognizing your professional boundaries, and getting clear on your intentions and expectations (especially those flying under the radar) is just purging or venting to gossip or a million other things that are often propelled by hidden needs. More than occasionally, I find that the people who misrepresent my work on vulnerability and conflate it with disclosure or emotional purging either don’t understand it, or they have so much personal resistance to the notion of being vulnerable that they stretch the concept until it appears ridiculous and easy to discount. In either case, if you come across an explanation of vulnerability that doesn’t include setting boundaries or being clear on intentions, proceed with caution. Vulnerability for vulnerability sake is not effective, useful or smart. To Feel Is To Be Vulnerable For those of us where were raised with healthy (or unhealthy) doses of “suck it up and get ‘er done,” rumbling with vulnerability is a challenge. The myths I outlined above work together to lead us to believe that vulnerability is the gooey center of the hard emotions that we work full time to avoid feeling, much less discussing (even when our avoidance causes us and the people around us pain) – emotions like fear, shame, grief, disappointment, and sadness. But vulnerability isn’t just the center of hard emotions, it’s the core of all emotions. To 69

feel is to be vulnerable. Believing that vulnerability is weakness is believing that feeling is weakness. And, like it or not, we are emotional beings. What most of us fail to understand, and what took me a decade of research to learn, is that vulnerability is the cradle of the emotions and experiences that we crave. Vulnerability is birthplace of love, belonging, and joy. We know that vulnerability is the cornerstone of courageous building, but we often fail to realize that without vulnerability there is no creativity or innovation. Why? Because there is nothing more uncertain than the creative process, and there is absolutely no innovation without failure. Show me a culture in which vulnerability is framed as weakness and I’ll show you a culture struggling to come up with fresh ideas and new perspectives. I love what

Amy Poehler had to say in her web series Smart Girls: Ask Amy: It’s very hard to have ideas. It’s very hard to put yourself out there, it’s very hard to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the thinkers, and the creators. They are the magic people of the world. Adaptability to change, hard conversations, feedback, problem solving, ethical decision making, recognition, resilience, and all of the other skills that underpin daring leadership are born of vulnerability. To foreclose on vulnerability and our emotional life out of fear that the costs will be too high is to walk away from the very thing that gives purpose and meaning to living. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us, “We are not necessarily thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.”

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Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was the son and grandson of Baptist ministers, and this was his vocation as well. After graduation from Morehouse College in Atlanta, King received the Master of Divinity degree from Cozier Theological Seminary, and he earned a Ph.D. in ethics from Boston University. After completing his doctorate in 1954, King was called to serve as the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. A year later, King was asked to lead the Montgomery bus boycott which was started by Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a city bus. King’s successful leadership of this nonviolent protest (in 1956, a U.S. District Court ruling ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses) catapulted King to national prominence. After his work in Montgomery, King became the main leader of the American civil rights movement. He founded and led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and through that organization worked to end segregation, electoral discrimination against blacks, and other basic civil rights. His “I Have a Dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington remains one of the most famous speeches in American history. Until his assassination in 1968, King promoted and applied the process of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi had successfully used to fight for independence in India. The sermon presented here is an excerpt from King’s book The Strength to Love. Written early in his civil rights career, this sermon displays King’s talent for speaking that has made his speeches so memorable. He starts with a verse from the Bible and connects it to his prescription for modern life, addressing “race prejudice” and “nonviolent resistance.”

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. King gives two examples of softmindedness and gullibility. What other aspects of softmindedness are mentioned, and how do they relate to King’s work for civil rights? 2. King addresses the conflict between science and religion. Explain his resolution of the apparent conflict. 3. What is the connection between nonviolent resistance, toughmindedness, and tenderheartedness? 4. How does King tie the virtues of toughmindedness and tenderheartedness to God and to the contemporary struggle for social justice?

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A TOUGH MIND AND A TENDER HEART By Martin Luther King Jr. A French philosopher said, “No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked.” The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites. Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two. Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites. He knew that his disciples would face a difficult and hostile world, where they would confront the recalcitrance of political officials and the intransigence of the protectors of the old order. He knew that they would meet cold and arrogant men whose hearts had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. So he said to them, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.’” And he gave them a formula for action: “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” It is pretty difficult to imagine a single person having, simultaneously, the characteristics of the serpent and the dove, but this is what Jesus expects. We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong, austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment. Who doubts that this toughness of mind is one of man’s greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think. This prevalent tendency toward softmindedness is found in man’s unbelievable gullibility. Take our attitude toward advertisements. We are so easily led to purchase a product because a television or radio advertisement pronounces it better than any other. Advertisers have long since learned that most people are softminded, and they capitalize on this susceptibility with skillful and effective slogans. This undue gullibility is also seen in the tendency of many readers to accept the printed word of the press as final truth. Few people realize that even our authentic channels of information — the press, the platform, and in many instances the pulpit — do not give us objective and unbiased truth. Few people have the toughness of mind to judge critically and to discern the true from the false, the fact from the fiction. Our minds are constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and false facts. One of the great needs of mankind is to be lifted above the morass of false propaganda. Softminded individuals are prone to embrace all kinds of superstitions. Their minds are constantly invaded by irrational fears, which range from fear of Friday the thirteenth to fear of a black cat crossing one’s path. As the elevator made its upward

I Let us consider, first, the need for a tough mind, characterized by incisive thinking, realistic appraisal, and decisive judgment. The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of 72

climb in one of the large hotels of New York City, I notice for the first time that there was no thirteenth floor – floor fourteen followed floor twelve. On inquiring from the elevator operator the reason for this omission, he said, “This practice is followed by most large hotels because of the fear of numerous people to stay on a thirteenth floor.” Then he added, “The real foolishness of the fear is to be found in the fact that the fourteenth floor is actually the thirteenth.” Such fears leave the soft mind haggard by day and haunted by night. The softminded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea. An elderly segregationist in the South is reported to have said, “I have come to see now that desegregation is inevitable. But I pray God that it will not take place until after I die.” The softminded person always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness. Softmindedness often invades religion. This is why religion has sometimes rejected new truth with a dogmatic passion. Through edicts and bulls, inquisitions and excommunications, the church has attempted to prorogue truth and place an impenetrable stone wall in the path of the truth-seeker. The historical-philological criticism of the Bible is considered by the softminded as blasphemous, and reason is often looked upon as the exercise of a corrupt faculty. Softminded persons have revised the Beatitudes to read, “Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God.” This has also led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true. There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion. Their respective worlds are different and their methods are

dissimilar. Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism. We do not need to look far to detect the dangers of softmindedness. Dictators, capitalizing on softmindedness, have led men to acts of barbarity and terror that are unthinkable in civilized society. Adolf Hitler realized that softmindedness was so prevalent among his followers that he said, “I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.” In Mein Kampf he asserted: “By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell — and hell, heaven … The greater the lie, the more readily will it be believed.” Softmindedness is one of the basic causes of race prejudice. The toughminded person always examines the facts before he reaches conclusions; in short, he post judges. The tenderminded person reaches a conclusion before he has examined the first fact; in short, he prejudges and is prejudiced. Race prejudice is based on groundless fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings. There are those who are sufficiently softminded to believe in the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of the Negro race in spite of the toughminded research of anthropologists who reveal the falsity of such a notion. There are softminded persons who argue that racial segregation should be perpetuated because Negroes lag behind in academic, health, and moral standards. They are not toughminded enough to realize that lagging standards are the result of segregation and discrimination. They do not 73

recognize that it is rationally unsound and sociologically untenable to use the tragic effects of segregation as an argument for its continuation. Too many politicians in the South recognize this disease of softmindedness which engulfs their constituency. With insidious zeal, they make inflammatory statements and disseminate distortions and half-truths which arouse abnormal fears and morbid antipathies within the minds of uneducated and underprivileged whites, leaving them so confused that they are led to acts of meanness and violence which no normal person commits. There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of softmindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.

island. No outpouring of love links him with the mainland of humanity. The hardhearted person lacks the capacity for genuine compassion. He is unmoved by the pains and afflictions of his brothers. He passes unfortunate men every day, but he never really sees them. He gives dollars to a worthwhile charity, but he gives not of his spirit. The hardhearted individual never sees people as people, but rather as mere objects or as impersonal cogs in an ever-turning wheel. In the vast wheel of industry, he sees men as hands. In the massive wheel of big city life, he sees men as digits in a multitude. In the deadly wheel of army life, he sees men as numbers in a regiment. He de-personalizes life. Jesus frequently illustrated the characteristics of the hardhearted. The rich fool was condemned, not because he was not toughminded, but rather because he was not tenderhearted. Life for him was a mirror in which he saw only himself, and not a window through which he saw other selves. Dives went to hell, not because he was wealthy, but because he was not tenderhearted enough to see Lazarus and because he made no attempt to bridge the gulf between himself and his brother. Jesus reminds us that the good life combines the toughness of the serpent and the tenderness of the dove. To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses. We as Negroes must bring together toughmindedness and tenderheartedness, if we are to move creatively toward the goal of freedom and justice. Softminded individuals among us feel that the only way to deal with oppression is by adjusting to it. They acquiesce and resign themselves to segregation. They prefer to remain

II But we must not stop with the cultivation of a tough mind. The gospel also demands a tender heart. Toughmindedness without tenderheartedness is cold and detached, leaving one’s life in a perpetual winter devoid of the warmth of spring and the gentle heat of summer. What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of toughmindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hardheartedness? The hardhearted person never truly loves. He engages in a crass utilitarianism which values other people mainly according to their usefulness to him. He never experiences the beauty of friendship, because he is too cold to feel affection for another and is too self-centered to share another’s joy and sorrow. He is an isolated

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oppressed. When Moses led the children of Israel from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land, he discovered that slaves do not always welcome their deliverers. They would rather bear those ills they have, as Shakespeare pointed out, than flee to others that they know not of. They prefer the “fleshpots of Egypt” to the ordeals of emancipation. But this is not the way out. Softminded acquiescence is cowardly. My friends, we cannot win the respect of the white people of the South or elsewhere if we are willing to trade the future of our children for our personal safety and comfort. Moreover, we must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to co-operate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil. And there are hardhearted and bitter individuals among us who would combat the opponent with physical violence and corroding hatred. Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating many more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace. I am convinced that if we succumb to the temptation to use violence in our struggle for freedom, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be a never-ending reign of chaos. A Voice, echoing through the corridors of time, says to every intemperate Peter, “Put up thy sword.” History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that failed to follow Christ’s command.

crisis in race relations. Through nonviolent resistance we shall be able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the perpetrators of the system. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as citizens, but may it never be said, my friends, that to gain it we used the inferior methods of falsehood, malice, hate, and violence. I would not conclude without applying the meaning of the text to the nature of God. The greatness of our God lies in the fact that he is both toughminded and tenderhearted. He has qualities both of austerity and of gentleness. The Bible, always clear in stressing both attributes of God, expresses his toughmindedness in his justice and Wrath and his tenderheartedness in his love and grace. God has two outstretched arms. One is strong enough to surround us with justice, and one is gentle enough to embrace us with grace. On the one hand, God is a God of justice who punished Israel for her wayward deeds, and on the other hand, he is a forgiving father whose heart was filled with unutterable joy when the prodigal returned home. I am thankful that we worship a God who is both toughminded and tenderhearted. If God were only toughminded, he would be a cold, passionless despot sitting in some far-off heaven “contemplating all,” as Tennyson puts it in “The Palace of Art.” He would be Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” self-knowing, but not other-loving. But if God were only tenderhearted, he would be too soft and sentimental to function when things go wrong and incapable of controlling what he has made. He would be like H. G. Wells’s lovable God in God, the Invisible King, who is strongly desirous of making a good world, but finds himself helpless before the surging powers of evil. God is neither hardhearted nor softminded. He is toughminded enough to transcend the world; he is tenderhearted enough to live in it. He

III A third way is open in our quest for freedom, namely, nonviolent resistance that combines toughmindedness and tenderheartedness and avoids the complacency and do-nothingness of the softminded and the violence and bitterness of the hardhearted. My belief is that this method must guide our action in the present 75

does not leave us alone in our agonies and struggles. He seeks us in dark places and suffers with us and for us in our tragic prodigality. At times we need to know that the Lord is a God of justice. When slumbering giants of injustice emerge in the earth, we need to know that there is a God of power who can cut them down like the grass and leave them withering like the green herb. When our most tireless efforts fail to stop the surging sweep of oppression, we need to know that in this universe is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man. But there are also times when we need to know that God possesses

love and mercy. When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive far country and are frustrated because of a strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance. When days grow dark and nights grow dreary, we can be thankful that our God combines in his nature a creative synthesis of love and justice which will lead us through life’s dark valleys and into sunlit pathways of hope and fulfillment.

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Nick Craig, Bill George, and Scott Nook Nick Craig is the President of the Authentic Leadership Institute, a leadership consulting firm committed to creating leaders and organizations with a deeper purpose and the courage to transform their business impact. Bill George, former Chair and CEO of Medtronic, is one of the world’s largest medical technology companies. George is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School, where he has taught leadership since 2004. Scott Nook is a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Nook’s research focuses on leader development, leading through change, and organizational failures.

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CRUCIBLE MOMENTS From Discover Your True North Fieldbook by Nick Craig, Bill George, and Scott Nook When heated directly by fire, the fire of trial, the heat of disease, Infernos of grief and penury ... Can we hold under the terror, the torment of transforming, under forging, Until we are bearers of light, torches, for sufferance, for illumining oblivion? -Susan Deborah King, from "Crucible," in One-Breasted Woman Chapter 1 introduced the central notion that “we are largely the stories we tell about ourselves.” In Chapter 2, we asked you to practice some “projective hindsight” to imagine how you might lose your way in hopes that, in fact, you wouldn’t “lose it,” but rather “find it” and increase the chances that you’ll stay on course. Here, we ask you to return to your life story, this time scanning it for particularly salient experiences that seem heavily laden with meaning. We call these crucibles. Life is chock-full of potentially rich developmental experiences. But not all of it. In fact, most of our waking hours are pretty boring. Our challenge here is to identify those times that seem most interesting and squeeze them for all they’re worth. As you embark on this chapter in your journey toward authentic leadership, consider the following two questions:  What events, relationships, or periods in your life have had the greatest impact on who you are?  What did you learn from these crucibles? It can be hard to gain insight and learn from periods of productive ferment, difficulties, and challenges when we are in the midst of them. Yet it is often during the most difficult times that we have the opportunity to confront who we are at the deepest level and realize what our lives and our leadership are all about. In their book Geeks and Geezers, authors Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas describe crucibles as intense experiences

that test us to our very limits. Crucibles force us to look at ourselves, examine our character and values in a new light, and come to grips with who we really are. “The skills required to conquer adversity and emerge stronger and more committed than ever,” they conclude, “are the same ones that make for extraordinary leaders.” Many crucibles involve pain and loss. Examples from your professional life might include confronting a difficult challenge at work, receiving critical feedback, getting passed over for promotion, or losing a job. Experiencing a divorce, illness, or death of a loved one are examples of highly consequential events in our personal lives that often qualify as potential crucibles. To a chemist, a crucible is a vessel in which substances are heated to high temperatures in order to trigger a chemical transformation, as in the case of the refinement of gold ore or a steel refinery’s blast furnace. The crucible is an ancient technology and has yielded rich literary references over time, ranging from the refiner’s fire of the Old Testament prophets, to the metaphor and techniques of alchemists, to Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible. While often painful, crucibles don’t necessarily have to be negative events. Getting accepted into a prestigious school, winning a big game or competition, or truly leading for the first time are all significant experiences with the potential to fundamentally shape who we are. Particularly powerful relationships with 78

mentors, elders, or personal heroes can also play an important role in our development. These too might qualify as a crucible. Any event or period of your life that forces deep self-reflection, that causes you to question your most basic assumptions, values, and worldview, has the potential to qualify as a crucible. Shortly after the end of the 2004 college basketball season, Duke University’s legendary men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (aka: Coach K) unexpectedly faced one of the most important decisions of his life. The Los Angeles franchise of the National Basketball Association offered Coach K a five-year, $40 million contract to leave his beloved Blue Devils to coach the Lakers. On the surface, receiving such a lucrative offer appears completely different from being fired, suffering through a major illness, or losing a loved one. And yet, this was perhaps the most significant crucible of his professional career. At the age of 57, receiving such an unexpected and attractive offer forced Coach K to reflect deeply on some very serious questions: What’s really important to me? What are my core values? Where do my loyalties lie? What’s my real purpose in life? His answer: “I passionately want to coach and teach ... and your heart has to be in whatever you lead ... Duke has always taken up my whole heart. And no matter how good some other option was, to lead my Duke team with all my heart could only happen at this place.” Coach K remained at Duke. More dedicated than ever, he earned his 1,000th victory in January of 2015, solidifying his position as the coach with most wins in Division I men’s basketball history. As you scan your life for potential crucibles, be playful. Think broadly. For some, the task of identifying a crucible comes easily. One single, searing moment in their lives seems to define who they are and how they lead. For others, this work can be

more difficult, the process more complex, their crucibles more nuanced. Are there any places in your life that you keep revisiting? Events or episodes that seem to hold your attention? These are crucible-rich zip codes, ripe for re-visiting to explore for important lessons. Many of us can’t point to one single, dramatic event that seems worthy of the label. That’s okay; don’t force it. Relax your criteria. Instead of a single event, your crucible might be an extended period of minor challenges that resulted in an important shift or reframing of yourself or your place in the world. It could also be a series of events over time that reveals an important pattern in your life. Who knows? You might be in the middle of an important crucible right now. Don’t worry if your crucible doesn’t seem to fit the formal definition. Don’t worry if your life seems largely blessed, if you haven’t experienced any dramatic hardships, trauma, or crises worthy of a good novel. This exercise is not about unleashing your competitive juices to see who has lived the most challenging life. It’s simply designed to ensure that you squeeze as much learning out of the rock that is your life story. It’s as simple (and hard) as that. Let’s try it! Potential Crucibles As you scan your life story, what events, relationships, or periods of your life have had the greatest impact on who you are? Start by searching for potential crucibles. For example: My parents divorced when I was eight years old; I was elected president of my high school class; I was passed over for promotion; I was cut from the JV basketball team; my partner of six years just broke up with me; when I was 12, my parents sent me from China to live in the United States with my grandparents and I didn’t speak any English; I wasn’t very 79

popular in high school or college; one of my children has no respect for me; I have the chance to start my own company, but I also have an offer to return to a prestigious consulting firm; my boss screamed at me in an important meeting with a client; I am in

love with a person from outside my faith; I spent three years in financial services and hated it, but loved the money; my father is dying; I just started in my first real leadership position, and I’m not sure that I can do this.

EXERCISE 3.1 POTENTIAL CRUCIBLES List at least three to five potential crucibles:  ________________________________________________________________________ 

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Your Greatest Crucible. Now, try to identify the single, most salient, and consequential experience of your life. If you had to point to just one life-defining event, which one would it be? Which one of the potential crucibles listed above seems to hold the most meaning for you? Identify your greatest crucible with an asterisk next to it (above). Pattern of Crucibles. If, upon reflection, no one single experience rises to the level of feeling particularly life defining or extraordinarily salient, then look for a pattern of crucibles in your life. Can you identify a significant theme or common thread that seems to flow through your life story, one that seems to define who you are? If you can, how would you describe this pattern?

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Multiple Crucibles. For this exercise, it’s important to work really hard at identifying a single greatest crucible or discerning a central pattern. Don’t give up too easily on either of these drills. After some effort though, if selecting a greatest crucible simply doesn’t feel right and no clear pattern emerges, then simply hang onto your original list of potential crucibles. You’ll need them for the next part of this exercise. This Story of Your Crucibles It’s time to write the story of your crucible. Whether it’s based on a single event, a pattern of experiences, or a list of important stories, the very practice of writing it down-putting it out there is an essential step in the learning process. You might be thinking, “I can skip this step. I’ve done the reflection, but writing is hard. Can’t I get the benefit of this exercise without having to write it down?” The short answer is, “No.” Reflection is important; however, until we write it down, we don’t really get it. The very discipline of writing infuses a level of

clarity into our understanding that simply doesn’t exist until we get it down on paper. Writing also injects some much-needed space between our experiences and ourselves. Until we write about them, in a sense, our experiences “have us.” The very act of writing shifts the locus of agency and control; putting our lives “out there” allows us to “have them.” Gaining some distance from our stories, from ourselves, can be very liberating. Writing our stories in this unique format – as crucibles – also allows us to more easily and powerfully share ourselves with others.

EXERCISE 3.2 THE STORY OF YOUR CRUCIBLE(S) Write a letter to yourself that tells the story of your life’s crucible. Write it in one continuous draft, allowing as much space as you need to complete the letter. As you write, tell the whole story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Set the stage, narrate the high point, include all relevant details. We are indeed the authors of own lives chance to write your story. Not the entire story, but the most salient moment (or moments) of it. Have some fun with this. Write something you will want to read again and again. No matter how potentially painful it might be to relive these important moments, ignoring them is not an option if you want to better understand yourself and make progress on your journey toward authenticity. Your life’s crucible:

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Learning From Your Crucible Having addressed the first question: What events, relationships, or periods of your life have had the greatest impact on who you are? Let’s now turn to the second: What did you learn from these crucibles? At this point, you might be thinking: While it might be an interesting intellectual exercise to identify potential crucibles in my life, what’s the point? This is more than a parlor game. The purpose of this entire exercise is to gain greater clarity about who you are, your authentic self, your True North.

Once you’ve identified your crucible, an important pattern, or a series of crucibles, the next step is to squeeze them for all they’re worth. The following questions will help you mine these experiences for as much meaning as possible:  In general, how do you respond to crucibles in your life? o Do you continue to spiral downward or come out stronger?

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o Do you learn anything from these extraordinary moments?  What do you learn from them? o What lessons (about others, the world, business, leadership, etc.) do you take away from your crucible? o What do you learn about yourself? People vary greatly along each of these dimensions. For your continued growth as a leader, it’s important to understand how you tend to respond in a crucible. As you review some of the most consequential moments of your life, can you identify a general pattern in how you respond to them? While not all crucibles involve pain or loss, most involve an internal struggle of some consequence. When faced with particularly searing moments in life, what is your general pattern of response? How you tend to deal with such battles is important to know. Do you tend to ignore them, hoping they’ll go away? Or do you seek them out and embrace them as potential learning experiences?

Not all of us are as fortunate as Coach K to have a $40 million offer trigger deep self-refection. In fact, most crucibles are indeed painful; many involve some form of loss. Adversity gets our attention; difficulties challenge us to our core. When things go well, when the world is largely working for us, we rarely pause to consider alternative ways of knowing, doing, or being. One way to summarize the two puzzles outlined above is to combine them into one single, deeply important question: How do you respond to adversity? Fortunately, there is a large body of research to help us address this question. If you are interested in learning more, there are dozens of good books on resilience, hardiness, and grit. We’ve hardiness, and grit. We’ve listed a few at the end of this chapter. Happily we don’t need to understand the science to learn from our experiences. In fact, we think you’ll find the research more useful if you first work hard at unpacking your own crucibles. Here are some questions to help you do this important work:

EXERCISE 3.3 LEARNING FROM YOUR CRUCIBLE Review the letter you just wrote describing your life’s crucible. What did you learn from it? What lessons (about the world, business, leadership, etc.) did you take away from this experience?

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What did you learn about yourself? ______________________________________________________________________________

In general, how do you tend to respond to adversity?

What resources did you call upon to help get through this crucible?

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Our lives are chock-full of potential developmental experiences. Not all of them rise to the significance of a crucible. However, the general process of identifying, reflecting, and learning from them is largely the same as the one you’ve practiced here.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS  There are a few particularly salient events, relationships, or periods in our

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lives that have a disproportionate impact on who we are and how we lead. We call these crucibles. Identifying, reflecting, and writing about these experiences is an important process in discovering our True North. Understanding how we respond to life’s crucibles is important to understanding how we grow and develop.

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Maya Angelou Maya Angelou (b.1928) is an accomplished poet, writer, performer, and activist. In the first of her autobiographical books, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Angelou revealed that she had been raped at the age of 8. When the man who raped her was found beaten to death not long after she testified against him in court, she chose to stop speaking for almost five years, fearing (she said later) that her voice might kill people. An African-American woman descended from slaves, Angelou eventually found her voice and has used it to inspire others ever since. Her writings often wrestle with issues of racial and economic oppression, which she frequently challenges through the use of humor and irony, as this poem demonstrates. In addition to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou is perhaps best known for her poem, “On the Pulse of the Morning,” recited at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993. She is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts (2000) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2011).

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. What central message is Angelou trying to express in this poem, and why is it important? 2. Who is the “you” that she addresses in the poem? 3. Why do you think Angelou uses images of prosperity in this poem (oil wells, gold mines, diamonds)? 4. Compare the last lines of the first stanza and the sixth stanza. What different meanings or emotions do the metaphors of rising “like dust” and rising “like air” convey? 5. Why do you think Angelou shifts from “I’ll rise” in the first part of the poem to “I rise” in the final section of the poem? Why do you think she repeats the final phrase?

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STILL I RISE By Maya Angelou You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room.

Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise.

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise.

Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries. Does my haughtiness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard ‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard

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William Cronon William Cronon studies North American environment history and the history of American West. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in American History as well as his Doctorate of Philosophy from Oxford University in British Urban and Economic History. His research seeks to understand the history of human interaction with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us. His first book, Changes in the Land (1983), received the Francis Parkman Prize, and Nature’s Metropolis (1991) won the Bancroft Prize. Cronon briefly distilled his teaching experience in this widely known essay to describe how one recognizes liberally educate people. What others have mulled over elsewhere, he outlined succinctly by taking as his key E.M. Forster’s counsel: “Only Connect.”

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. You have chosen to attend a college that focuses on liberal education. Why does that matter to you? Or does it? Explain. 2. Essential education is viewed as an important part of a liberal education. If you were to create an essential education plan at Wartburg, what courses would you include? Justify your selections. 3. The author lists 10 qualities that he admires in the liberally educated. Review the first nine of those qualities. Which do you feel is the most important? The least important? 4. “Only connect” is the 10th quality, as well as the title of this article. What significance does the act of “connecting” have in terms of liberal education? 5. Throughout the article, Cronon addresses the question “What does it mean to be a liberally educated person?” After reading the article, how would you answer that question?

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ONLY CONNECT By William Cronon What does it mean to be a liberally educated person? It seems such a simple question, especially given the frequency with which colleges and universities genuflect toward this well-worn phrase as the central icon of their institutional missions. Mantra-like, the words are endlessly repeated, starting in the glossy admissions brochures that high school students receive by the hundreds in their mailboxes and continuing right down to the last tired invocations they hear on commencement day. It would be surprising indeed if the phrase did not begin to sound at least a little empty after so much repetition, and surely undergraduates can be forgiven if they eventually regard liberal education as either a marketing ploy or a shibboleth. Yet many of us continue to place great stock in these words, believing them to describe one of the ultimate goods that a college or university should serve. So, what exactly do we mean by liberal education, and why do we care so much about it? In speaking of "liberal" education, we certainly do not mean an education that indoctrinates students in the values of political liberalism, at least not in the most obvious sense of the latter phrase. Rather, we use these words to describe an educational tradition that celebrates and nurtures human freedom. These days liberal and liberty have become words so mired in controversy, embraced and reviled as they have been by the far ends of the political spectrum, that we scarcely know how to use them without turning them into slogans— but they can hardly be separated from this educational tradition. Liberal derives from the Latin liberalis, meaning "of or relating to the liberal arts," which in turn derives from the Latin word liber, meaning "free." But the word actually has much deeper

roots, being akin to the Old English word leodan, meaning "to grow," and leod, meaning "people." It is also related to the Greek word eleutheros, meaning "free," and goes all the way back to the Sanskrit word rodhati, meaning "one climbs," "one grows." Freedom and growth: here, surely, are values that lie at the very core of what we mean when we speak of a liberal education. Liberal education is built on these values: it aspires to nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom. So, one very simple answer to my question is that liberally educated people have been liberated by their education to explore and fulfill the promise of their own highest talents. But what might an education for human freedom actually look like? There’s the rub. Our current culture wars, our struggles over educational standards are all ultimately about the concrete embodiment of abstract values like "freedom" and "growth" in actual courses and textbooks and curricular requirements. Should students be forced to take courses in American history, and if so, what should those courses contain? Should they be forced to learn a foreign language, encounter a laboratory science, master calculus, study grammar at the expense of creative writing (or the reverse), read Plato or Shakespeare or Marx or Darwin? Should they be required to take courses that foster ethnic and racial tolerance? Even if we agree about the importance of freedom and growth, we can still disagree quite a lot about which curriculum will best promote these values. That is why, when we argue about education, we usually spend less time talking about core values than about formal standards: what are the subjects that all

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young people should take to help them become educated adults? This is not an easy question. Maybe that is why—in the spirit of E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and a thousand college course catalogs—our answers to it often take the form of lists: lists of mandatory courses, lists of required readings, lists of essential facts, lists of the hundred best novels written in English in the twentieth century, and so on and on. This impulse toward list making has in fact been part of liberal education for a very long time. In their original medieval incarnation, the "liberal arts" were required courses, more or less, that every student was supposed to learn before attaining the status of a "free man." There was nothing vague about the artes liberales. They were a very concrete list of seven subjects: the trivium, which consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, which consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Together, these were the forms of knowledge worthy of a free man. We should remember the powerful class and gender biases that were built into this vision of freedom. The "free men" who studied the liberal arts were male aristocrats; these specialized bodies of knowledge were status markers that set them apart from "unfree" serfs and peasants, as well as from the members of other vulgar and ignoble classes. Our modern sense of liberal education has expanded from this medieval foundation to include a greater range of human talents and a much more inclusive number of human beings, holding out at least the dream that everyone might someday be liberated by an education that stands in the service of human freedom. And yet when we try to figure out what this education for human freedom might look like, we still make lists. We no longer hold up as a required curriculum the seven artes liberales of the medieval university; we no longer expect that the classical

nineteenth-century college curriculum in Greek and Latin is enough to make a person learned. But we do offer plenty of other complicated lists with which we try to identify the courses and distribution requirements that constitute a liberal education. Such requirements vary somewhat from institution to institution, but certain elements crop up predictably. However complex the curricular tables and credit formulas may become—and they can get pretty baroque!—more often than not they include a certain number of total credit hours; a basic composition course; at least pre-calculus mathematics; some credits in a foreign language; some credits in the humanities; some credits in the social sciences; some credits in the natural sciences; and concentrated study in at least one major discipline. We have obviously come a long way from the artes liberales—and yet I worry that amid all these requirements we may be tempted to forget the ultimate purpose of this thing we call a liberal education. No matter how deliberately they may have been hammered out in committee meetings, it’s not clear what these carefully articulated and finely tuned requirements have to do with human freedom. And when we try to state the purpose of such requirements, we often flounder. Here, for instance, is what one institution I know well states as the "Objects of a Liberal Education": "(1) competency in communication; (2) competency in using the modes of thought characteristic of the major areas of knowledge; (3) a knowledge of our basic cultural heritage; (4) a thorough understanding of at least one subject area." This is the kind of language one expects from an academic committee, I guess, but it is hardly a statement that stirs the heart or inspires the soul. One problem, I think, is that it is much easier to itemize the requirements of a curriculum than to 91

describe the qualities of the human beings we would like that curriculum to produce. All the required courses in the world will fail to give us a liberal education if, in the act of requiring them, we forget that their purpose is to nurture human freedom and growth. I would therefore like to return to my opening question and try to answer it (since I too find lists irresistible) with a list of my own. My list consists not of required courses but of personal qualities: the ten qualities I most admire in the people I know who seem to embody the values of a liberal education. How does one recognize liberally educated people?

how to read far more than just words. They are moved by what they see in a great art museum and what they hear in a concert hall. They recognize extraordinary athletic achievements; they are engaged by classic and contemporary works of theater and cinema; they find in television a valuable window on popular culture. When they wander through a forest or a wetland or a desert, they can identify the wildlife and interpret the lay of the land. They can glance at a farmer’s field and tell the difference between soy beans and alfalfa. They recognize fine craftsmanship, whether by a cabinetmaker or an auto mechanic. And they can surf the World Wide Web. All of these are ways in which the eyes and the ears are attuned to the wonders that make up the human and the natural worlds. None of us can possibly master all these forms of “reading,” but educated people should be competent in many of them and curious about all of them.

1. They listen and they hear. This is so simple that it may not seem worth saying, but in our distracted and overbusy age, I think it’ s worth declaring that educated people know how to pay attention—to others and to the world around them. They work hard to hear what other people say. They can follow an argument, track logical reasoning, detect illogic, hear the emotions that lie behind both the logic and the illogic, and ultimately empathize with the person who is feeling those emotions.

3. They can talk with anyone. Educated people know how to talk. They can give a speech, ask thoughtful questions, and make people laugh. They can hold a conversation with a high school dropout or a Nobel laureate, a child or a nursing- home resident, a factory worker or a corporate president. Moreover, they participate in such conversations not because they like to talk about themselves but because they are genuinely interested in others. A friend of mine says one of the most important things his father ever told him was that whenever he had a conversation, his job was "to figure out what’s so neat about what the other person does." I cannot imagine a more succinct description of this critically important quality.

2. They read and they understand. This too is ridiculously simple to say but very difficult to achieve, since there are so many ways of reading in our world. Educated people can appreciate not only the front page of the New York Times but also the arts section, the sports section, the business section, the science section, and the editorials. They can gain insight from not only The American Scholar and the New York Review of Books but also from Scientific American, the Economist, the National Enquirer, Vogue, and Reader’s Digest. They can enjoy John Milton and John Grisham. But skilled readers know

4. They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly. 92

What goes for talking goes for writing as well: educated people know the craft of putting words on paper. I’m not talking about parsing a sentence or composing a paragraph, but about expressing what is in their minds and hearts so as to teach, persuade, and move the person who reads their words. I am talking about writing as a form of touching, akin to the touching that happens in an exhilarating conversation.

7. They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism. This is another way of saying that they can understand the power of other people's dreams and nightmares as well as their own. They have the intellectual range and emotional generosity to step outside their own experiences and prejudices, thereby opening themselves to perspectives different from their own. From this commitment to tolerance flow all those aspects of a liberal education that oppose parochialism and celebrate the wider world: studying foreign languages, learning about the cultures of distant peoples, exploring the history of long-ago times, discovering the many ways in which men and women have known the sacred and given names to their gods. Without such encounters, we cannot learn how much people differ—and how much they have in common.

5. They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems. The ability to solve puzzles requires many skills, including a basic comfort with numbers, a familiarity with computers, and the recognition that many problems that appear to turn on questions of quality can in fact be reinterpreted as subtle problems of quantity. These are the skills of the analyst, the manager, the engineer, the critic: the ability to look at a complicated reality, break it into pieces, and figure out how it works in order to do practical things in the real world. Part of the challenge in this, of course, is the ability to put reality back together again after having broken it into pieces—for only by so doing can we accomplish practical goals without violating the integrity of the world we are trying to change.

8. They understand how to get things done in the world. In describing the goal of his Rhodes Scholarships, Cecil Rhodes spoke of trying to identify young people who would spend their lives engaged in what he called "the world’s fight," by which he meant the struggle to leave the world a better place than they had found it. Learning how to get things done in the world in order to leave it a better place is surely one of the most practical and important lessons we can take from our education. It is fraught with peril because the power to act in the world can so easily be abused—but we fool ourselves if we think we can avoid acting, avoid exercising power, avoid joining the world’s fight. And so, we study power and struggle to use it wisely and well.

6. They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth. Truly educated people love learning, but they love wisdom more. They can appreciate a closely reasoned argument without being unduly impressed by mere logic. They understand that knowledge serves values, and they strive to put these two—knowledge and values—into constant dialogue with each other. The ability to recognize true rigor is one of the most important achievements in any education, but it is worthless, even dangerous, if it is not placed in the service of some larger vision that also renders it humane.

9. They nurture and empower the people around them. Nothing is more important in tempering the exercise of power and shaping right 93

action than the recognition that no one ever acts alone. Liberally educated people understand that they belong to a community whose prosperity and well-being are crucial to their own, and they help that community flourish by making the success of others possible. If we speak of education for freedom, then one of the crucial insights of a liberal education must be that the freedom of the individual is possible only in a free community, and vice versa. It is the community that empowers the free individual, just as it is free individuals who lead and empower the community. The fulfillment of high talent, the just exercise of power, the celebration of human diversity: nothing so redeems these things as the recognition that what seem like personal triumphs are in fact the achievements of our common humanity.

But I must offer two caveats. The first is that my original question—"What does it mean to be a liberally educated person?"—is misleading, deeply so, because it suggests that one can somehow take a group of courses, or accumulate a certain number of credits, or undergo an obligatory set of learning experiences, and emerge liberally educated at the end of the process. Nothing could be further from the truth. A liberal education is not something any of us ever achieve; it is not a state. Rather, it is a way of living in the face of our own ignorance, a way of groping toward wisdom in full recognition of our own folly, a way of educating ourselves without any illusion that our educations will ever be complete. My second caveat has to do with individualism. It is no accident that an educational philosophy described as "liberal" is almost always articulated in terms of the individuals who are supposed to benefit from its teachings. I have similarly implied that the ten qualities on my list belong to individual people. I have asserted that liberal education in particular is about nurturing human freedom—helping young people discover and hone their talents—and this too sounds as if education exists for the benefit of individuals. All this is fair enough, and yet it too is deeply misleading in one crucial way. Education for human freedom is also education for human community. The two cannot exist without each other. Each of the qualities I have described is a craft or a skill or a way of being in the world that frees us to act with greater knowledge or power. But each of these qualities also makes us ever more aware of the connections we have with other people and the rest of creation, and so they remind us of the obligations we have to use our knowledge and power responsibly. If I am right that all these qualities are finally about connecting, then we need to confront one further paradox about liberal

10. They follow E. M. Forster’s injunction from Howards End: "Only connect . . ." More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. Every one of the qualities I have described here—listening, reading, talking, writing, puzzle solving, truth seeking, seeing through other people’s eyes, leading, working in a community—is finally about connecting. A liberal education is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect. I believe we should measure our educational system—whether we speak of grade schools or universities—by how well we succeed in training children and young adults to aspire to these ten qualities. I believe we should judge ourselves and our communities by how well we succeed in fostering and celebrating these qualities in each of us.

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education. In the act of making us free, it also binds us to the communities that gave us our freedom in the first place; it makes us responsible to those communities in ways that limit our freedom. In the end, it turns out that liberty is not about thinking or saying or doing whatever we want. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves. And so, I keep returning to those two words of E. M. Forster’s: “Only connect.” I have said that they are as good an answer as any I know to the question of what it means

to be a liberally educated person; but they are also an equally fine description of that most powerful and generous form of human connection we call love. I do not mean romantic or passionate love, but the love that lies at the heart of all the great religious faiths: not eros, but agape. Liberal education nurtures human freedom in the service of human community, which is to say that in the end it celebrates love. Whether we speak of our schools or our universities or ourselves, I hope we will hold fast to this as our constant practice, in the full depth and richness of its many meanings: Only connect.

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A. Bartlett Giammati A renowned scholar and baseball enthusiast, A. Bartlett Giamatti (1939–1989) taught English, Italian and comparative literature at Princeton and Yale Universities, serving as president of Yale from 1978–1986. From 1986 to 1989, he engaged his passion for baseball more directly in the position of president of the National League, a role that culminated in his being named Commissioner of Baseball in 1989 just prior to his death of a heart attack at age 51. In the few months that he served in this position, he faced one of the sport’s most difficult choices: what to do about Pete Rose and his alleged involvement in gambling. Giamatti ultimately banned Pete Rose from baseball for life. His passion for the game of baseball was surpassed only by his passion for learning and liberal education. In this essay, based upon a speech he made to students at Yale in 1983, Giamatti defends liberal education as something that is good in and of its own right. He argues that liberal education need not be justified or rationalized as useful by some external standard (e.g., it improves job prospects or is practical). As Giamatti points out, it is through liberal education that we discover how to be “full human beings.” Moreover, for Giamatti, baseball and liberal education share a common and uniquely American concern: maintaining the delicate balance between individual freedom and the well-being of the group.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. How does Giamatti propose that we think about the value of a liberal education? Why? 2. In what ways does being liberally educated serve both the good of the individual and the collective social good? 3. Have you been seeking some “real world” explanation or justification for pursuing a liberal education at Wartburg? Why or why not? How might Giamatti’s argument influenced your thinking?

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THE EARTHLY USE OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION By A. Bartlett Giamatti Each of us experiences colleges differently. [However], I can assure you that soon your normal anxieties will recede and a genuine excitement will begin, a rousing motion of the spirit unlike anything you have experienced before. And that will mark the beginning of it, the grand adventure that you now undertake, never alone but on your own, the voyage of exploration in freedom that is the development of your own mind. Generations have preceded you in this splendid opening out of the self as you use the mind to explore the mind, and, if the human race is rational, generations will come after you. But each of you will experience your education uniquely — charting and ordering and dwelling in the land of your own intellect and sensibility, discovering powers you had only dreamed of and mysteries you had not imagined and reaches you had not thought that thought could reach. There will be pain and some considerable loneliness at times, and not all the terrain will be green and refreshing. There will be awesome wastes and depths as well as heights. The adventure of discovery is, however, thrilling because you will sharpen and focus your powers of analysis, of creativity, of rational-being. If at Yale you can experience the joy that the acquisition and creation of knowledge for its own sake brings, the adventure will last your whole life and you will have discovered the distinction between living as a full human being and merely existing. If there is a single term to describe the education that can spark a lifelong love of learning, it is the term liberal education. A liberal education has nothing to do with those political designer labels liberal and conservative that some so lovingly stitch on to every idea they pull off, or put on, the rack. A liberal education is not one that

seeks to implant the precepts of a specific religious or political orthodoxy. Nor is it an education intending to prepare for immediate immersion in a profession. In Yale College, education is liberal in Cardinal Newman’s sense of the word. As he says in the fifth discourse of The Idea of the University, That alone is liberal knowledge which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or absorbed in any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation. The most ordinary pursuits have this specific character, if they are selfsufficient and complete; the highest lose it, when they minister to something beyond them. As Newman emphasizes, a liberal education is not defined by the content or by the subject matter of a course of study. It is a common error, for instance, to equate a liberal education with the so-called liberal arts or studia humanitatis. To study the liberal arts or the humanities is not necessarily to acquire a liberal education unless one studies these and allied subjects in a spirit that, as Newman has it, seeks no immediate sequel, that is independent of a profession’s advantage. If you pursue the study of anything not for the intrinsic rewards of exercising and developing the power of the mind but because you press toward a professional goal, then you are pursuing not a liberal education but rather something else. A liberal education is defined by the attitude of the mind toward the knowledge 98

the mind explores and creates. Such education occurs when you pursue knowledge because you are motivated to experience and absorb what comes of thinking — thinking about the traditions of our common human heritage in all its forms, thinking about new patterns or designs in what the world proffers today — whether in philosophic texts or financial markets or chemical combinations — thinking in order to create new knowledge that others will the explore. A liberal education … embraces physics as well as French, lasers as well as literature, social science and physical and biological sciences as well as the arts and humanities. A liberal education rests on the supposition that our humanity is enriched by the pursuit of learning for its own sake; it is dedicated to the proposition that growth in thought, and in the power to think, increases the pleasure, breadth, and value of life. ‘That is very touching,’ I will be told, ‘that is all very well, but how does someone make a living with this joy of learning and pleasure in the pursuit of learning? What is the earthly use of all this kind of education later on, in the practical, real world?’ These are not trivial questions, though the presuppositions behind them puzzle me somewhat. I am puzzled, for instance, by the unexamined assumption that the real world is always thought to lie outside or beyond the realm of education. I am puzzled by the confident assumption that only in certain parts of daily life do people make real consequences. I am puzzled by those who think that ideas do not have reality or that knowledge is irrelevant to the workings of daily life. To invert Plato and to believe that ideas are unreal and that their pursuit has no power for practical or useful good is to shrink reality and define ignorance. To speak directly to the questions posed by the skeptic of the idea of a liberal education, I can say only this: ideas and their pursuit

define our humanity and make us human. Ideas, embodied in data and values, beliefs, principles, and original insights, must be pursued because they are valuable in themselves and because they are the stuff of life. There is nothing more necessary to the full, free, and decent life of a person or of a people or of the human race than to free the mind by passionately and rationally exercising the mind’s power to inquire freely. There can be no more practical education, in my opinion, than one that launches you on the course of fulfilling your human capacities to reason and to imagine freely and that hones your abilities to express the results of your thinking in speech and in writing with logic, clarity, and grace. While such an education may be deemed impractical by those wedded to the notion that nothing in life is more important than one’s career, nevertheless I welcome you to a liberal education’s rigorous and demanding pleasures. Fear not, you will not be impeded from making a living because you have learned to think for yourself and because you take pleasure in the operation of the mind and in the pursuit of new ideas. And you will need to make a living. The world will not provide you with sustenance or employment. You will have to work for it; I am instead speaking of another dimension of your lives, the dimension of your spirit that will last longer than a job, that will outlast a profession, that will represent by the end of your time on earth the sum of your human significance. That is the dimension represented by the mind unfettered, ‘freely ranging only within the Zodiac of his own wit,’ as the old poet said. There is no greater power a human being can develop for the individual’s or for the public’s good. And I believe that the good, for individuals and for communities, is the end to which education must tend. I affirm 99

Newman’s vision that a liberal education is one seeking no sequel or complement. I take him to be writing of the motive or tendency of the mind operating initially within the educational process. But I believe there is also a larger tendency or motive, which is animated by the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. I believe that the pleasure in the pursuit of knowledge joins and is finally at one with our general human desire for a life elevated by dignity, decency, and moral progress. That larger hope does not come later; it exists inextricably intertwined with a liberal education. The joy of intellectual pursuit and the pursuit of the good and decent life are no more separable than on a fair spring day the sweet breeze is separable from the sunlight. In the common pursuit of ideas for themselves and of the larger or common good, the freedom that the individual mind wishes for itself, it also seeks for others. How could it be otherwise? In the pursuit of knowledge leading to the good, you cannot wish for others less than you wish for yourself. Thus, in the pursuit of freedom, the individual finds it necessary to order or to limit the surge to freedom so that others in

the community are not denied the very condition each of us seeks. A liberal education desires to foster a freedom of the mind that will also contribute, in its measure, to the freedom of others. We learn, therefore, that there is no true freedom without order; we learn that there are limits to our freedom, limits we learn to choose freely in order not to undermine what we seek. After all, if there were, on the one hand, no restraints at all, only anarchy of intellect and chaos of community would result. On the other hand, if all were restraint, and release of inquiry and thought were stifled, only a death of the spirit and a denial of any freedom could result. There must be an interplay of restraint and release, of order and freedom, in our individual lives and in our life together. Without such interplay within each of us, there can be no good life for any of us. If there is no striving for the good life for all of us, however, there cannot be a good life for any one of us. We must learn how freedom depends for its existence upon freely chosen (because rationally understood) forms of order.

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Plato The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428–347 B.C.E.) lived in Athens during a time of rich intellectual and artistic activity. The student of Socrates, another noted philosopher, Plato carried on his mentor’s work after Socrates was famously put to death for heresy in 399. Most of Plato’s philosophic writings are cast in the form of dialogues between Socrates and various other characters. Using this teaching style, Socrates uses incisive questioning to help the other participants in the conversation discover new understandings of the topic under discussion. This process has come to be known as dialogic learning. “The Myth of the Cave,” one of Plato’s most famous and influential works, is part of The Republic, a larger essay on the ideal aims of government. In this work, Socrates poses some large questions about what humans can actually know, how they come to know it, and how they determine what is true.

Questions for Thought and Discus sion 1. According to Socrates, what does the allegory of the cave represent? 2. What are the key elements in the imagery used in the allegory? 3. What are some things the allegory suggests about the process of enlightenment or education? 4. What do the images “shackles” and “cave” suggest about the perspective of the cave dwellers or prisoners? 5. In society today or in your own life, what sorts of things shackle the mind? 6. Compare the perspective of the freed prisoner with the cave prisoners. 7. According to the allegory, lack of clarity or intellectual confusion can occur in two distinct ways or contexts. What are they? 8. According to the allegory, how do cave prisoners get free? What does this suggest about intellectual freedom? 9. The allegory presupposes that there is a distinction between appearances and reality. Do you agree? Why or why not?

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THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE By Plato [Socrates begins, addressing Glaucon] And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened — Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. I see. And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows? Yes, he said And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? Very true.

And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure when one of the passersby spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow? No question, he replied. To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. That is certain. And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look toward the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned toward more real existence, he has a clearer vision — what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them — will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? Far truer. And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him? True, he said. And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged 102

ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light, his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities. Not all in a moment, he said. He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day? Certainly. Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is. Certainly. He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold? Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him. And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them? Certainly, he would. And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care

for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, “Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,” and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner? Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner. Imagine once more, I said, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes of darkness? To be sure, he said. And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if anyone tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. No question, he said. This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly, God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and 103

the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed. I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you. Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted. Yes, very natural. And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice? Anything but surprising, he replied. Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more

reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. That, he said, is a very just distinction. But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes. They undoubtedly say this, he replied. Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or, in other words, of the good. Very true. And must there not be some art which will affect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth? Yes, he said, such an art may be presumed. And whereas the other so-called virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand, hurtful and useless. Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue — how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness? 104

Very true, he said. But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below — if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now. Very likely. Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely, or rather a necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of their education, will be able ministers of State; not the former, because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already dwelling apart in the islands of the blest. Very true, he replied. Then, I said, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all — they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now. What do you mean? I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and partake of their labors and honors, whether they are worth having or not.

But is not this unjust? he said; ought we to give them a worse life, when they might have a better? You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State. True, he said, I had forgotten. Observe, Glaucon, that there will be no injustice in compelling our philosophers to have a care and providence of others; we shall explain to them that in other States, men of their class are not obliged to share in the toils of politics; and this is reasonable, for they grow up at their own sweet will, and the government would rather not have them. Being self-taught, they cannot be expected to show any gratitude for a culture which they have never received. But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus, our State, which is also yours, will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, 105

which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst. Quite true, he replied. And will our pupils, when they hear this, refuse to take their turn at the toils of State, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their time with one another in the heavenly light? Impossible, he answered; for they are just men, and the commands which we impose upon them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them will take office as a stern necessity, and not after the fashion of our present rulers of State. Yes, my friend, I said; and there lies the point. You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas, if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils

which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State. Most true, he replied. And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other? Indeed, I do not, he said. And those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight. No question. Who, then, are those whom we shall compel to be guardians? Surely they will be the men who are wisest about affairs of State, and by whom the State is best administered, and who at the same time have other honors and another and a better life than that of politics? They are the men, and I will choose them, he replied. And now shall we consider in what way such guardians will be produced, and how they are to be brought from darkness to light — as some are said to have ascended from the world below to the gods? By all means, he replied. The process, I said, is not the turning over of an oyster-shell, but the turning round of a soul passing from a day which is little better than night to the true day of being, that is, the ascent from below which we affirm to be true philosophy? Quite so.

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Peter Kreeft Peter Kreeft (b.1938), a professor of philosophy at Boston College and King’s College (N.Y.) has taught at the university level since 1965 and has authored over forty-five books on Christianity and philosophy. Although a Calvinist, Kreeft became an apologist for the Catholic tradition during his research into the theological and philosophical positions of the early Church. The selection in this reader, “On Education and E.T.,” forms the first chapter of Kreeft’s book, The Best Things in Life: A Twentieth-Century Socrates Looks at Power, Pleasure, Truth and the Good Life. In this piece, Kreeft stages the dialogue between Socrates and two students at Desperate State University, one of whom is Peter Pragma. In this dialogue, Kreeft imagines Socrates taking up the idea contained in one of the sayings most commonly attributed to him: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Cultural note: E.T. is name of the title character in the 1982 movie, directed by Stephen Spielberg and re-released in 2002. The term, E.T., is used in this reading to convey the sense that someone who thinks like Socrates must come from out of this world.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. How would you answer the questions that Socrates poses in this piece? 2. What are the differences between a philosophical approach and a practical approach to education? 3. Can these approaches relate to each other in one educational setting?

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ON EDUCATION AND E.T. By Peter Kreeft SOCRATES: Excuse me for bothering you, but what are you doing?

SOCRATES: Then it is not just the eyes that read.

PETER PRAGMA: What kind of silly question is that? I’m reading a book. Or was, until you interrupted me. Can’t you see that?

PETER: Oh. The mind then. Are you satisfied now?

SOCRATES: Alas, I often fail to see what others see, and see things others cannot see.

PETER: Somehow, I thought you’d say that.

SOCRATES: No.

SOCRATES: I cannot see your mind, can I?

PETER: I don’t get it.

PETER: No.

SOCRATES: I saw you holding the book, yes, but I did not see you reading it.

SOCRATES: Then I cannot see you reading.

PETER: What in the world are you talking about?

PETER: I guess you can’t. But what a strange thing to say!

SOCRATES: You are holding the book in your hands, aren’t you?

SOCRATES: Strange but true. Truth is often stranger than fiction, you know. Which do you prefer?

PETER: Of course. SOCRATES: And I can see your hands.

PETER: You know, you’re stranger than fiction too, little man.

PETER: So?

SOCRATES: That’s because I’m true too.

SOCRATES: But do you read the book with your hands?

PETER: Who are you, anyway? SOCRATEs: I am Socrates.

PETER: Of course not.

PETER: Sure you are. And I’m E.T.

SOCRATES: With what then?

SOCRATES: I’m pleased to meet you, E.T.

PETER: With my eyes, of course.

PETER: My name is Peter Pragma.

SOCRATES: Oh, I don’t think so.

SOCRATES: Do you have two names?

PETER: I think you’re crazy.

PETER: What do you mean?

SOCRATES: Perhaps, but I speak the truth, and I think I can show you that. Tell me, can a corpse read?

SOCRATES: You said your name was E.T.

PETER: No …

PETER: And you said your name was Socrates.

SOCRATES: But a corpse can have eyes, can’t it?

SOCRATES: Because it is. I have this strange habit of saying what is.

PETER: Yes.

PETER: What do you want from me?

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SOCRATES: Would you let me pursue my silly question just a moment longer?

PETER: You’re going to ask me why I want a degree.

PETER: I thought you got your answer.

SOCRATES: And you’re going to answer.

SOCRATES: Not to my real question. You see, when I asked you what you were doing, I really meant. Why are you doing it?

PETER: But it’s another silly question. Everyone knows what a degree is for. SOCRATES: But I am not “everyone.” So, would you please tell me?

PETER: I’m studying for my exam tomorrow.

PETER: A college degree is the entrance ticket to a good job. Do you know how difficult the job market is today? Where have you been for the last few years?

SOCRATES: And why are you doing that? PETER: You know, you sound like a little child.

SOCRATES: You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But we must ask just one more question, or rather two: What is “a good job” and why do you want one?

SOCRATES: Thank you. PETER: I didn’t mean it as a compliment. SOCRATES: I don’t care. Only answer the question, please. PETER: I’m studying to pass my course, of course.

PETER: Money, of course. That’s the answer to both questions. To all questions, maybe.

SOCRATES: And why do you want to do that?

SOCRATES: I see. And what do you want to do with all the money you make?

PETER: Another silly question! Don’t you ever grow up?

PETER: You said your last two questions were your last.

SOCRATES: Let me tell you a secret, Peter: there are no grown-ups. But you still haven’t answered my “silly question”.

SOCRATES: If you want to go away, I cannot keep you here. But if we pursue our exploration one little step further, we may discover something new.

PETER: To get a degree, of course.

PETER: What do you think you’ll find? A new world?

SOCRATES: You mean all the time and effort and money you put into your education here at Desperate State is to purchase that little piece of paper?

SOCRATES: Quite possibly. A new world of thought. Will you come with me? Shall we trudge ahead through the swamps of our uncertainties? Or shall we sit comfortably at home in our little cave?

PETER: That’s the way it is. SOCRATES: I think you may be able to guess what my next question is going to be.

PETER: Why should I torture myself with all these silly questions from a strange little man? I’m supposed to be studying for my exam.

PETER: I’m catching on. I think it’s an infection. SOCRATES: What is the next question, then? 109

SOCRATES: Because it would be profitable for you. The unexamined life is not worth living, you know.

degree, to get a good job, to make a lot of money, to raise a family and send your children to college

PETER: I heard that somewhere … Good grief! That’s one of the quotations that might be on my exam tomorrow. Who said that anyway?

PETER: Right. SOCRATES: And why will they go to college? PETER: Same reason I’m here. To get good jobs, of course.

SOCRATES: I did. Didn’t you hear me? PETER: No, I mean who said it originally?

SOCRATES: So they can send their children to college?

SOCRATES: It was I; I assure you. Now shall we continue our journey?

PETER: Yes.

PETER: What are you getting at, anyway, Socrates?

SOCRATES: Have you ever heard the expression “arguing in a circle”?

SOCRATES: No, Peter, the question is what you are getting at. That is the topic we were exploring. Now shall we continue to make your life a little less unexamined and a little more worth living?

PETER: No, I never took logic.

PETER: All right. For a little while, anyway.

SOCRATES: Really?

SOCRATES: Then you will answer my last question?

PETER: I’m a practical man. I don’t care about logic, just life.

PETER: I forgot what it was.

SOCRATES: Then perhaps we should call what you are doing “living in a circle.” Have you ever asked yourself a terrifying, threatening question? What is the whole circle there for?

SOCRATES: Really? I would never have guessed it. PETER: You’re teasing me.

SOCRATES: What do you need money for? PETER: Everything! Everything I want costs money. SOCRATES: For instance?

PETER: Hmmm … nobody ever bothered me with that question before.

PETER: Do you know how much it costs to raise a family nowadays?

SOCRATES: I know. That is why I was sent to you.

SOCRATES: And what would you say is the largest expense in raising a family nowadays?

PETER: Well, sending kids to college isn’t the only thing I’m working for. I’m working for my own good too. That’s not a circle, is it?

PETER: Probably sending the kids to college. SOCRATES: I see. Let’s review what you have said. You are reading this book to study for your exam, so that you can pass it and your course, to graduate and get a

SOCRATES: We don’t know until we look, do we? Tell me, what is “your own good”? PETER: What do you mean? 110

SOCRATES: What benefit to yourself do you hope the money from a well-paying job will bring to you?

I be here? What’s the value of college? You’ve got a sermon up your sleeve, haven’t you?

PETER: All sorts of things. The good life. Fun and games. Leisure.

SOCRATES: Is that what you expect me to do?

SOCRATES: I see. And you are now giving up fun and games for some serious studying so that you can pass your exams and your courses and get your degree.

PETER: Sure. Didn’t you just tear down my answers so that you could sell me yours? SOCRATES: Indeed not. I am not a wise man, only a philosopher, a lover and pursuer of wisdom, that divine but elusive goal.

PETER: Right. It’s called “delayed gratification.” I could be watching the football game right now, or playing poker. But I’m putting my time in the bank. It’s an investment for the future. You see, when I’m set up in a good job, I’ll be able to call my own shots.

PETER: What do you want with me then? SOCRATES: To spread the infection of philosophizing. PETER: So you’re not going to teach me the answers?

SOCRATES: You mean you will then have leisure and be able to watch football games or play poker whenever you wish.

SOCRATES: No. I think the most valuable lesson I could teach you is to become your own teacher. Isn’t that one of the things you are here to learn? Isn’t that one of the greatest values of a college education? Have none of your teachers taught you that? What has become of my great invention, anyway?

PETER: Right. SOCRATES: Why don’t you just do those things right now? PETER: What?

PETER: I guess I never looked at education that way.

SOCRATES: Why do you work instead of play if all you want to do is play? You’re working now so that years from now you can have enough money to afford leisure to play. But you can play now. So why take the long, hard road if you’re already home? It seems to be another circle back to where you stared from, where you are now.

SOCRATES: It’s not too late to begin. PETER: It is today, Socrates — or whoever you are. I’m really too busy today. SOCRATES: Too busy to know why you’re so busy? Too busy doing to know what you’re doing?

PETER: Are you telling me I should just drop out of school and goof off?

PETER: Look, maybe we could continue this conversation some other time. I have more important things to do than this stuff …

SOCRATES: No, I am telling you that you should find a good reason to be here. I don’t think you have found that yet. Shall we keep searching?

SOCRATES: Philosophy. This stuff is philosophy. What exam are you studying for, by the way?

PETER: All right, wise man, or wise guy, whichever you are. You tell me. Why should 111

PETER: Well, actually, it’s a philosophy exam.

PETER: I just can’t waste time on questions like that.

SOCRATES: I see. I think you may be in trouble there.

SOCRATES: Because you have to study philosophy?

PETER: No way. I memorized the professor’s notes. I’ve got all the answers.

PETER: Yes. Good-by, strange little man. SOCRATES: Good-by, E.T. I hope someday you escape your circular wanderings and find your way home.

SOCRATES: And none of the questions. What is the value of your answers then?

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Paulo Freire A teacher of adults among the rural poor in Brazil, Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was recognized by educators across the globe as one of the most influential and inspiring educational philosophers in modern time. Exiled from his native Brazil during a military coup in 1964, Freire continued developing his “pedagogy of the oppressed” in Chile and many other countries. In 1979, he was able to return to Brazil where he later was appointed Minister of Education for the City of Sao Paulo. Committed to working with individuals at the grass-roots level, Freire promoted education as a means to help individuals overcome their sense of powerlessness. The selection that follows is excerpted from Chapter 2 in Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written in Portuguese and translated by M. B. Ramos for publication in the United States in 1970.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. How do the “banking concept” and “problem-posing” approaches to education differ? 2. As you consider Freire’s argument, what do you see as the major benefits and drawbacks of dialogical education? 3. How would you describe your experiences in education — do they fit the “banking concept” or “problem-posing” models? How so? 4. What are the implications of Freire’s ideas for students and faculty here at Wartburg?

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THE BANKING CONCEPT OF EDUCATION By Paulo Freire the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. 5. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other 6. In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence — but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.

1. A careful analysis of the teacherstudent relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness. 2. The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration — contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity. 3. The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. “Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem.” The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of “capital” in the affirmation “the capital of Para is Belem,” that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil. 4. Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly

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7. The raison d’etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacherstudent contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. 8. This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole: a. the teacher teaches and the students are taught; b. the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; c. the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; d. the teacher talks and the students listen — meekly; e. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; f. the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; g. the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; h. the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; i. the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; j. the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. 9. It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as

transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of the reality in them. 10. The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus, they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another. 11. Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of “welfare recipients.” They are treated as individual cases, as marginal men who deviate from the general configuration of a “good, organized, and just” society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these “incompetent and lazy” folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be “integrated,” “incorporated” into the healthy society that they have “forsaken.” 12. The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not men living “outside” society. They have always been “inside” — inside the structure which made them “beings for others.” The solution 115

is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become “beings for themselves.” Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientização. 28. Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world. “Problem-posing” education, responding to the essence of consciousness — intentionality — rejects communiqués and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian “split”— consciousness as consciousness of consciousness. 29. Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors — teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relations — indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object — are otherwise impossible. 30. Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical pattern's characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the

teacher-of-the-students and the students-ofthe teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with studentsteachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. Men teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher. 33. Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. 34. Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed. 45. A deepened consciousness of their situation leads men to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over which men feel themselves to be in control. If men, as historical beings 116

necessarily engaged with other men in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of men’s humanity. Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate men from their own decisionmaking is to change them into objects. 47. Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit

the oppressed to begin to question: Why? While only a revolutionary society can carry out this education in systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, with the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary — that is to say, dialogical — from the outset.

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Jackson Reynolds Jackson Reynolds, class of 2020, grew up in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and studied religion and leadership at Wartburg College. Jackson is currently attending Princeton Theological Seminary for his Master of Divinity and is seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). After, he hopes to continue his education and pursue a Ph.D. in biblical studies. Jackson wrote this essay in response to always being asked, “Why are you a religion major?” Most of the people asking thought a religion major was not as valuable as other majors. Jackson, and some of his fellow students, wrote essays about why studying religion is a valuable and worthwhile endeavor. There is a misconception that studying religion will turn someone into an atheist. While this is possible, it is more likely that one will find a deeper understanding of what it is they believe and why it is they believe it. Jackson hopes to show that studying religion is more about diving into life's great mysteries rather than being certain of all of the “right” answers.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. What do you think of the “machine” analogy – something very literally mechanical – for talking about faith – something that is typically more personal, organic, alive? 2. Reynolds claims that “Tinkering is scary for most, if not all.” Do you agree with this? Have you heard this idea from others? 3. How would you draw your faith machine? How would you identify the major parts? 4. How have you assembled your faith machine so far? Where have the ‘parts’ come from? Have you ever disassembled it before? If so, what did you learn? 5. What role does college play in Reynolds’ argument about the “faith machine”?

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WHY QUESTION MY FAITH: THE FAITH MACHINE By Jackson Reynolds A professor of mine once told me a story. The story goes that before returning to college after Winter Break, a family laid hands on a student in prayer. The family was praying that God would help this student keep their faith strong during this next semester away at college. The reason they were worried was because this student would be taking their first religion course, a course which all students are required to take at the college. They were worried the professor would be some sort of liberal militant atheist who would try to tear down and destroy this student’s faith. They assumed that studying religion would shatter the faith of the student. They were half right. We have this yearning to understand the divine spark that is within all of us. Attempting to understand this divine spark, image, DNA, or whatever you want to call it, is part of the deal that we call life. People try do this in many different ways. For some reason the academic study of religion is not perceived as a viable option by many people of faith. For reasons I do not understand, they don’t see a connection between studying religion and recognizing our relationship with the divine. Often studying religion is seen as a sure-fire way to become an atheist. I, however, will argue the opposite. I have a metaphor for what studying religion looks like in relation to faith. I call it “The Faith Machine.” Everyone has their own faith machine. It is individual and unique to every person. Everyone, throughout their lives have built their machine. They vary in both size and appearance depending on the person. But what is absolutely certain, is that every single person in the world has their own faith machine.

When a person takes a religion course, they are forced to take out their faith machine and give it some inspection. Not only does it make them give it a really good look, but it makes them look around at other people’s machines. Doing this opens one up to alternative viewpoints as well as provides an environment for deep reflection and contemplation. All religion courses make one do this at some level, but the good religion courses take it a step deeper. Good religion courses make the student open up their machine and start disassembling it. These courses force the student to start taking apart their machine and examining the pieces. Great religion courses take it even further. They require the student take apart their whole machine piece by piece, gear by gear, and lay all of the parts out on a table. Once this is done, the student has to start thinking about what they believe. Not only do they have to think about what they believe, but they also have to think about why they believe what they believe. Once someone understands what they believe and why they believe it or what they don’t believe and why they don’t believe it, they can finally start putting their faith machine back together. Sometimes the machine is reassembled, and it is identical to what it looked like before when the person took it apart. Sometimes the machine is reassembled, and there is not a single piece remaining from the original machine. Other times the machine has a little bit of old and a little bit of new. Either way, the point of taking it apart is to more fully understand their faith and beliefs. Now, the course will most likely not make you examine every single part of the machine. It will probably require the examination of just a section of the machine or possibly a single piece.

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This is how growth in faith occurs. It is just like a muscle. It must be torn down in order for it to be built back up stronger. I would argue that modern Christianity does not want anyone to tinker with their machine. Tinkering is scary for most, if not all. No one wants to lose their faith that they hold so dearly. They don’t want to take apart their machine, only to find that they are unable to put it back together. Unfortunately, that is the price that growth demands. Nevertheless, this process can be one of the most thought provoking and impactful steps a person can take in understanding their place in the universe. The study of religion will hopefully allow you to dig deeper into yourself. It will hopefully provide situations where real growth happens. With all of this comes the risk of losing something that was once held tightly. But, ask yourself this question: Can you really fail when struggling with the Divine? It seems to have become a common practice for people to try and sell pre-built and pre-packaged faith machines. They have mass produced these machines and want you to throw away yours and buy theirs. These salespeople want to corner the market on these faith machines. They would prefer you to put these prepackaged faith machines in a glass case under lock and key and never touch them ever again. They believe they have found all the correct parts and pieces. They think that they know what the machine should look like. They are sure that the machine they are selling is the best out there. They are wrong. By doing this they think they are doing something good, when in reality, they are advocating for a faith that is fake. Everyone must go on their own journey in finding their faith or belief system. Faith cannot live vicariously. It must be authentic, and it must be your own. Your machine will almost always be in the process of being taken apart and being

put back together. This is a sign of a healthy faith machine. I would advise you to be weary of people that say your machine should eventually be completed. There is no finishing of your faith machine. It is ever evolving and ever changing. As the great Franciscan monk, Richard Rohr, says in his book The Divine Dance, “Mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand - it is something that you can endlessly understand!” There is never going to be a time where you look at your machine and can conclude that you have fully understood everything and that you no longer have to struggle. You will never come to a point where you have wrestled with the mystery of the divine and now it is no longer a mystery. That is the beauty of all this. It is something that you endlessly understand! There is no end to the wonder! I am not going to lie to you, there are times when it is going to be hard. You will get to a concept that will make you rethink everything you have ever known. That’s okay. That’s good. That’s the point. If you never struggle or are never forced to rethink your understanding, then something is not right. I remember in my first New Testament course, I had a somewhat of an existential crisis. I left the classroom on a Friday afternoon with questions up the wazoo. I was constantly thinking about this topic and could not get it out of my head. I went over to one of my friend’s house and brought up my dilemma. We talked it over and I felt quite a bit better. That is really all that I needed. Just some time to process it and some friends to riff with. While I still have not fully come to know my views on the topic, I am at peace with it… for the moment. I’ll probably swing back around to it at some point. Religion classes are a space that allow for this type of exploration and growth to occur. I came to realize the fact that understanding the Divine is constantly 121

ongoing and will never be finished. That is the great thing about studying religion and theology. One never gets bored because there is always another question to be thought about in a new way. There is always something new being brought to the table. Try not to get caught up in the things that don’t have answers and rejoice in the fact that there is still something to try to wrap your mind around. If the most important questions were easy to answer they wouldn’t be worth asking. After taking a few courses you find that while you have, in your possession, a glass of water, you must also realize you are standing in the middle of the ocean. So… wade into the waters of wonder and don’t ever stop tinkering with your faith machine. Studying religion causes one to start to ask questions. Some questions don’t always have answers. This seems especially true in the field of religion and theology. The act of questioning can be seen as problematic to those that have been told asking questions leads to loss or destruction of faith. I am here to tell you that it is, in fact, the opposite. We are curious creatures. Think of the last time you were with a child. How many questions did they ask you? They ask one question. You give one answer. Then, they ask you a question based on your answer to their original question. Then, they ask another question based on your answer to that question. They can’t get enough of asking questions. For some reason, we decided at some point that there are some things you can question and some things you can’t. Faith has become one of these things that we cannot ask questions about and that is just plain foolishness. This field pushes you to go back to that curious stage of your life and keep the questions coming. It is not healthy to run away from your questions. God doesn’t shun the big questions. In fact, I believe it is God’s desire for us to wrestle with the big

questions. Think about any other relationship. How do you get to know someone? You ask them questions. You try and learn about them. It’s the same with God. You can’t get to know anyone if you don’t ask questions. These questions might not have answers. It is important to understand that certainty is not always the goal. Sometimes it’s not about finding the answer but exploring the question. A great mentor of mine once told me, “I’m not so sure having all the right answers is what it’s all about.” It is okay to explore something and not end with an answer. Remember that there is always something new to be learned. The idea that we have nothing to learn from thousands of years of accumulated wisdom is ignorant and idiocy. People have been wrestling with the big questions about life and death and the meaning of it all for millennia. It is important that we humble ourselves and admit that we might have something to learn from them. It is also important to remember that it is not all figured out. You are joining a conversation that has been going on for thousands of years and hopefully will continue for thousands more. Don’t let someone tell you that because something is a mystery that it is pointless to try and understand it. This seems to happen a lot in mainstream Christianity. People don’t like the idea of someone understanding something more than them. So, when you come across a topic or idea that they have tried to understand but cannot, they will try to shut you down. Do not let yourself be discouraged by this. You dive into that topic and you do your best to figure it out. If you can’t, you can’t. But at least you will have tried. And maybe you will try again once more. When you read or hear something that doesn’t quite jive with you. Dive deeper into that. Really look at why. What about it 122

makes you tick? Why does it rub you the wrong way? The same goes with things that resonate so clearly with you. Talk about why these things make you feel that way. In doing so you are learning to dive into the infinite mystery that is the divine. So, welcome to the struggle. May you find that God does not skirt the big

questions. May you rediscover the wonder that comes with living into the flow that is the mystery of the Divine. May you realize that your faith is ever changing and that the struggle itself is sacred. May you no longer be afraid to slap your faith machine down on the workbench and start working. May the peace of the Lord be with you. Always.

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Thomas Christenson Thomas Christenson earned his B.A. from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He has taught at Augsburg College, Concordia College, and Capital University where he has been a professor of philosophy since 1989. He is the founding editor of Intersections: Faith + Life + Learning, a periodical written for and by the faculty and staff of ELCA colleges and universities. Christenson has published widely in the scholarly areas of environmental ethics; moral selfhood; philosophy of religion; and philosophy of work, vocation, and economic thought.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. 2. 3. 4.

What are the main ideas of the two models Christenson describes? What is the purpose of each of these models? What elements are necessary for the vocational model to work? Which model is better in Christenson’s view and why? Which model do you think is better and why? 5. After having read Christenson’s argument, in what ways (if any) would you revise your definition of a college of the church?

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THE LUTHERAN COLLEGE / UNIVERSITY: TWO MODELS By Thomas Christenson Introduction It is my experience that a good deal of confusion arises in discussions about Lutheran higher education because of assumptions that are made. Many people interested in Lutheran higher education assume a particular model of what a Lutheran college should look like. Having made that assumption they go on to judge the Lutheran character of particular institutions on how well they live up to that model. What I wish to do in this essay is fourfold: First I want to make explicit what I believe is the most frequently assumed model. Second, I wish to show what the consequences have been (and are) of assuming this model, sketching both a brief history of the evolution of many Lutheran universities and colleges and a picture of the current situation. Third, I wish to show that there is at least one other model that should be considered and develop that model fairly fully. Finally, I wish to discuss the benefits and problems associated with these two models.

History and Evolution of the Model The for us/by us model dominated the establishment and development of most of the Lutheran colleges and universities in the United States in the nineteenth century. A great many of them were founded as seminaries or as seminaries plus preseminaries. Many of them added teacher training to their curriculum early on, at some point admitted women to the undergraduate college, and, as the institutions grew, slowly came to add other practical and liberal subjects. But throughout this period of initial growth there was never any question about what the primary model was. They were institutions that practiced education of Lutherans, by Lutherans, focused on the preservation and support of a community of educated Lutherans. At some point (and the date varies depending on geography and demography) many of these schools expanded their curriculum as their student populations grew. In many cases the seminary and preseminary students who were there became a minority, the Lutheran students became a smaller percentage of the whole, sometimes even becoming a minority among the religiously identified students in the university. In many cases the same practices and patterns remained in spite of these other changes. The campus still had a focal worship space, the university still held daily or weekly chapel services, it still had a faculty in theology perhaps slowly evolving into a faculty in religious studies, etc. A substantial, though diminishing, number of faculty and administrators were Lutheran. The president and the board of trustees embodied, and, nominally at least, sought to preserve some semblance of that original Lutheran identity. As long as the seminary/pre-seminary

The For Us / By Us Model A very common way to think about a Lutheran college or university is to think of it employing the paradigm of a seminary. A Lutheran seminary is quite naturally and appropriately education by Lutherans of Lutherans in Lutheranism for a Lutheran purpose. The purpose of such an educational institution is primarily the self-replication of Lutherans. By means of such institutions pastors and teachers are trained for the future leadership of the church community. It is very natural and proper that this training should be done (at least primarily if not exclusively) by Lutherans and that it should be circumscribed by the confessions and practices of the Lutheran church. 126

model continued to dominate thinking about Lutheran colleges and universities, there were predictable reactions to the historical shifts and changes noted above. Many alums, church leaders, and leaders of these colleges and universities saw these changes and lamented them. It was easy to see that what had evolved was not “Lutheran” in the same way that the seminary/pre-seminary had been. It was clear, for example, that the institution was no longer primarily for Lutherans or by Lutherans, and it became quite clear that it was no longer predominantly for the preservation and promulgation of Lutheranism either. The judgments were commonly made, therefore, that these institutions had “lapsed,” or they had abandoned their Lutheran identity, or had slid into the “slough of secularism.” Some presidents of some Lutheran colleges explicitly pronounced that, though their institutions had been “historically Lutheran,” that they were no longer and had no interest in being so. They sought their identity elsewhere, often wishing to become an elite American private liberal arts college. Since the for us/by us model no longer fit, they denied the Lutheran connection altogether and sought a model from a different source. Some presidents and boards of trustees, on the other hand, sought to lead their institutions back in the direction of the for us/by us model. Some are rather thoroughly confused about whether they are or want to be a Lutheran university in that sense any more. They tolerate the memory of having been a Lutheran college for the sake of their older alums, but do not press the idea in the presence of new students or current faculty, etc. They hope “to be all things to all people” and avoid serious discussions of identity and mission whenever possible. All of these judgments operate on the assumption that the for us/by us model is the model for Lutheran higher education. Some seek to move back toward

it, some have abandoned it, some are judged to have unintentionally “lapsed” from it, some avoid discussion of it whenever possible and some are confused by it. But what if it is not the model? What if there is another viable model of what a Lutheran college or university might be? The Vocation Model (The for the World with a Lot of Help from Our Friends Model) The college/university is a service (through the education of persons) of the deep needs of the world. I call this the “vocation” model because it is based on Luther’s understanding of vocation. In the Christian world of the late middle ages the term “vocation” applied exclusively to people who had “a religious calling,” i.e., to people called away from the world to become monks, nuns, etc. Luther was one such person; he became an Augustinian monk, and by all accounts pursued this religious life with effort and seriousness. But over the years Luther came to think of vocation in a very different way. He came to see that all persons have a vocation, a call from God to serve the real needs of their neighbors. This call applied as much to the peasant growing turnips as it did to the mother caring for children to the shoemaker making shoes or the legislator making laws. The test for vocation was not “Are you doing something religious?” but “Are you serving in your station the real needs of your neighbor?” So rather than seeing the monk or nun as the paradigm of vocation, Luther came to see the ordinary work of ordinary people as the paradigm. He came to critique the monastic life precisely because it was exclusively devoted to religiousness, i.e., to improving one’s standing in the eyes of God, while it did not, in Luther’s view, serve the real needs of real people in society. We can detect in Luther’s sermons that Luther’s parishioners had a hard time 127

adjusting to this shift in view and kept on thinking they ought to be doing something “really religious,” i.e., penance, pilgrimages, veneration of the saints, etc. But Luther kept telling them, “Do your work in love for those you are given to serve with the gifts at your disposal. Do all this focused on the needs of your neighbor and God will in that activity be served and glorified.”

calling requires us to ask some hard and radical questions: “Are people’s wants the same as people’s needs?” “Are wants a good index of needs in a society thoroughly manipulated by advertising and fashion?” “Are some kinds of shoes actually damaging to wearers?” “Are some demeaning?” “Do some shoes signal class and other differences that do not serve our needs for mutual respect and community?” Thus, though there is no necessity in claiming a vocation to make Christian shoes, the idea of vocation will influence the kinds of shoes one is willing to make and market. So, seeing one’s life and work as vocation does make a difference (and frequently a profound one) to what one does, how one does it, as well as why one does it.

A Homely Illustration Professor DeAne Lagerquist, a friend of mine who teaches at St. Olaf College, has employed the following illustration: If God has called us to make shoes, we are not called us to make shoes with little crosses on them or embossed with Luther’s seal. Instead we are called to make good shoes, shoes that serve well the needs of those that wear them. So while there is no need to make Christian shoes there is a need for serviceable shoes, well- fitting shoes, etc. We are doing the Lutheran thing not by doing something peculiarly religious nor by making something marked with Luther’s seal, but precisely by focusing our attention on the real needs that require service. As long as those needs are being well met it is not important that the need be Lutheran, nor that those served be Lutheran, nor that those who are employed in serving it be exclusively Lutheran. Lutheran hospitals, nursing homes, social service agencies, daycare centers and schools may (and often do) embody such an understanding of vocation. I find this illustration to be provocative and informative. But if we leave the illustration at this point, we may miss something important. Up to this point in the discussion we are left with the impression that the Christian Lutheran shoemaker is a generic maker of generic shoes just like any other shoemaker would make. But I think there’s more to vocation than that. As shoemakers we are called to serve, in love, the real needs of the neighbor. But this

Institutional Vocation Luther maintained that institutions, and not just individuals, had a divine calling insofar as they serve real human needs. The temptation, of course, is for institutions to become self-serving or for them to operate in behalf of the professionals that operate them rather than the public they were intended to serve. Thus, we must continually voice questions about what end we are serving and how well we serve it. Does our justice system serve well the needs of those in need of it? Or is it designed to serve well the needs of attorneys? Does our health care system serve well the needs of those who need it most? Or is it shaped by the agendas of HMOs, insurance companies, and health professionals? Does our system of public education serve well the needs of those who come to it in direst need? Does our political system serve well the needs of the country and its citizens or does it serve the needs of parties and partisans? None of these are easy questions. They reveal to us that our means frequently do not serve the ends they espouse and our institutions often do not serve those they claim to serve. 128

creative thinkers, people who think beyond chauvinisms and other oversimple either-or patterns, people who know how to live sustainably, preservers of multidimensional personhood, people devoted to justice, people practiced in long-term and large-view thinking, people who combine realism and hope, people who practice community.

The Vocation Model Of A Lutheran College/University So, what would it mean for a college or university to be shaped by this understanding of vocation? First of all, it would imply that the college/ university would pervasively and perennially keep in mind a cluster of “vocational questions”:  What are the deep needs of the world that we are called to address through the process of education?  What kinds of persons does the world need in order to meet these deep needs?  Who is our neighbor? That is, whose needs should we focus on serving? An educational elite? The people in our immediate neighborhood? Is our neighborhood now worldwide?  What are the real needs of students that we are called to meet through this educational process?  What gifts (and limitations) do we bring to this task? We need to ask these questions pervasively because it is tempting to make them the province of some special office or program in the university rather than informing the task of everyone. We need to ask these questions perennially because it is easy to fall into a pattern of doing something because that’s how we’ve always done it. What this means is that a university built on this model will constantly be in the process of critically reviewing its mission, its priorities, its polity, its curriculum and its pedagogy. When I have posed these questions to my students and colleagues, I received a great flow of responses, like turning on a tap. I offer just a small sample of their answers to two questions here: What kinds of persons does the world require in order to meet its deepest needs? Peacemakers, critical and

What gifts do we (as a Lutheran university) bring to this task? A gospel that liberates us for service to the world, an understanding of the creation as a gift, and an understanding of our own calling as stewards of the creation. Christ as a model of the human, the church as a model of hopeful community, diffracting God’s love for the world. Models of critical faithfulness, loving reformation. A tradition of dialogical education at the intersection of faith, the disciplines, and the professions. Second, a university informed by this understanding of vocation would honor the work of all who perform essential tasks in the place as well as in society. We need to celebrate the callings of students as well as of teachers, coaches and those who sweep the floors, administrators and other maintenance personnel, secretaries and those who work the library and bookstore. We should be wary of the ways we have of sorting jobs according to prestige, and we should be suspicious of all rigid categorizations, e.g., religious vs. secular, labor vs. management. Third, we should evaluate ourselves on how well we serve those we are given to serve and be very suspicious of other ways of rating or ranking universities based on publications, research supported grants, 129

percentages of applicants turned away, average ACT or SAT scores, etc. The question for the vocation-focused university is not “How elite are we?” but “How well do we do at the task of educating those whom we are given to serve?” and “Are our graduates serving the needs of the world?” Will this leave universities modeled on the vocational concept indistinguishable from generic secular universities? I don’t think so. If we may generalize on the past and present performance of our secular universities, I think we can say that they are not places that have been informed by the cluster of vocational questions cited above. Secular universities are very often dominated by the idea of disciplinary and sub-disciplinary specialization, professionalization, and disciplinary reductionism. Seldom is the question raised about whether this pattern serves well the needs of society, or the needs of students, to say nothing of whether it meets the deep needs of the world. Secular universities have fallen prey to and help perpetuate all sorts of elitism and chauvinism and fashion-ism that the vocation model would object to and attempt to avoid. As a consequence, I believe that almost all the professional programs one can find in a university would be pursued differently if tested by the vocational questions cited above. I believe that many of the disciplines would be reorganized, many of the requirements rethought and I believe that a good deal of pedagogy would be re-considered as well. But that does not imply that everything should be different. Lutherans do not have (nor should we want) an exclusive copyright on those vocational questions. It is possible that these vocational questions can be asked by others with keen insight and honesty and that educational programs can be designed by others who have taken the service of real needs seriously. We should be happy when this is so and be willing to learn from them.

So Which Of These Two Models Is Better? My own conclusion is that both are good. The for us/by us model was and may still be appropriate in situations where there are a fairly large community of Lutherans who can make up the student body and the faculty and staff of the institution. In the U.S., Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin may still have a sufficient density of Lutherans to make this work. Seminaries (in the ELCA at least) are now separate institutions. They may be located near or even contiguous to Lutheran colleges or universities but by now have completely separate institutional identities. Their presence and the presence of their students, their faculty, and their curricula no longer answer (nor address) the question about the university’s Lutheran identity, at least not in the way they once did. But many of our Lutheran universities now serve very diverse students while employing very diverse faculties to do so. The “by us, for us” model no longer works well there. But there is no reason why the vocation model could not. In fact, to a certain degree, it is working well in a number of Lutheran institutions across the country. It is for such institutions, serving diverse student groups with diverse faculty that the vocation model works best. It has the capacity to meet a real need (the deep needs of the world and the real needs of its diverse students) with the gifts it has available. That is, for me, the defining character of vocation, this intersection of needs and gifts. It has the capacity to be Lutheran in a significant sense, embodying, as it does, a key concept and understanding of Lutheran thinking. Afterthoughts The problem with a “two models” approach to any question is the likelihood of supposing that those are the only two 130

models or that they are exclusive. Neither of these needs be the case. It’s very possible that someone may discern other models than the two I have presented here. In fact, I’d be happy if that were the case. My own faint imagination doesn’t see, at present, what they might be. Please inform me. But much more helpful, I believe, is the suggestion that these two models are, in fact two poles of a continuum and that most institutions find themselves somewhere in between the models sketched above. I can imagine and know of many happy compromises between the two models. I think those compromises are more happily made when we see what the models are and are explicit about the ways in which our institutions are informed by each. My occasion for writing this is the perception that for many institutions the for us/by us model has dominated our thinking

without our being explicitly aware of it and without our being aware that there is another viable model of Lutheran education available. For too long the operative options have been Lutheran university or generic secular university; you’re either in or out. What I intended was to show that the Lutheran college/ university is much larger, richer and more diverse concept than many may have supposed. I firmly believe that Lutheran colleges and universities are not only important historically but that they are important in the present and the future tense. My view of Lutheran higher education is not a nostalgic lamentation of something passing from the scene, but an enthusiastic endorsement of a thriving enterprise, fulfilling God’s call, serving the deep needs of the world through the work of education.

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Eboo Patel Eboo Patel is an author, speaker, and education. He holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. Named by U.S. News & World Report as one of America’s Best Leaders of 2009, Patel was a member of President Barack Obama's inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships. He is the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that aims to promote interfaith cooperation. Patel details his life and career extensively in his 2007 autobiography, Acts of Faith. In the book, Patel notes that he became interested in religious diversity in college, where he noticed that conversations on multiculturalism and multiple identities did not involve religious identity.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. What are the relationships in Patel’s narrative that have such an effect on the authors? What, if anything, do you make of the fact that several key people in his story are of different religious identities? 2. What relationship does service have to Patel’s reflection on his faith? What are some of the key organizations with which he engages in service? What, if anything, do you make of the fact that they are organizations from different faith traditions? 3. What other aspects of identity, in relationship to faith and religion, are part of Patel’s reflections upon his own? 4. What role does the university play in Patel’s narrative of identity? What are some specific experiences that influence him, and how do they do that?

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IDENTITY POLITICS From Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel “All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.” J.M Coetzee My first college memory is at the gym. There are three basketball games going on – a black game, an Asian game, and a white game. I am confused, but not about who I am. I know I am white. I have spent years making myself so. That is why I started playing basketball in the first place. It is what popular white kids at my school did. I figured the physical defect of my brown skin would be overlooked if I perfected a fifteenfoot jump shot. The basketball court, to my eyes, was a big bucket of skin whitener. I looked at the black and Asian kids. They seemed so comfortable. They shouted at one another up and down the court. In distinct flow, ran pick-and-rolls and giveand-gos in their own unique rhythms. Didn’t they want to play on the white court? Hadn’t they spent years studying the white game so they could make its moves their own? Isn’t that what it means to be colored in America? The world never seemed so new to me as it did during those first few months of college. My first lesson was on race. I was stunned to learn that not everybody wanted to be white. I remember seeing a Korean girl I had gone to high school with across the hall at Illini Union. “Kristen,” I called out. But she didn’t turn around. “She went back to her Korean name,” a mutual friend, also Korean, later explained when I told her about the incident. “She won’t answer to Kristen anymore.” “What the hell is that about?” I asked. “It happens to a lot of Koreans when they go to college. They become more involved in their own ethnicity and culture. They hang out only with Koreans.”

She was using college as a place to de-whiten herself. The more I looked around, the more I realized that she wasn’t the only one. Cafeterias were balkanized by race and ethnicity. Unlike in high school, where the popular (mostly white) kids sat at one table and the others longed for a place there, people wanted to be where they were, in fact, they were fiercely proud and protective of their own zones. Every residence hall, in addition to having a general student council, had a black student union. I had a class with the president of the black student union at Allen Hall, where I lived during my freshman and sophomore years, and was impressed by his intellect and passion. “Why don’t you run for president of Allen Hall Council?” I asked. “I think you’d be great. I think you’d get elected.” “Fuck Allen Hall Council,” he responded. “Everything I do, I do for black people.” The black kid sitting next to him didn’t even turn to face us. He just nodded. I remember the moment that this made sense to me. During the first semester of college, I found myself entranced by a beautiful young woman in my geology class. It goes without saying that she was white; that was the definition of beauty to me. Class after class, I looked for my opening, and one day I got close enough to flash a direct smile at her and approach. She shot me a look of disgust, turned around, and began walking the other way with a group of equally beautiful, equally white girls. I remember thinking, “well, I shouldn’t have tried anyway. Girls like that don’t go for guys like me.” And then I stopped in my tracks. What did I mean by 134

that? Basically this: pretty white girls don’t go for brown guys. My skin color, my ethnic name, the food my mother cooked meant no access to certain circles. I had learned that rule at a very young age and lived by it for many years. Violating that invisible code risked the punishment of ridicule. For so long, I had simply accepted this as fact of life. But college gave me a different framework in which to see race. The problem was not with my skin; it was with her eyes. Having swallowed the pill of white supremacy whole during high school and allowed its poison to spread through my body, I suppose it should have come as no surprise that I would accept uncritically the first elixir that presented itself. That elixir was identity politics, and it was in full swing during my undergraduate years. The grand idea of identity politics circa 1994, or at least the way my crew and I understood it, was this; the world, and one’s place in it, was entirely defined by the color of one’s skin, the income of one’s parents, and the shape of one’s genitalia. Middleclass white men had built a culture, an economy, and a political system designed to maintain their own power. First, they called it Western civilization, then they called it America, and now they were calling it globalization. These people were the oppressors. The rest of us, the oppressed, had been pawns in their game for far too long. A few heroes over time had picked up on this, and the bravest among them – Nat Turner, Lucy Parsons, Stokely Carmichael – had revolted. The rise of identity politics was the beginning of new age, a great intellectual liberating system but also to perceive and return to our own authentic selves. Our authentic selves were, of course, totally determined by our ascribed race, class, and gender identities, which shaped everything from one’s politics to one’s

friendship to one’s tastes in food and music. To be black was to be liberal, at least; if you knew anything about your history which, to us, meant a brush with Marcus Garvey or Frederick Douglass), you were awaked to your true political nature, which was to be radical. A black Republican? No such thing. What of Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas? We had two explanations; they had been duped by the white power structure and therefore weren’t really republicans, or they were willing to sell out their own people for personal profit (and therefore weren’t really black). We spent countless hours discussing nomenclature; black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native American or Indigenous Person? We argued to the point of blows over the nature of various oppressions. Were black women more oppressed based on their race or their gender? Who was more marginalize, African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans? The Asian Americans, feeling a bit left out, invited a radical Asian American speaker to campus who gave a talk called “Where Are the Asian American Malcom Xs”? “The personal is political” was our battle cry. Selective individual actions were immediately refracted into large-scale truths. It wasn’t just four white cops who beat Rodney King; it was every white person oppressing every person of color on earth. In high school history class, America had been present as the land of opportunity and freedom. I had been told almost nothing about its dark side. But now I couldn’t get enough. I read Howard Zinn’s account of Columbus’s voyage and was sickened that the man we celebrate as “discovering” America made plans to exploit the indigenous people here as soon as he laid eyes on them. I learned that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which lead to a massive escalation of the Vietnam War, was probably based on a lie. President Lyndon 135

rights movement; “you can’t stick a knife into a ma’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call that progress.” I found myself increasingly enamored of the occasional references to the value of violence. “Every time a cop murders somebody in Harlem” I read in one volume, “we will retaliate by murdering someone in midtown.” “By any means necessary” was Malcom X’s famous line. It made infinite sense to me. If the American system’s primary tool of engagement was violence, then those of us who sought to change it would have to become fluent in that language. I found myself pushing the envelope more. I started calling liberals “house niggers” a term I learned from reading Malcom X, meaning they were too domesticated and comfortable to take the necessary actions to bring down the system. My father, growing increasingly frustrated by my stridency, told me to stop talking about politics when I visited home. “You’re too bourgeois to see what’s really happening in this world,” I responded. He exploded with anger, saying something about how his “bourgeois” ways were paying my college tuition. I took his anger as evidence that I was on the right path. Every radical had been rejected, even mocked, when he first spoke true to power. My father’s frustration was confirmation that I gained entry into the tradition of righteous revolutionaries. I searched for models of people who had tried to block the machinery of American imperialism. One of the campus radicals said to me, “have you ever heard of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn? They started an outfit in the 1960s called the Weather Underground that did strategic bombing here in the U.S. You should check them out.” I filed that away in the back of my head. I was sure the reference would come in handy someday.

Johnson had sent waves of poor and minority Americans to destroy a country because of his ego. Power will always oppress people, one of my professors said. The evidence for that was right in front of me. Champaign-Urbana wasn’t much of a city, but it has many more social problems than Glen Ellyn. All you had to do was open your eyes to see Vietnam vets on the street drinking mouthwash for the alcohol and black kids in the poor part of town going to schools far inferior to the tony University High where the professors sent their children. I began to see the world through the framework of my radicalizing political consciousness. As I watched drunk white frat boys mock homeless people on Green Street on Friday nights, I saw corporate fat cats eating caviar while poor Americans starved during the Great Depression. When the crowds of Fighting Illini fans streamed by on their way to the basketball game wearing T-shirts and hats displaying university’s’ demeaning mascot, Chief Illiniwek, I saw the spirit of Christopher Columbus crushing the natives. My response was to rage. I remember shouting down my fellow students in sociology classes at the University of Illinois for suggesting that welfare should be reformed so that poor people took more personal responsibility, angrily protesting against conservative speakers who came to campus, calling anybody who applied for a corporate job a sellout. “America is bent on imperialism” was the first thought I had every morning and the last thought I had every night. I was guided mostly by 1960s-era radical black thought – H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, early Malcolm X. The key lesson I took from this material was that progress was a myth. It was revolution or nothing. I quoted Malcom X to the mealy-mouthed liberals who cited the victories of the civil 136

Gone were my high school dreams of a perfect LSAT score and a prime corporate law job in LA. I had liberated myself from the capitalist framework that provides comfort for some and poverty for most. I had left the known world and entered the universe of myth. The one thing that connected me to my past was volunteering. Something about my YMCA experiences and my parents’ insistence that service was essential stuck with me. Also, I needed the human connection. My head was swimming with radical theories and my spirit was bursting with anger. The moments I spent trying to concretely improve somebody’s life kept me from falling over the edge. Every Sunday morning, I went to a nursing home and played my guitar for the residents. On alternate Monday nights, I helped cook dinner and clean the kitchen at the women’s shelter. Thursdays I picked up cakes and cookies from a local bakery and delivered them to the Salvation Army. The leaders of local social service agencies became some of my closest mentors in Champaign. But my intellectual and activist friends were cool toward such activities. They thought that social services were part of the “system” and that by volunteering I was helping perpetuate the injustices inherent in capitalism. The litmus test they used for any initiative was whether it was “radical,” by which they meant, will this activity ultimately destroy the current system? I stopped telling them about the new programs I had started as president of the Allen Hall Volunteer Group because they would inevitably dismiss them with a wave of a clove cigarette and a single line: “That sounds like just another middle-class liberal program.” No doubt there was something superficial about a good deal of the volunteering that took place when I was a student. The other students I worked with at

homeless shelters and tutoring programs took their volunteer activities seriously, but when I tried to start discussions on the causes of homelessness or educational inequality, they didn’t want to hear it. “Volunteering at the Salvation Army for two hours on Thursday night makes me feel like I am giving back,” one of them told me. “Then I don’t feel bad when I go out and have fun on Friday night.” “Yeah, but those guys you play cards with on Thursday night are still at the Salvation Army on Friday while you are out partying,” I thought. If the primary purpose of volunteering is to help other people, not to assuage our own guilt, shouldn’t we spend some time thinking about how to improve the situation of homeless people in a more permanent way? But I was also aware of a more creative movement bubbling up. It had volunteering at its core, but its broader mission was social change. Organizations such as Teach for America, City Year, and Habitat for Humanity combined the concrete activities of typical volunteer programs with an exciting vision of large-scale transformation. If you volunteered with a Habitat for Humanity project, you weren’t just building houses; you were ending poverty housing. If you joined Teach for America, you weren't just helping 30 fourth graders; you were transforming American education. At City Year, you weren’t just doing jumping jacks in the park wearing a bright red jacket; you were showing the world that young people were idealistic change makers, not selfabsorbed cynics. Moreover, these organizations took diversity seriously. They realized that service was an ideal place to bring together people from different racial, ethnic, class, and geographical backgrounds. People built a special relationship with one another when they passed bricks at a Habitat for Humanity site or planned lessons for children at an 137

inner-city school. The common purpose gave them a common bond. Furthermore, because these people came from different backgrounds, they inevitably brought different perspectives to the various challenges that emerged in their service projects. In other words, a diverse team made for better service. As my angry activist friends bemoaned the lack of participation in our political meetings, I watched thousands of people, from economics majors to English majors, flock to Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, and City Year. These organizations had managed to create an aura around themselves. They were far larger than the particular programs; they had become ideas in the culture. President Bill Clinton recognized this and created AmeriCorps to build on that energy. The New York Times and other major publications took notice and wrote articles extolling these groups. I realized that Wendy Kopp of Teach for America, Vanessa Kirsch of Public Allies, and Alan Khazei and Michael Brown of City Year were not much older than I was. They had founded their organizations when they were recent college graduates. I had been made to believe that our only heroes were martyrs of the 1960s. I was proud to know that my generation had produced leaders, too. The dorm I lived in, Allen Hall, was a temple of radical politics and cultural creativity. It was the University of Illinois’s first Living Learning Community, meaning that academic courses were offered in the dorm itself, with the intention of cultivating a liberal arts college type intellectual atmosphere. “Freaks and geeks” was what the rest of the campus called it. One of the first people I met at Allen Hall was a tall, lanky senior named Jeff Pinzino. He embodied Allen Hall perfectly. When I came back from class in the afternoon, he was inevitable on the porch,

playing Hack Sack and harmonica with the hippie types. He was into things like ethnomusicology and Alan Watts, and had organized theater troupes, writing groups, and political discussion circles in the hall. Jeff had an almost perfect grade point average, but nobody had ever seen him study. The only time I ever saw him in the library, he was listening to Delta blues musicians in the music archive. I once saw him reading a brochure for the Maharishi University in Iowa. When I asked him about it, he told me it was one of the graduate programs he was considering, along with Stanford and the University of Chicago. I loved Jeff's offbeat interests, but even more I loved his ability to make things happen. “Why do you spend so much time starting little groups?” I once asked him. “Because the most important thing you can learn is how to turn an idea into reality,” he responded. I wrote that phrase down in my journal and underlined it three times. The director of Allen Hall, Howie Schein, was an aging hippie who had received his PhD from Berkeley during its political heyday. Committed to social justice and student empowerment in his own lowkey way, Howie attracted the campus’s most politically radical and student-centered faculty to teach courses at Allen. Allen’s section of Introduction to Political Science was famously taught by a Marxist who had played a prominent role in the organization of Vietnam Veterans Against the War: Howie also had music rooms and art studios built in the hall, found funding for students to create political and cultural programs, and started one of the nation’s first guest in residence programs, which brought writers, artists, and political agitators to live in the hall and interact with students for one to two weeks. The purpose, he once told me, was to show students that accounting, law, engineering, and medicine were not the only life paths available. 138

If I hadn’t felt so dizzy, I might have reached for her, I told Emily. “Oh, habibi,” she said to me, using an Arabic term of affection. “You go to this beautiful girl before she concludes you are too stupid and looks for someone else.” Being Jewish was central to Sarah’s identity. She had been raised in Jewish youth programs; had twice been on the March of the Living, where young Jews visit the sites of concentration camps in Europe; and had served on the international board of B’nai B’rith’s youth organization. When we met, she was studying Hebrew in preparation for a semester in Israel. Whereas Lisa’s religiosity was based on notions of truth, Sarah’s was based on commitment to peoplehood and social justice. She did not strictly keep Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, but she lit candles every Friday evening in honor of its arrival. “My great-grandmother lit candles, my grandmother lit candles, my mother lights candles, so I will light candles,” she explained to me. Her parents had escaped Romania’s brutal dictator Ceausescu in the early 1970s and moved to Israel. They had left Israel for the United States, then returned when war broke out in 1973. Sarah would joke, “Most people leave countries when wars happen. My parents moved back.” But I understood the seriousness behind what she was saying. Her people had been willing to fight for Jewishness, and Sarah felt it was her honor and responsibility to be a part of the tradition and community that others had fought and died for. Sarah spoke often about tikkun, olam and tzedakah, the Hebrew terms for repairing the world and doing charity. These were the most important principles of Judaism to her, and in her eyes, they commanded Jews to help all humanity, especially those who are suffering. I remember going with Sarah to Foellinger Auditorium at the University of Illinois to

It was a guest in residence at Allen Hall who nudged me toward my second serious relationship. Emily Shihadeh, a Palestinian American playwright, performed her onewoman play about growing up in Ramallah and inventing her own destiny in San Francisco to a rapt audience at Allen Hall. I loved her. She had my mother’s strength of will and my father’s sense of humor. She wanted to see Champaign, so I took her to all the places I volunteered: the nursing home where I played music, the homeless shelter where I served dinner, the elementary school where I taught peace games to children. Driving back to Allen Hall after one of these excursions, she turned to me and said, “I can see what you are doing. You are trying to give all of your love away through these different service activities. It is good you are helping people, but you will never get full from it. This kind of love you have has to be given to one person, a special person.” I told her about Sarah. We had met at a student leadership conference and been friends ever since. The activist circle at Illinois was small, so we ran into each other a lot. Earlier that year, we had founded a program that took residents of one of the homeless shelters for social outings once a week. We were often the only two students who showed up, and after we took the residents back to the shelter, we would go to Zorbas for a sandwich and some late-night blues. One night, after we dropped the guys off, Sarah looked up at the sky and said, “Tonight is a perfect night for star spinning.” “What’s that?” I asked. “You’ve never been star spinning?” she asked in mock surprise. And so, we drove to a field a few miles from campus, crossed our wrists, grabbed each other’s hands, and spun around looking skyward. We fell down, arms sprawled out, laughing hysterically.

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hear a Holocaust survivor speak about his experiences. Sarah wept throughout the talk. She had visited the concentration camp this man had been in. When the speech was done, Sarah asked the first question: “I have been involved in Holocaust education since I was twelve. I lived by the motto ‘Never again.’ But it is happening again, now, before our eyes, in Bosnia. What will make it stop?” A hush fell over the audience. The man onstage mumbled something weak, congratulating Sarah for caring. The Q and A continued, but Sarah’s question hung in the room for the remainder of the event. She and I left. I was quieter than usual. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Nothing really,” I told her. “It’s just that the only other person I’ve heard talk about what’s happening in Bosnia is my dad. He’s so angry that it’s Muslims being massacred there. He’s convinced that if it was Christians or Jews, the rest of the world would try to stop it.” “I just think it’s horrible, all those people being killed,” Sarah said. “I didn’t even know they were Muslims. But whoever they are, the world should come to their aid.” Something occurred to me. In all the sociology courses on identity I had taken, in all the late-night conversations we had at Allen Hall on the subject, the issue of religion rarely came up. We were always talking about freedom for women or Latinos or lesbians. Identity was always defined as race, class, gender, or, occasionally, sexual orientation. When I became a resident adviser, half of my training focused on dealing with issues around those particular identities. The service-learning movement took diversity seriously, but it was always about blacks and whites, poor folks and rich folks, urbanites and suburbanites; never about Muslims, Christians, and Jews. I had been to many programs at the Office of

Minority Student Affairs, and they also had always focused on the same things. We talked about the limited roles for black actors, the discrimination that kept gay politicians in the closet, the burden of the second shift for women, the cultural capital that accrued to middle-class kids because of the circumstances of their birth. We extolled bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldua for their ability to write about these various identities in an integrated way, and filled hours debating whether the oppressions associated with each identity added together or multiplied together. But right now, as we griped about Denzel Washington getting passed over for the Oscar for Malcolm X, a religious war was raging in the Balkans, tens of thousands of people were dying, and faith was nowhere to be found in the diversity discussion. What I didn’t tell Sarah at that time, what I had told few people actually because I didn’t know how to make sense of it myself, was that I had recently discovered religion. I had come across a copy of Robert Coles’s The Call of Service and was drawn to one of the people he wrote about: Dorothy Day. He spoke of her with absolute awe, as if she was a force of nature. In her thirties, during the Great Depression, Day had started something called the Catholic Worker movement, which combined radical politics, direct service, and community living. For nearly half a century, Day had given up her own middle-class privilege to live with those who went without in what was called a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality. The original House of Hospitality was on the Lower East Side of New York City, but it inspired more than a hundred others across the nation. Like everything else that seemed good, I was convinced that the Catholic Worker movement had faded away in the 1960s.

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“Oh, no,” somebody told me when I made an offhand reference to the Catholic Worker and bemoaned its disappearance. “There are still many, many Catholic Worker houses left. In fact, there is one here in Champaign." “What’s it like?” I asked, shocked. “Part shelter for poor folks, part anarchist movement for Catholic radicals, part community for anyone who enters. Really, it’s about a whole new way of living. You’ve got to go there to know.” From the moment I entered St. Jude’s, it was clear to me that this was different from any other place I’d been. I couldn’t figure out whether it was a shelter or a home. There was nobody doing intake. There was no executive director’s office. White, black, and brown kids played together in the living room. I smelled food and heard English and Spanish voices coming from the kitchen. The first thing somebody said to me was, “Are you staying for dinner?” “Yes,” I said. The salad and stew were simple and filling, and the conversation came easy. After dinner, I asked someone, “Who are the staff here? And who are the residents?” “That’s not the best way to think about this place,” the person told me. “We’re a community. The question we ask is, ‘What’s your story?’ There is a family here who emigrated from a small village in Mexico. The father found out about this place from his Catholic parish. They’ve been here for four months, enough time for the father to find a job and scrape together the security deposit on an apartment. There are others here with graduate degrees who believe that sharing their lives with the needy is their Christian calling. If you want to know the philosophy behind all of this, read Dorothy Day.” I found some of Day’s old essays and a copy of her autobiography. In those writings, I found an articulation of what it

meant to be human, to be radical, and to be useful. Recalling the thoughts of her college days, Day wrote, “I did not see anyone taking off his coat and giving it to the poor. I didn’t see anyone having a banquet and calling in the lame, the halt and the blind. And those who were doing it, like the Salvation Army, did not appeal to me. I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too.” Elsewhere in her autobiography, she wrote: “Why was so much done in remedying social evils instead of avoiding them in the first place?... Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” Here was what I had been seeking for so long: a vision of radical equality—all human beings living the abundant life—that could be achieved through both a direct service approach and a change-the system politics. For so long, those two things had existed in separate rooms in my life a different group of friends, a different way of talking for each. Here was a movement that combined them. Finally, the two sides of myself could be in the same room. The most radical part about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement was the insistence that everything the movement did was guided by a single force: love. “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community,” Day wrote at the end of her autobiography. I felt as if she was talking to me one-on-one. I was tired of raging. It left me feeling empty, and what did it achieve anyway? I wanted to improve people's lives because I loved humanity, not because I hated the system. Sometimes, I thought, my activist friends hated the system more than they loved humanity. The Catholic Worker became my community. I started making weekly visits 141

to St. Jude House while I was in Champaign. And the summer after my sophomore year, Jeff Pinzino and I did a seven-week road trip through Catholic Worker houses ranging from the North east to the Deep South. I cut up carrots for the soup kitchen at St. Joseph’s House in New York City; demonstrated at the Pentagon with Catholic Workers in Washington, D.C.; heard the inspiring story of a Vietnam veteran in Atlanta who had climbed back from addiction and mental illness and was now helping others do the same. More than anything, I marveled at the spirit with which Catholic Workers carried out their tasks. The only word to describe it is grace. I was accustomed to seeing the staff at social service agencies get frustrated, even angry, with the people they were working with (whom they referred to, strangely, as “clients”). I never saw that at a Catholic Worker house. The Houses of Hospitality were, by and large, cultures of kindness. And unlike most of the other demonstrations I went to, which were dominated by anger and self-righteousness, speakers at Catholic Worker demonstrations spoke even their most radical statements with an air of humility and love. When I demonstrated at the Pentagon with a group of Catholic Workers, they didn’t shout about how evil soldiers were; they sang hymns and said they would pray for the military brass walking in. Even when Dorothy Day referred to America as a “filthy, rotten system,” she somehow managed to do it in a way that called for hopeful, loving change, not anger and rage. I was intoxicated by Day’s vision and felt deep admiration for the Catholic Workers I met. I found myself asking constantly, “What is the source of the love you so often speak of?” Their answer came in one three-letter word that I had rarely heard during my time in college: God.

In The Call of Service, Robert Coles described a conversation between one of his Harvard undergraduates and Day in the late 1970s. The young man, a science major, told Day, “You’ve done so much already for these people.” “The Lord has done it all; we try to be adequate instruments of His,” she answered. “Well, it’s been you folks who have done all this,” the young man insisted, pointing to the soup kitchen in which Day and other Catholic Workers were busily preparing a meal, skeptical of calling in a supernatural power for what seemed clearly to be a human action. Day was gentle but equally insistent that God was the source of her work. “Oh, when we pray, we are told—we are given answers to our questions. They [the answers] come to us, and then we know He has sent us the thoughts, the ideas. They all don’t just belong to us. He lives in our thoughts, the Lord does.” According to Day, all we humans can do is be grateful for the opportunity to hear God’s call and ask for the strength to answer it. For Day, that answer came in the form of prayer and work, which to her amounted to much the same thing: I may be old and near the end, but in my mind, I’m the same old Dorothy trying to show the good Lord that I’m working for Him to the best of my ability. I pray that God will give me a chance to pray to Him the way I like to pray to Him. If I pray by making soup and serving soup, I feel I’m praying by doing. When I’m in bed, and the doctor has told me firmly to stay there for a few days, I don’t feel I’ve earned my right to pray for myself and others, to pray for these poor folks who come here for a square meal.

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My college years were about entering alien territory intrepidly. What was a suburban, middle-class, Indian kid doing in Marxist circles and homeless shelters? I wore the unexpectedness of it all like a badge of honor. Sometimes I wondered whether shock value was more important to me than social justice. The Catholic Workers were the least likely circle for a kid like me. They were more radical than the Marxist intellectuals I knew, more gentle than the social service types I volunteered with, more intelligent than the professors who taught my classes, and more effective than the activists I protested with. And yet I felt so at ease with them. Reading Dorothy Day, I realized why: they knew that God had created humanity with the hope that we would achieve the Kingdom on earth. Their purpose for doing this work was in their bones and emerged with every breath. Once one realizes that, what can one do but obey with joy? As William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “[Faith is] the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” One of my discomforts with radical politics was that it deified the individual. The underlying belief of all the radicals I knew was that our reasons, our methods, our ability to help others all came from our own minds. We were so smart and smug. I even felt a peculiar similarity with the Jeopardy battles my friends and I had had in high school, except the game with my radical friends was who could most elegantly apply Fanon to current events. Day’s view that God is the source of love, equality, and connection—and that He requires His ultimate creation, humanity, to achieve the same on earth—made sense to me in a deep place, perhaps the same place I was trying to fill in high school by fasting.

When Catholic Workers asked about my religion, I told them that I didn’t really have one. They were happy for me to participate in their prayer life anyway, and they made it clear that I should do whatever felt comfortable to me and no more. I found the singing and praying and moments of silence deeply inspiring. I bowed my head and followed along as best I could. But I always found myself standing at a slight angle to the core symbols of the Christian faith—the Cross, the blood, the Resurrection—and I never felt any desire to convert. Nobody in the Catholic Worker movement ever suggested that I do so. They saved me just the same. I realized this years later, when I met Bill Ayers. I was working in Chicago and interested in new models of youth development. Several people suggested I go see Bill, a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a key figure in both local school reform and the small schools movement. “Where have I heard that name before?” I thought, and suddenly I made the connection to the Weather Underground, the radical sixties group that had planted bombs in federal buildings as a strategy for bringing down the system. Bill had recently published his memoir, Fugitive Days. The similarities between our stories was scary. We were both middleclass kids from Glen Ellyn who had discovered the dark side of America in college and responded with rage. We both had contempt for liberals and romanticized the violent rebellions of John Brown and Che Guevara. We were both familiar with the Jeffersonian line that the people should rebel during every era. We both fancied ourselves in the vanguard. Sitting at the kitchen table one night in 1968, talking about the death machine that was the U.S. government, a new guy in Bill’s circle, Terry Robbins, had suggested 143

that things had gone too far and it was time to bomb the pigs into the Stone Age. At first Bill and his friends resisted. That’s crazy, they said. “There’s got to be a place in this revolution for a man of principled violence,’ Terry responded. Bill found the image intoxicating, and he spent the ensuing years doing violent battle with cops, learning to build bombs, and calling for all “mother country radicals” to bring the war home with acts of violence on American soil. He lost several friends and a decade of his life in the process. What if I had been at that kitchen table that night? What if a Terry Robbins figure had crossed my path, showed me his sketchbook full of bomb designs, and encouraged me to study the Blaster’s Handbook? At nineteen, I was already convinced that America understood only violence. I was just this side of believing that it was my responsibility to inflict it. I only needed a nudge. My father couldn’t make it all the way through Fugitive Days, “It reminds me too much of you,” he said. “It scares the shit out of me, what you could have become.” It had been chance-grace—that I had sat at the Catholic Worker table and it had been Dorothy Day’s book that had fallen into my hands. On our summer road trip, Sarah and I visited Emily Shihadeh in San Francisco. She received us warmly, with big hugs, and after spending a few minutes with Sarah, she declared that taking her advice and making my move was the smartest thing I had ever done. Then came the platefuls of hummus, falafel, and pita. “I love Middle Eastern food,” Sarah said. “This is Arab food, Palestinian food,” Emily responded, growing suddenly cool. “The Israelis occupy our land, but they cannot take our culture.” Sarah understood that comment in context, as illustrative of the sentiment of

the people who had lost something, in some cases everything, when Israel had triumphed. She did not grow defensive or angry. Instead, she resolved to explore the Palestinian side of the matter during her semester in Israel. I visited her in Israel, at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, where a few years later a close friend of hers was in the cafeteria during a suicide bombing. We floated in the Dead Sea, wandered through Jerusalem’s markets (where Sarah bought a plaque for my parents with IN THE NAME OF GOD written in Arabic on it), ate hot bagels with savory zatar (an aromatic spice mixture), went to the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock, visited the Way of the Cross. In Haifa, we walked through the gardens of the Baha’i Temple and listened to an earnest young man in pleated khaki pants tell us about the need for unity. Sarah delved into the Palestinian situation and into Jewish history in Israel. She was heartbroken by both. I knew little about either. Sarah took me on a tour of the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. The tour guide was a friend of hers, a young American Jew who had moved to Israel, what Jews call “making aliyah.” He and the Arab kids who gathered spoke in both Hebrew and Arabic, talking about life in Arab villages, the simple pleasures of backgammon games and Arabic coffee on Sunday afternoons, the frustration of waiting for hours at Israeli checkpoints on their way to visit family in the West Bank. Sarah put her hands over her face when she heard this. “I hate that their lives are like this,” she told me later. Our tour guide at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, was another American who had made aliyah. He came across as a smooth intellectual, mentioning his two PhDs in passing. After he had caught us in the web of his seductive intellect, he carefully injected his right-wing 144

poison. He told stories of the destruction of Kristallnacht, the livelihoods lost, the intimidation of children and women in Jewish neighborhoods, the fear of men that it would only get worse. He ended the story in a flat voice, saying that the world had done nothing then, and why should Jews expect the world to pay attention to their suffering now? He walked us through the various halls of Yad Vashem, telling more stories of suffering, bringing half the group to tears, and continuing to press his particular politics. “Oslo,” he said, and shook his head in disgust. “Haven’t we Jews heard this before? Land for peace. It didn’t work when Neville Chamberlain, that spineless wimp, tried it sixty years ago. Look what it led to then. Who can believe it will lead to something different now?” I knew little about international peacemaking and nothing about the Oslo Accords, signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993, but I could tell a spoiler when I saw one. Sarah was as furious with him as I was. “There are so many people who are trying to create a just situation here, and people like him are working to defeat us every day,” she told me on the way out. Jewish identity issues had always played a large role in Sarah’s life, and they became paramount in Israel. “The most important thing to people here is that you marry another Jew,” she told me. “The inter marriage rate between Jews and non-Jews is so high now that some Jewish leaders are saying that the Jews are killing Judaism ourselves. They would rather a Jew eat a bacon double cheeseburger than marry outside the faith.” In her own gentle way, Sarah was telling me that she was struggling with our relationship. She felt as if she had an obligation to her tradition, her people. I was too daft to catch her drift. We went to a Shabbat dinner in Jerusalem with a group of young American

and Israeli Jews. The conversation shifted back and forth between graduate school plans and social justice issues. These were the things that college students and recent graduates talked about all the time. I felt completely at home. I wound up in a conversation with a young Jewish woman in a long skirt. It looked like a religious outfit. I asked her about it, and she explained to me that she was an Orthodox Jew and followed a tradition called shomer negiah. In her community, unmarried men and women could not date, could not touch, could not be in the same room together unsupervised. “I will marry a Jew,” she told me with total certainty, “and I will do it according to the dictates of my tradition.” She motioned toward Sarah and said, “The girl you came with, she is your girlfriend? She is a Jew?” “Yes,” I said. “And you, what are you?” “Nothing really, I guess. I’m exploring different spiritualties right now,” I told her. “Will you and Sarah marry?” she asked. “Um, we don’t really talk about that right now,” I said. “I mean, we’re together. That feels like a lot for where we are at in our lives.” “Oh,” she said, looking at me with some suspicion. I realized that she was younger than both Sarah and me, but she did not consider marriage too much of a responsibility for her. It would be an honor and a duty for her to be married; it would be carrying out the will of her community and continuing with the practices of her tradition. “And if you get married, what will your wedding be like? Whose tradition will it follow?” I shrugged. It wasn’t something I had thought about. It didn’t seem important. Sarah had been listening to our conversation, and I could feel her getting 145

increasingly uncomfortable. At the mention of our wedding, she got up abruptly, disrupting the conversation she was in, and said to me, “I want to go.” I could tell she was mad, but I had no idea why. I got our coats, hailed a taxi, and waited for her to lay into me. “Do you have any idea what you were doing tonight?” she said. “That girl you were talking to is a devout Orthodox Jew. She lives by rules that were handed down by God. She is part of a tradition that is thousands of years old. Every question she asked you was a ridiculing of me. There was an invisible conversation that you were totally oblivious to, whose main theme was that Sarah is a bad Jew because she is dating a goy. The only reason she kept on asking you questions was to get more details on how wayward I am.” I wanted to say, “Screw her. Why does she get to tell you what to do?” And then I realized something: Sarah wanted that. She had come to Israel to connect with her community, her tradition. What is a community but a group of people who have some claim over you, and what is a tradition

but a set of stories and principles and rules handed down over hundreds or thousands of years that each new generation has to wrestle with? I started sobbing. The cabdriver must have thought we were crazy. Sarah, warm and sweet, moved over to me and put her hand on my back. I had totally lost it by this point, weeping uncontrollably, as if a loved one had died. “What is it, my love?” Sarah asked. I finally pulled myself together. “It’s just that you feel like you have something to live up to, this Judaism thing. You have these principles you talk about, and this community that watches out for you, and even when it feels suffocating, at least you know they care for you. I have none of that. I just have some things that I’m interested in and a bunch of groups I come in and out of. But I could leave them at any time, and they wouldn’t know I was gone.” It was a harsh truth I was telling. For all my talk of identity politics, I had yet to develop much of an identity.

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Chris Stedman Chris Stedman received his Master’s in Religion from Meadville Lombard Theological School at the University of Chicago, for which he was awarded the Billings Prize for Most Outstanding Scholastic Achievement. A graduate of Augsburg College with a summa cum laude B.A. in Religion, Chris writes for the Huffington Post, Washington Post, and more. Previously a Content Developer and Adjunct Trainer for Interfaith Youth Core, Chris is an atheist working to foster positive and productive dialogue and collaborative action between faith communities and the nonreligious. He speaks on this topic across the United States and around the world. Stedman is currently the Assistant Chaplain and Values in Action Coordinator for the humanist community at Harvard Humanist Community at Harvard University (where he was previously the inaugural Interfaith and Community Service Fellow).

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. Discuss the role of anger and rage in Stedman’s narrative. At whom or what is he? Why? What do they do with that anger? How does he later reflect on it? 2. What is a key relationship in Stedman’s story that has an effect on him? What do you notice about that relationship? 3. What relationship does service have to Stedman’s reflections on religion? Where does he serve, and what difference do those places make for him? 4. What role does college play for Stedman’s exploration of faith and religion?

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UNHOLIER THAN THOU: SAYING GOODBYE TO GOD From Faitheist by Chris Stedman “That God does not exist, I cannot deny. That my whole being cries out for God, I cannot forget.” Jean-Paul Sartre After years of working to reconcile being gay with being a Christian, I entered Augsburg College ready for a fresh start on solid ground. It was to be a time of spiritual growth that would set my call to ministry. I expected college to be difficult but merely in the way that college is difficult for many others—the late-night cram sessions followed by early-morning exams, the growing pains of newfound independence, and the difficulty of discerning which peer pressures to concede. I didn’t expect that I would stop believing in God altogether. It’s hard to put my finger on the demise of my belief in God. There was no moment of revelation, no neat and tidy bookend to the years of belief that followed my initial conversion. The conclusion of my Christian faith was a gradual process; it was something that happened in increments as a result of careful thought and investigation. I suppose it started in my Religion 100 class, the first of two required religion classes at Augsburg. One of our earliest assignments was a project in which we were asked to define our “canon.” After learning about the process through which biblical texts became canonized-something I’d been ignorant of beforehand-we were invited to define our own personal canon of texts. I listed songs, movies, poems, and books that had been especially influential. Flannery O’Connor, Sufjan Stevens, Pär Lagerkvist, Tom Waits, and a Kevin Smith film all made the list. I relished the project, and it was only after I submitted it that I realized I hadn’t included the Bible. It’s revealing to me now that I listed Lagerkvist, whose Nobel Prize-winning

novel, Barabbas, was among my favorite literary works at the time. That book, which imagines the life of the man who was released by the Romans in place of Jesus, was Lagerkvist’s way of elucidating his lifelong struggle over his lack of faith and inability to believe in Jesus. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Barabbas’s story was my own. I wanted to believe in God. I wanted to love Jesus and participate in His fellowship of believers. I looked to many Christians as pillars of goodness, and I wanted to emulate their compassion and social justice ethic. Sure, there were Christians promoting hate, but I’d met few people more dedicated to repairing the world and helping those in need than the Christians I knew. I earnestly believed that, to be like them, I needed to believe in their God. It seemed to be a package deal, but I was much more invested in the positive, human-affirming ethics and the community aspect of it than I was in the theism. It was kind of heartbreaking, then, when I realized that I no longer believed in God. With the same kind of recognition I experienced when I finally put the word gay onto the feelings I’d had for most of my life, it eventually hit me that I was an atheist. It was as if I had come home from an especially long week at work to find out that God had packed up His things and moved out days before without leaving a forwarding address, and I’d just been too busy to notice His absence. I didn’t come to the personal conclusion that God probably didn’t exist because I was angry. It wasn’t merely a reaction to the problems I saw in many religious beliefs and 148

communities, or to the negative experiences I’d had—I had already made my peace with my past and saw that religious communities were making progress on addressing dehumanizing beliefs and practices. Rather, it was a conclusion I came to through intellectual and personal consideration. As I studied religion, I took a step back and reflected on the arguments for and against the existence of God, and was underwhelmed by the evidence. Recalling my nontheism in childhood, it suddenly seemed odd that I had adopted a theistic worldview after not having had one in my youth. It became apparent that believing in a divine force simply didn’t resonate with my experiences or how I understood the world. I had thought that my negative experiences-all those years of believing that God was ignoring my pleas to be rid of the burden of being gay, the years I spent hating myself for who I was-were God’s way of helping me understand the experience of suffering; that they were preparation for pastoral work in solidarity with the marginalized and disenfranchised. I wanted to help others, and the people I knew who helped others the most were pastors. But what I didn’t fully understand then was that my desire to help others and be in a community existed apart from the theological claims Of Christianity, which had never sat as easily with me. After I was encouraged by my college professors to critically examine the underlying desires that initially propelled me into Christianity, I left the Church. I remember vividly those first college nights that followed my awareness of my atheism; how I would climb into bed after an over long study session or a hushed dormroom party, close my eyes and have to quash my instinct to pray, and how it felt like extinguishing a cigarette before it was actually finished-unnatural, premature.

Sometimes I would try to pray anyway, just to see if it still “worked," like the way I sometimes pick up the trombone to see if I can still play all these years later. But praying felt like an act, so wholly phony, so I put it in the back of the closet to collect dust. Prayer became like that unplayed trombone or a phantom limb, something I once used regularly but now am not sure was ever mine. Letting go of God was difficult. Even as I began to step up my antireligious rhetoric in college, I privately mourned God. I wanted to believe and was disappointed in my inability to do so. I missed Him and the community and ethical commitments that came along with Him. I didn’t jump into calling myself an atheist right away. I wasn’t ready to renounce God publicly-many of my social relationships had been formed through my participation in Christian communities. And I didn’t really like the word, either. Why would I call myself an atheist? It seemed to arrogantly declare, “Yes, I know definitively that God does not exist.” On the other hand, I wanted to feel the kind of assuredness that Christianity had given me, and a complete rejection of organized religion gave me that. I looked for religious demons everywhere. Suddenly Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota state senator who believed that global warming was a myth and that gay marriage was the worst thing that could happen to our society, came to represent all Christians in my mind. (I relished pointing out her bizarre beliefs in a column for my college newspaper). I sought out any opportunity to point to religion and say, “See! Look how bad it is.” When you’re looking for garbage, you’ll find it. It became easy to notice the flaws and miss the merits. In an impressive bit of internal dissonance, I simultaneously set out on a quasi-quest—a kind of spiritual seeking-but 149

I was quickly overwhelmed by the choices. There were so many religions, and each offered something equally exciting and different. I wanted it all! I wanted Jesus and Buddha and Confucius and Darwin. But I felt the victim of the medieval dictum that “every choice is a renunciation”—that choosing to follow one path meant that I had to forsake every other. After all, wasn’t that part of why I left Christianity? Because it had felt, to me, limited in its scope-a definitive statement to an unanswerable question. This short exploration was half-hearted; I had already made up my mind that I was an atheist. It was like going into the fitting room at the mall and trying on fifteen different shirts while knowing you don’t have the money to pay for any of them. I was going through the motions, but I wasn’t really making progress. Even as I tried on different identities, I began to step up my antireligious behavior, arrogantly rolling my eyes at anyone with a semblance of certainty. Christianity became my special target. I decided that after our break-up I did not want to be friends. This tension was reflected in my college religion papers. I walked the line between denouncing religion and trying to rescue it from itself, for myself. Maybe Christianity can be resurrected, I thought, if I just defend it enough. I read the writings of progressive theologians with a quiet resentment, jealous of their ability to modernize Christianity but still retain a belief in God. I was mad at myself for not being able to believe-after years of struggling to reconcile my belief in God with my queer identity (and eventually succeeding), it felt unfair to have done so in vain. Some theologians and religious practitioners tell me that dry spells happen and that perhaps I gave up on God too quickly, but years later I am surer than ever that I don’t believe in God, and struggle to

recall why I did in the first place. To be honest, the question no longer intrigues me—I’m much too interested in the complexities of being human to spend much time thinking about anything beyond that. However, in the years immediately following my departure from Christianity, that was anything but true. I was frustrated and unsettled, and I found myself once again wrestling with the tension of not fitting into a traditional paradigm. After years of denying my own instincts and questioning the validity of central aspects of who I am, my identity became structured in response to other people’s identities. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was trying to affirm the conclusions I had reached by working to persuade others to be convinced in kind. If I instilled doubt in another, my own skepticism felt more legitimate. And though my atheism wasn’t born of anger, I found myself resisting others’ religious expressions with a previously unfamiliar degree of annoyanceespecially at their most reverent. The day after the Interstate 35W Mississippi River Bridge collapsed without warning during rush hour, I stood with a group of friends near the wreckage, where we gathered for an impromptu vigil. I couldn’t believe that this massive structure—a bridge I often used to get from my apartment, which was a few blocks away from our vigil, to my job at a folk-music school just across the river was no more. Just like that, it disappeared. I was at work when it happened. I heard an unusual loud noise, looked out the window, and saw a cloud of dust. Curious, I locked up the school and wandered down the street. As I approached the bridge, the scene was unlike anything I had ever seen before police cars and fire trucks formed a blockade around both sides of the bridge, and dust clouded the air. A swarm of people were hugging and crying, and everything 150

was roped off by police tape. I ran into friends and felt relieved that they were okay. I immediately tried to call everyone I knew in the area, but because so many people were trying to use their cell phones, no one could get a call out. So we just stood there, numb and horrified, and took solace in one another’s company. Surrounded by friends a day later, I felt sadness for those who had died mixed with gratitude that the casualties had been few. But I was also annoyed-in the wake of death and destruction, I couldn’t abide the prayers I overheard. I thought that praying was futile at best, and inappropriate and disrespectful at worst. “This is bullshit,” I mumbled as I listened to a friend pray aloud. As I surveyed the empty space where there was once a bridge, I tried to pretend that I wasn’t filling the empty space that once held my belief in God with resentment. The brown waters of the Mississippi continued their journey to the Atlantic, but I was frozen in place. I didn’t believe in God anymore, but I didn’t know how to be anything but angry about it. He had disappeared, and all I felt was absence. Despite my conflicted views on religion, college was a largely positive experience. I jumped at the wealth of opportunities I had to learn and grow. In my second year at Augsburg, I spent the month of January in El Salvador-a special treat for a lifelong Minnesotan, to be sure—on a study abroad trip through Augsburg’s Center for Global Education. I was ecstatic; for months leading up to the trip, it was all I could talk about. The dozen or so students participating in the course spent the first chunk of the program in the capital city of San Salvador. We were carefully guarded by the trip chaperones. Only once did a few of us manage to escape their watchful eyes long

enough to wander the city unsupervised for a brief hour. There was something about the tropical heat and the chaotic streets that made me see things out of the corner of my eye that weren’t really there. But it became immediately clear that one thing I wasn’t imagining was the stark economic inequality in El Salvador. People with money seemed to be hiding behind walls, white halls, and armed guards, content to ignore the rampant poverty just beyond their landscaped yards. I didn’t understand how they could just pretend it wasn’t there. Though my childhood was meager by some standards, I’d never even seen economic disparity like I saw that daygarbage cans ablaze, dispensing smog and haze; children unwatched and unclothed, sitting atop self-made stacks of dirt and newspaper; trash piled so high that it obscured the barbed wire and broken glass adorning nearly every fence and wall; mansions on one hill side, cardboard shacks on the next. It rattled me, and I was actually relieved when one of the chaperones managed to reach us by phone and request that we come back to the hostel. Later that day, the group piled in the van to visit La Divina Providencia, the site where Monsignor Oscar Romero was assassinated. I was wearing shorts to compensate for the heavy Salvadoran heat. Growing up in Minnesota, shorts became a treasured commodity I only got to bust out of the furthest depths of my closet for those beautiful and brief summer months. The rest of the year was cold enough that exposed limbs were a rare sight; thick pajamas were required to make winter nights tolerable. For much of my life my legs spent very little time absorbing the light of day, and I could go for weeks without seeing the stalk of wheat and Bible verse I’d had inked on my right calf in high school.

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and I don’t care to know what matters to them. I changed the subject to our impending visit to Monsignor Romero’s assassination site. I idolized Romero. Here was a man unafraid to take a stand for what was right. With a camera, I captured every Salvadoran mural, painting, and icon emblazoned with Romero’s image. My primary impetus to study in El Salvador was my fascination with Romero and the incredible story of his life. Appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977—to the satisfaction of the corrupt Salvadoran government-Romero was initially a conservative Catholic leader largely uninterested in politics. After the assassination of a personal friend, Romero underwent a transformation and began to speak out against the grueling Salvadoran poverty, government-sanctioned assassination and torture, and other rampant injustices. He started to draw international attention to the horrors going on in El Salvador, citing his newfound allegiance to liberation theology as his incentive to speak out against El Salvador’s human rights violations. He spoke too loudly for some and was assassinated just three years after his appointment. At the time, I failed to connect the dots between Romero’s religious motivations and his brave deeds. Somehow, I managed to divorce the religious assertions of the archbishop from his actions. He would’ve done those things anyway, I justified. He was just speaking the language of his context. His actions, with or without the religious motivations behind them, are what matter here. That he was a religious man and that his actions were deeply rooted in his personal religious convictions were things I didn’t want to think about. We arrived at the site, and the chatter in the van died down. We exited the vehicle and were met by a middle-aged woman with

Sure enough, someone in the van noticed the tattoo on my leg and asked me about it. I became flushed with hot embarrassment, reddening my already sunburned face. “Oh, that? Yeah, I got that back when I was still a Christian,” I muttered. Embarrassment washed over me—there it was, I thought, another reminder of those years I’d spent as a deluded fool. “What does it mean? What’s the verse?” my friend inquired. “It’s Jesus speaking,” I said through gritted teeth. “It goes: ‘I tell you for certain that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it will remain only one grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.’” “Or something like that,” I added dismissively so as to seem disinterested. “Wow, that’s beautiful. But do you regret it, since you’re, you know, not a Christian anymore?” I exhaled loudly and complained to those seated nearby about just how stupid it was that I got the tattoo shortly before I stopped believing in God. It was as if I’d known deep down that my belief was already in its sunset—as if I was desperately clinging onto its vestige with a bold and permanent statement, as if to say: There, self, now you can’t get out of it. I added that no one under the age of twenty should be allowed to make the decision to alter his or her skin. My friends smiled tightly, mouths closed, and I realized I was offending them. I decided I didn’t care. They knew I didn't believe in God, so they shouldn't have been surprised. If I was expected to tolerate their religious proclamations, then they needed to accept my irreligious rants. Still, I trend toward peacemaking over rabble-rousing, so I started to get anxious about my comments. Fine, I thought, under the rug it goes. We just won’t talk about our differences, for the sake of “getting along.” They don’t want to hear what matters to me, 152

a loose-fitting white blouse that occasionally caught the whisper of a Salvadoran breeze. She introduced herself as Rosaline and explained that she would be giving us a tour of the site. Beginning at Romero’s living quarters, we followed behind her. Producing no sound but the crunch of gravel beneath our feet, we listened with more attention than we usually gave our professors as she shared details about the history of La Divina Providencia and Romero’s involvement. Before long, Rosaline stopped us at the front of the church and invited us inside. The cool air of the sanctuary was a welcome respite from the Salvadoran sun. Light filtered in through the large windows, and the sound of our footsteps echoed against the walls as we timidly entered the room and took seats in the pews. Slowly and solemnly, Rosaline informed us that this was the actual location of Romero’s assassination. She detailed the day of his death: how several men had pulled up outside the small church while Romero was at the pulpit; how they shot at him through the open doors and drove off; how he bled and quickly died. I looked through the open doors and wondered why Romero hadn’t shut them. He had known that his life was in danger, I thought. Why hadn’t he guarded himself a little more closely? Just weeks before he was murdered, Monsignor Romero said, ‘If God accepts the sacrifice of my life, may my death be for the freedom of my people.’ I looked up at the ceiling of the church as Rosaline spoke in a thick accent. She continued quoting Romero: “A bishop will die, but the Church of God, which is the people, will never perish. If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people.” I was breathless. After a moment of silence, our guide notified us that Romero had been mid-

Homily when he was shot. In true religious narrative form, Romero was actually preaching about how he knew that he was a marked man but that what was “right” mattered more than what was safe or comfortable. At the end of her talk, Rosaline informed us that this Homily had revolved around a verse of Scripture. She asked if she could share it with us. We nodded all at once without saying a word. “In the words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” she began, “I tell you for certain that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it will remain only one grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” I shut my eyes tight and bowed my head toward the ground so as not to feel the gazes of those who had been sitting near me in the van. No fucking way, I thought. You’ve got to be kidding me. Chance is a funny thing and it is easily mistaken for portent. A birthday check from your grandparents arrives at just the right moment, saving you from a late rent fee. You reconnect with a person you met a year before and suddenly see him or her in a new way. You pray for health and just like that like a miracle your cold is gone. But, tempting as it may be to think otherwise, I don’t believe that the universe maintains any preordained or intelligent order. My best guess is that such lucky occurrences are, well, just that. Yet as I sat in a Salvadoran church smarting with the memory of my own sardonic commentary, sentimentality washed over me. I felt such a longing to believe again—to see this moment as a Gift, as an Instruction, as Fruition. I fought this idea and my resulting emotions, biting my lip so that I wouldn’t cry. It didn’t work, so I swallowed hard and tasted blood. Turning away from the spot where Romero bled, I walked out into the sunlight and out into a

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city still suffering inequalities that Romero gave his life to redress. I don’t know why I felt I needed that episode to be intentionally orchestrated in order to cull significance from it-it was significant on its own merit. I imagine that a desire for purpose is innate for many of us. We presuppose that learning occurs within larger, cosmic narrative structures. Things matter because there is an implicit reason behind their occurrence, and it is our job to discern the organic meaning within. Constellating and creating our own sense of meaning from such moments can feel insufficient; discovering some preordained answer seems more compelling. In that moment I wanted to be handed a fate, not fashion my own. But soon enough it was as if none of what had happened in Romero’s church had ever transpired. Instead of honestly grappling with and responding to the immensity of that moment, I tossed it aside. I was mortified with myself for having looked for a sign of God, and the coincidence was relegated to the camp of charming curiosity. Religion-and my post religious search for values and meaningremained as dead to me as Oscar Romero, entombed in stone and unreachable. With my El Salvador trip finished, I set to finishing my degree. Augsburg’s philosophy is that education does not just take place in the classroom, and students are required to participate in off-campus community service work in their first semester. I volunteered with an organization called the Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College, a satellite of the national Campus Kitchen Project. CKAC recovered unused food from the campus cafeteria and distributed it to hunger-relief agencies in the area. I became enamored with the work of CKAC in my first semester at Augsburg and looked for opportunities to move into leadership; when a slot opened up on the

Leadership Team, I was thrilled to be invited. I requested the chance to lead the volunteer shift I’d been trained on, a weekly visit to deliver food to the Brian Coyle Community Center. Just blocks from school, BCCC served the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, the most densely populated area of Minnesota, with nearly two thousand apartment units in a two-block area. Cedar-Riverside is home to Riverside Plaza, immortalized as the building in the opening sequence of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Designed to be a utopian complex accommodating people from the highest of incomes to the lowest, today it primarily consists of subsidized housing. Numerous students at my school (who mostly refused to leave campus in anything but a car with locked doors for fear of being “shanked”) not-so-lovingly referred to Riverside Plaza as “The Crack Stacks” and “The Slum in the Sky”. (Those same individuals, most of whom had cars on campus, would go a few extra miles to avoid the closest Target, which they dubbed “Targhetto”). I was embarrassed by how many of my classmates wrote off an entire group of people. Yes, there was significantly more violent crime in that area than in other parts of Minneapolis, and it was important to be careful there. Crime is a reality in Cedar Riverside, and that isn’t changing: a year after I graduated and stopped volunteering there, an Augsburg student volunteer was shot and killed leaving BCCC. Still, I rarely felt uncomfortable walking or biking through Cedar-Riverside. There were times when I felt slightly unsafe and quickened my pace, but those times were few. The reason I was never the victim of such violence may have been pure and random luck, but I also believe that the fears many had about the neighborhood were overblown-if they had gotten to know more

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of the community’s residents, they might’ve thought differently, This idea that relationality has a transformative impact was one reason I so enjoyed working at BCCC. I wasn’t just interested in dropping off some food once a week and patting myself on the back for doing my part. I wanted relationships with the people who frequented BCCC, to invite them to share their stories and to share my own. It was less about my coming in to do something “nice” and more about mutually enriching relationships between those serving and those being served. Service work should never be a one-way streetotherwise it’s tempting to imagine yourself as a hero and those you are assisting as in need of saving. These were people who were just like me but who had experienced a different set of life circumstances. Knowing that, I hoped to establish relationships of mutual care and concern with people that so many of my classmates seemed to ignore. Sure enough, I started to become an active member of the BCCC community. I dropped by to say hi when I was in the area, attended neighborhood meetings, and stayed late after some volunteer shifts to spend more time talking. I became well acquainted with the lives of those I served and began to better understand, in particular, the challenges faced by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, who were the majority in Cedar-Riverside. When a young girl with big brown eyes and a striking red head scarf vividly described her first encounter with snow, I felt like I was experiencing Minnesota winter for the first time. When a mother with one child in her arm and two running around her feet thanked me for helping her son with his math homework, I admitted that he actually knew more about the subject than I did. When I missed a week due to a bad cold, everyone grinned at my return and told me how much they had missed and worried about me. We became

invested in one another’s lives, and we taught one another how to be together. They even tried to coach me on some rudimentary Somali but always playfully chided me for not sounding forceful enough. “You sound too Minnesotan!” they’d say with a chuckle. (And they were right.) But when it came to matters of religious life, I disengaged. I knew I should not bring pork to BCCC, and I knew why. But I avoided discussing it because it had to do with religion. Some of my antireligious friends would make jokes about me bringing pepperoni pizza on my shift, and I would crack a weak smile and change the subject. Now here was a new tension. It was one thing to mock my own religious past, because it was mine, but the jokes about the religious beliefs of the people I served at BCCC started to make me uncomfortable. These were people I cared about, and their beliefs mattered deeply to them. One day, I stayed a bit later than usual, caught up in conversation with a group of BCCC regulars. Gradually all but one trickled away, leaving me alone with a young woman I had spoken to a handful of times. She was petite but her presence filled the room she spoke rapidly and precisely. A few plates of food scraps sat on the table in front of us as we quizzed one another on the details of our lives. After some talk of how terribly the Minnesota Timberwolves had been playing that year and which local politicians we were voting for, she paused and looked down at the nearly empty plate in front of her and took a deep breath. “You know, some days I’m really afraid to go out in public because of how I dress. I just get tired of dealing with the stares and jeers my hijab elicits,” she said, barely audible. We were both silent. I heard a shout from down the hall that signaled that the

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gymnasium was closing and all basketballs should be returned to the equipment closet. “It’s not exactly the same thing, but I think I can empathize a little,” I said before I could stop myself. She looked up. Her face showed that she was curious about how I, a white guy who looked like every other young Minnesota hipster who used the Greenway (a bicycle freeway) to get around, might relate. “Sometimes I get really nervous about the looks I get when I’m holding another man’s hand in public.” I wasn't sure how she would respond to this new information. I wasn’t really out to anyone at BCCC – I assumed that, because many of them were religious, it would be an issue. She smiled, and I realized I hadn’t taken a breath in the last minute. “When I’m afraid of how others might receive me,” she said, leaning in, her elbows sliding across the table, “it is my belief in Allah that gives me strength.” She wasn’t proselytizing; she was sharing her beliefs. She hadn’t asked for clarification about what I had said, hadn’t condemned me; she hadn’t even blinked. “May I ask you: what gives you strength when you get such looks, or when someone says something disparaging about you because of who you are?” She looked me in the face, her eyes warm and inviting. I froze. I looked down at her elbows and noticed that they were fixed in place. “Um, do you know when this place shuts down for the night?” I asked, shifting my head to the left, unable to look her in the eye. If I were being honest, I would’ve said, “I’m shutting down this conversation for the night.” Her religious beliefs were integral to her identity, and she had opened a door for us to discuss the things that mattered to us both with candor and honesty. Yet I couldn’t even bring myself to speak up when some of

my friends mocked the religious convictions of Muslims I worked with at BCCC – so how could I discuss religion with her? I was afraid to open up to her—the gulf I imagined between the experiences of a gay atheist and Muslim woman seemed too vast. I decided our values and identities were irrelevant to the work I was there to do and slammed shut the door that she had opened. Rising abruptly, I picked up the plates from the table and grabbed my bike helmet with a fumble, inventing some story about a big paper that was due the next day. I realize now that I was just as guilty of diminishing many of Cedar-Riverside’s residents as my “Targhetto” – fearing peers or those making crass jokes about pepperoni pizza were. My “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to working with Minneapolis’s Muslim community was inhibiting; my refusal to engage the religious identities of my BCCC colleagues closed me off from countless opportunities to build bridges of understanding and respect with a community I honestly knew very little about, aside from my academic study of Islam. I was in a position to learn from a community that (especially post-9/11) many people – myself included – viewed with fear and suspicion, but I declined. By refusing to open up to them about my own beliefs and experiences, I also denied them the opportunity to learn about me—to really know me and understand the challenges that I faced. When I refused to engage the full person with those at BCCC, I wasn’t living up to my aspiration of empowering individuals and seeing them as deserving of dignity and respect. As a religion major, I was also doing myself, and the subjects I studied at Augsburg, an intellectual injustice by not taking religious identities seriously. And as a friend to the people I worked with at BCCC, I was quarantining myself from the meaty conversations of mutuality.

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Years later, I had the opportunity to work with members of the Muslim community in Chicago. At first blush, it once again seemed we had little in common. At one of my first community meetings, I was approached by a young woman who asked why I was there. I told her that I was an atheist looking to learn more about the Muslim community. Her eyes flicked to my right, as if to check with someone if it was all right for me to be there. But her hesitation didn’t last long; within minutes, we were gushing over our mutual love for a new Brother Ali song, “Tightrope.” In it, Brother Ali—a Muslim rapper from Minnesota-tells the stories of a young Muslim woman who faces discrimination for wearing a headscarf and a closeted gay teenager who is the son of an anti-gay Christian minister. We bonded over how we both felt that the song represented struggles we ourselves had experienced and the parallels between them. By the end of the conversation, she and I had uncovered a lot of common ground between our seemingly disparate identities. After that conversation, I reflected on how different it was from those I’d had when working with the Somali community in Minneapolis, and how important it was to build that kind of understanding. But back in Minneapolis, I couldn’t see that. I was happier to pretend that practiced religion was at best irrelevant or stupid and at worst destructive, and that there was little or nothing to be gained by talking about our different beliefs and experiences. I pedaled away from BCCC a little faster than usual that night, telling myself that my hurry was because the sun was setting and I felt unsafe. That I would feel unsafe at night was, of course, a case of massive self-deception, as I’d actually become a frequent creature of the night – and, on some evenings, a night terror. As college came to an end, more and

more nights were carousing, careening affairs. On one such night, I stormed off into the dark as a friend’s laughter echoed behind me, goading me on. We had spent the evening slamming whiskey and ranting about religion. After several hours of drinking straight from a plastic bottle, I was belligerent. I stumbled through the dark, headed nowhere in particular, moving forward without direction, my friend following close behind. Eventually, I encountered a church sign. It was small and humble-a wooden frame with chipped red paint housing a glass case. On the other side of the glass, misshapen black letters were unevenly arranged to spell the church’s name and that week’s sermon title, which championed forgiveness or grace or something equally uplifting. Several letters were missing, and the glass plate was clouded with age. Without a second’s thought, I kicked it in. Staring down at the broken glass splayed before my feet, I saw fragments of my face staring back at me. I didn’t recognize my reflection. I had once been kind and quiet, goofy and gentle—now, my face was splintered, creased with anger and self-righteousness. I heard my friend laugh, louder and harder and louder and harder until it filled my ears and drowned out everything else. I found a doorway and hurled my body into it, huddling against the ground, weeping and slamming my fist into the concrete. I think he thought I was vomiting. The next day, as I nursed my hangover, we joked about it. “Maybe a synagogue next time?” he said. I forced a meager laugh and took a sip of a green sports drink. It didn’t cure my hangover, but it was cool and soothing-a momentary relief from the gnawing awareness of my thoughtlessness. 157

Years later I spent an afternoon wandering through that neighborhood in search of the church I’d defaced. It was a hot day, and by the time I finally found it I was drenched. I stood before the sign, wiping the sweat from my face with my t-shirt. There was a new pane of glass in place, clear as a Minnesota lake, and a new sermon title as well: “If you can’t go home, come here.” I walked over to the doorway and sat down in the shade, running a hand along the ground I once punched. I knew this church wasn’t my home, but I no longer wanted to destroy it.

computer monitors shielding me from direct contact with religion as a living, breathing organism. From the ivory tower of my academic library it became easy to disconnect myself from the corporeal body of religion and understand it as merely a problematic concept. I was beginning to fill the void left by Christianity with my own beliefs: I had accepted that I didn’t believe in God and even found inspiration in the thought that, if there was no afterlife, then the here-and-now ought to be appreciated and lived to the fullest. But hating religion and the religious wasn’t making me happy. It felt just as wrong as being religious had. But when all you know and all you see in the world is dichotomy, there’s no way to be anything other than religious or antireligious. Years later, I am grateful that this period of internal conflict happened while I was at Augsburg, which works hard to create a safe environment for students to ask tough questions and engage in meaningful work. In many ways, Augsburg helped me reign in my rage and frustration; it served to contain me. Had I been somewhere else, I might have spiraled out of control and been entirely consumed by my negative thoughts and unfocused antitheism. The small, caring environment of peers and professors at Augsburg helped me channel my anger into my academic pursuits and social opportunities, so that even as my personal life became little more than a series of unhealthy behaviors, I was ultimately protected from destroying myself. Despite all of this, I entered my last semester of college with a grade point average that qualified me for summa cum laude honors. To achieve summa honors at Augsburg, you not only have to meet the GPA minimum but must also write and defend an essay explaining why you deserve special recognition. For my defense panel I selected an English professor I’d worked

Though Augsburg encouraged learning outside the classroom through community service, it wouldn’t have been a degree program without classes. As I advanced in my studies, I found myself increasingly conflicted about my approach to religion. I wrestled with Christian doctrine— from Jesus as the Son of God instead of just an allegorical prophet, to the very existence of an anthropomorphic God as a human invention – in my undergraduate thesis, trying to merge it with the Buddhist notion of upaya (or “skillful means”) and cast Jesus as a bodhisattva, but such attempts were half-hearted. I read selections of it to a Buddhist friend, who gave me a sympathetic look and said that I was at my best when I acted as an unwilling repairman for Christianity. But I didn’t really want to fix Christianity – I wanted it to be broken, like it had broken me. If Christianity was unfixable then there was a reason for my suffering. And maybe, if Christianity was so inherently problematic that its theology couldn’t be resolved, there was still hope for me to be redeemed. I might be able to best it yet. Though I was at a Christian school, I studied religion as a sociological phenomenon, with a wall of books and 158

with on a research paper about Flannery O’Connor and religion, my sociology of religion professor, and my religion major advisor. But perhaps I should have warned them; I was so caustic, bitter, and resentful about my impending religion degree that I titled the essay “Kissing Ass and Taking Names” and in it disparaged a good deal of my coursework and professors. Was I trying to hurt them? Was this my idea of retribution? Because, surely, the entire edifice of Augsburg was to blame for my situation. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have this damn degree in religion. My essay was a smack in the face, and I deserved to be reprimanded. But my professors’ compassion and forgiveness eclipsed my childish, spiteful writing. Either they were able to recall moments when I’d been more professional – and more creative – or they understood me better than I did. They knew I was capable of more than a witty title to cover for a brute display of bitterness. They knew I’d come around; they granted me summa cum laude and sent me on my way. I decided not to walk at graduation, opting to spend that weekend partying instead. Where was my pride at what I had accomplished? I had paid for this degree all by myself – juggling multiple jobs, earning academic scholarships, and taking out too many student loans. But instead of celebrating my achievement, I wanted to pretend as if it had never happened. I was insufferable—at that year’s Christmas dinner, my father’s mother invited me to say grace in celebration of my new bachelor’s degree. Instead of offering a humble and grateful reflection, I gave a lecture on the exclusivism of Christmas and how the Sikh notion of the langar, or community meal, was a much better model for the kind of gathering we were having. Shortly after graduating, I got my first tattoo since getting the stalk of wheat in high

school. My choice this time was a bit strange, but let me explain. The capybara has always fascinated me—it is a rodent the size of a boar that spends half its life in aquatic conditions. When I watched a television program that claimed that the Catholic Church classifies the capybara as a fish, I knew I had to get it as a tattoo. According to the program, a pope declared the capybara to be a fish after some puzzled missionaries wrote to him inquiring how to classify the creature. The Church, the show concluded, cannot re-classify the capybara as a rodent today due to the doctrine of the infallibility of the pope. After that, I decided that the capybara was a perfect symbol of the absurdity of religious certainty, and I relished the idea that many Catholics in South America actually ate capybara on Fridays during Lent as if it were a fish! (Later in life I decided to research the veracity of this story but had a difficult time locating its origin.) See how blindly people follow religious rules? I thought with a smarmy grin as I sat, sweating while a bearded tattoo artist labored over me. Without even a second thought or a pause to question why they do as they are told. Fools. I, on the other hand, was so smart because I continued to question everything around me. Some good it was doing me. At twenty years old, with a religion degree and experience as a newspaper intern, I felt unemployable and unbalanced. Exhausted from having raced my way through college and constantly working to justify my degree against my own claims of the idiocy of religion, I packed up my things and fled the city for Minnesota’s great white north. It was there, during a bitter winter in the isolated deep woods, that I was humbled into understanding how my conflicted enmity toward religion was poisoning my own well.

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Nadia Bolz-Weber Nadia Bolz-Weber is an author, ordained Lutheran minister and public theologian. She served as the founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Denver, Colorado, until 2018. She writes and speaks about personal failures, recovery, grace, and faith. Nadia is a three-time New York Times bestselling author for her first book Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, Accidental Saints; Finding God in All the Wrong People, and SHAMELESS; A Sexual Reformation.

Questions for Thought and Discussion 1. Discuss the role of anger and rage in Bolz-Weber’s narrative. At whom or what is she angry? Why? What does she do with that anger? 2. What are some of the important relationships in Bolz-Weber’s story that has a significant impact effect on her? 3. How does Bolz-Weber describe her learning, and her unlearning? How does it happen for her? 4. How do the five bullet points of what Pastor Ross taught her, a good basic list of Lutheran theological themes, inform what we do at Wartburg College, a college of the ELCA?

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THANKS, ELCA! From Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard... And about five o'clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us." —Matthew 20:1, 6-7a On the first date with my husband, I asked if he was a unicorn. It felt like an honest question. By the time I met Matthew, it had been a decade since I’d left the church of my youth, during which time I became increasingly aware of injustice and poverty and the basic horrors of society, which I felt could only be ignored by the most heartless of people. I had never heard anything about caring for the poor in the church of my childhood. We were more of a “just over in the glory land” kind of crowd who set our sights on heaven above. I thought I had moved as far from the fundamentalism of my childhood as possible. But at the time I didn’t know that it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parents’ church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. It had containers into which every person and idea and event was to be placed. These were sometimes labeled “saved” and “not saved” (those who will join us in the glory land and those who will not) or perhaps “us” and “not us" (same thing) or simply just “good” and “bad” (again, same thing). As a teenager, I began to question the Great Christian Sorting System. My gay friends in high school were kind and funny and loved me, so I suspected that my church had placed them in the wrong category. And dancing, it turns out, was fun. Swimming in the same pool with boys was normal (and fun), and in the end, people who weren’t

Christians, to me, just felt easier to be around. Injustices in the world needed to be addressed and not ignored. Christians weren’t good; people who fought for peace and justice were good. I had been lied to, and in my anger at being lied to about the containers, I left the church. But it turns out, I hadn’t actually escaped the sorting system. I had just changed the labels. I began to realize this when, in January 1995, I met Matthew, a tall, really cute Lutheran seminary student. We met playing a game of pickup volleyball. (Volleyball courts, after all, are the sacred breeding grounds of tall people.) I had been sober for four years and was still hanging out with God’s aunt at the time I went out with Matthew. I was also in therapy with a middle-aged therapist who wore flowing clothes and sang in some sort of choir. She was smart and seemed to be genuinely optimistic about me in a way that made me question her judgment while also being desperately grateful to her. I nervously mentioned one day in the spring of 1995 that I had met a really cute guy, but that he was... um... nice. This obviously was a problem (a previous boyfriend had spent six years in San Quentin for armed robbery), so “nice” had never been a compelling characteristic to me. “Why don't you just try it?” she offered. Best seventy-five dollars I ever spent, that hour of therapy. On our first date, Matthew and I sat across the booth from each other at el Taco de Mexico, one of the only places in Denver 161

hadn’t come to me as a result of hopefulness and positive thinking. It was grace. Unitarians just don’t talk much about our need for God’s grace. They have a higher opinion of human beings than I have ever felt comfortable claiming, as someone who both reads the paper and knows the condition of my own heart. Having had the experience of getting sober and feeling like God interrupted my bullshit life, I couldn’t be comforted by my own divinity or awesomeness, although I’d love it if I could. In the end, as much as I desperately wanted to be Unitarian, I couldn’t, because what I needed was a specific divine source of reconciliation and wholeness, a source that is connected to me in love, but does not come from inside of me. One morning, I sat in our tiny apartment kitchen lamenting over a bowl of oatmeal how un-Unitarian I was, when Matthew said, “Just come with me to St. Paul’s on Sunday. It doesn’t suck, I promise. Plus, you’ll love Pastor Ross; he’s gay.” I relented, but only because the pastor was gay, and I hoped that meant some flamboyance and dramatics. As Matthew drove us the following Sunday to St. Paul Lutheran Church in Oakland, I asked him a slew of slightly anxious questions like, “Can I sit on the aisle in case I need to escape?” By the time we arrived I had calmed down and actually convinced myself that it was going to be just like Culture Club meets the 700 Club. But it was just a church. And yet it wasn’t at all just a church. There were no dramatics or drag. Just a whole lot of people who didn’t seem to really match each other: gay, straight, kids, elderly folks in wheelchairs, white, black. The building was old and respectable, with red carpeting and dark wood. I sat on the end of an old pew and took in the beautiful stained glass. I had never experienced liturgy before. But here the congregation said things

where you can get brain tostadas and tongue tacos. Over two plates of less adventurous chile relleno burritos, Matthew asked me about my interests. We spoke of social issues: racism, homelessness, and women’s rights, and we saw eye to eye on everything. Then he said, “Well, my heart for social justice is rooted in my Christian faith.” Um, what? I just stared at him, saying nothing. He went on to tell me that he was a Lutheran seminary student at Iliff School of Theology, and that he was in the peace and social justice-focused master of divinity program; he was in school to be a Lutheran pastor. Oh, yeah, and he was from Texas. Like I said, Matthew was a unicorn; a mythical combination of creatures that doesn’t exist in reality. But I soon learned that there was actually a whole world of Christians who take Matthew 25 seriously, who believe that when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for the sick, we do so to Jesus’ own self. They weren’t magical fantasy creatures; they were just a kind of Christian I had never heard of. I thought that was interesting and quaint, but still, not for me. My own internal sorting system wouldn’t allow for it; if I started to put some Christians in the “good” container where would it end? Still, the date with the Lutheran unicorn went well enough that six months later we were living together in Oakland, where we had moved so Matthew could finish his Lutheran seminary training. While in California, I spent several months trying like hell to be a Unitarian. Quakerism didn’t work for me, Wicca was great, but I always felt like I was just visiting. So I hoped Unitarianism would be just right. Unitarians are such smart, good people. They seem so hopeful. They vote Democrat and recycle and love women and they let you believe anything you want to, and I wanted to be one of them badly. But I couldn’t pull it off. Four years of sobriety 162

together during the service. And they did stuff: stood, sat, knelt, crossed themselves, went up to the altar for communion, like choreographed sacredness. In the car on the way home I asked Matthew, “So if I go back, and I’m not saying I will, but if I do, will they do those same things and say those same things again next week?” He grinned. “Yes, Nadia. That’s what we call ‘liturgy.’ People have been doing those things and saying those things for a couple millennia, and I’m pretty sure... next week, too.” It was in those first couple months that I fell in love with liturgy, the ancient pattern of worship shared mainly in the Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, and Episcopal churches. It felt like a gift that had been care taken by generations of the faithful and handed to us to live out and caretake and hand off. Like a stream that has flowed long before us and will continue long after us. A stream that we get to swim in, so that we, like those who came before us, can be immersed in language of truth and promise and grace. Something about the liturgy was simultaneously destabilizing and centering; my individualism subverted by being joined to other people through God to find who I was. Somehow it happened through God. One specific, divine force. I didn’t really know the hymns though. And several of them just seemed unfortunate. Four months later, on the Sunday Matthew and I announced our engagement, I stood during the closing hymn with everyone else even though I wasn’t singing. As the crucifer (the person in the procession and recession who holds the crucifix) passed me, I saw behind him Pastor Ross, who started to grin. As he approached me, he quickly leaned over, bright eyed, and whispered, “Now, Nadia, pastor’s wives are expected to sing all the verses of the hymn.” He winked and kept walking.

One Sunday, Pastor Ross announced that he would be teaching an adult confirmation class, since it ends up that there were a lot of people like me who loved St. Paul’s and didn’t know a single thing about Lutheranism. He said that there would be information available in the narthex. I leaned over to Matthew and whispered, “The Narthex? Isn’t that a Dr. Seuss character that speaks for the trees?” “It's a lobby,” he smirked. “And just the fact that you just said that makes me think maybe you should go to the class.” It was disorienting to soon find myself voluntarily spending my Wednesday nights in the basement of a church that was filled with churchgoers and not recovering alcoholics. The first day of class, “grace” was written on the chalkboard in the classroom. Pastor Ross is old school; no dry erase for him. To this day, the man types all his sermons on a typewriter. He has no computer. When I came to St. Paul’s because I liked the idea that their pastor was gay, I had no idea he would end up being so old-fashioned. He pointed to the word “grace” on the board. “Everything I’m going to tell you goes back to this,’ he claimed. I simultaneously doubted and hoped that was true. Most of what I had been taught by Christian clergy was that I was created by God, but was bad because of something some chick did in the Garden of Eden, and that I should try really hard to be good so that God, who is an angry bastard, won't punish me. Grace had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t learned about grace from the church. But I did learn about it from sober drunks who managed to stop drinking by giving their will over to the care of God and who then tried like hell to live a life according to spiritual principles. What the drunks taught me was that there was a power greater than myself who could be a source of

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restoration, and that higher power, it ends up, is not me. A lot had happened to me in church basements. I’d had my first kiss, had been taught to fear an angry God, learned to trust a higher power, and now had my life changed again. In short, here’s what Pastor Ross taught me: 



 



I need to clarify something, however. God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word. My selfishness is not the end-all... instead, it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn’t about God creating humans as flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace—like saying “Oh, it’s OK, I’ll be a good guy and forgive you.” It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.” So, soon after having been bitten by the Lutheran vampire, my Lutheran unicorn fiancé and I invited another couple from his seminary over for dinner and were talking about how I was loving St. Paul’s and Pastor Ross and learning about Lutheran theology from such a great guy. I served them up another helping of cheese enchiladas and we laughed about Ross’s inability to use email. “What does his partner, Bob, do?” I asked. In unison, all three replied, “Schoolteacher!” and laughed. It’s a wellknown stereotype that pastor’s wives are always schoolteachers. “He’s such a traditional, orthodox Lutheran pastor,” AmyJo offered, “which is why it was such bullshit what happened to him.” They informed me that two years earlier, Ross had been brought up on charges and endured an ecclesial trial, the result of which was his being removed from the official clergy roster of the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (although his congregation chose to ignore this and continued to employ him as their

God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time. The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.

(Write out these bullet points, memorize them, and you could save a lot of money not going to Lutheran seminary.) I have been a Lutheran since then because the Lutheran church is the only place that has given me language for what I have experienced to be true in my life, which is why I now call Pastor Ross Merkle the Vampire Who Turned Me. 164

pastor). Ross had not embezzled money or had an affair with his secretary. Ross’s infraction was that he was in a lifelong, committed, monogamous partnership with Bob the schoolteacher. At the time, the official policy of the ELCA stated that ordained clergy were expected to be celibate in their singleness or faithful in their marriage. Ross and Bob could not be legally married, therefore Ross was in violation. “Are you serious?” I asked. I looked at them all, waiting for a defense that would matter. “I thought I had left that kind of crap behind with altar calls and misogyny.” For the rest of the night I fumed like a betrayed eighth grader. The confirmation classes I had taken, Ross Merkle’s gracious acceptance of me, and my hearing the Gospel and receiving the Eucharist at St. Paul’s all felt like God again came down, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Pay attention, this is for you.” It felt like the kingdom of heaven, and I had fallen in love with the whole Lutheran thing. But now suddenly it felt like those five minutes of a movie where the couple is gloriously ignorant of each other’s shortcomings and are vapidly skipping hand-in-hand through a field of wildflowers. You know as the viewer that as soon as the montage ends, some kind of awful is going to happen. The Lutheran church was so different from the conservative Christianity of my youth and I was happy, and then the damned montage ended and I had to put the Lutherans in the same category as the Church of Christ. The one labeled “bad.” “It feels like the rug of the hope that the church might actually be something beautiful and redemptive was pulled out from under me,” I told Pastor Ross during a meeting in his office. I expected some kind of shared outrage from him. But in his humble wisdom, Pastor Ross suggested to me that God is still at work redeeming us and making all things new even in the midst

of broken people and broken systems and that, despite any idealism otherwise, it had always been that way. He believed so much in the grace that the Lutheran church taught that he refused to let the failings of that same church sell their own teachings short. I found that inspiring and impossible, so I didn’t reject the ELCA. But I was still angry. “There’s not enough wrong with it to leave and there’s just enough wrong with it to stay,” Matthew later told me. “Fight to change it.” Thirteen years later, after I had married Matthew, had two children, gone to college, gone to seminary, gotten ordained, and started a church, House for All Sinners and Saints, I sat on my bed and watched a video stream of the 2009 church-wide assembly of the ELCA (the denomination’s legislative body) as they prayerfully voted to change their policy around sexual orientation. Congregations who chose to could now call as their pastor a clergyperson in a lifelong, committed, same-sex relationship. I immediately called my parishioner Stuart who had become a leader at church soon after arriving with his boyfriend, Jim. “Thanks, ELCA!” He yelled in his most drag-queeny voice, and I cracked up. Thanks, ELCA! was an inside joke at our church. House for All Sinners and Saints had quickly become well known in the Lutheran world, both by those who loved us and those who hated us. Those who loved us were inspired by our liturgical creativity and freedom, and those who hated us were offended by my gender (thus the term “pastrix") and by our love of the gays. And both groups liked to blog about it all. I had recently shared with my parishioners one such blog post in which someone had written: “I can’t believe the ELCA would waste money on this ‘church.’ Their openness to homosexuality shows that

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House for All Sinners and Saints has obviously thrown the Bible out the window.” “We should totally stage a photo of HFASS with money raining down and a big sign that says ‘Thanks, ELCA!’ I had said in response to the blog post. Stuart, who was not named the House for All Sinners and Saints’ Minister of Fabulousness for nothing, went a gay step further. “No,” he insisted. “Everyone should be dancing and holding flutes of champagne while Pastor Nadia throws a Bible out the window and money rains down from the ceiling as a buff male dancer in a gold lamé Speedo holds a sign that says, ‘Thanks, ELCA!’” And another inside joke was born. Many of the folks at House for All had been hurt by the church in one way or another. Several, like Stuart himself, had been victims of so-called ex-gay reparative therapy at the hands of Christians, some had been told they were not up to snuff in the eyes of God, and, needless to say, the vast majority of the folks at House for All were not regularly attending a church when they joined us. In other words, they were just like me in the spring of 1996 when I first walked into St. Paul’s in Oakland. It was important to me that the House for All Sinners and Saints be a place where no one had to check at the door their personalities or the parts of our stories that seemed “unchristian.” I wanted a place where something other than how we responded to rules was at the center of our life together. Yet, in the end, despite how much I love HFASS, I am still not an idealist, not when it comes to our human projects. Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well intentioned or inclusive. But I am totally idealistic about God’s redeeming work in my life and in the world. As a matter of fact, at our quarterly “Welcome to HFASS” events, we ask the question, What drew you to HFASS? They

love the singing, people often say, and the community, and the lack of praise bands, and the fact that they feel like they can comfortably be themselves. They love that we laugh a lot and have drag queens and that it’s a place where difficult truths can be spoken and everyone is welcome, and where we pray for each other. I am always the last to speak at these events. I tell them that I love hearing all of that and that I, too, love being in a spiritual community where I don’t have to add to or take away from my own story to be accepted. But I have learned something by belonging to two polar-opposite communities, Albion Babylon and the Church of Christ—and I wanted them to hear me: This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens. If they choose to leave when we don’t meet their expectations, they won’t get to see how the grace of God can come in and fill the holes left by our community’s failure, and that’s just too beautiful and too real to miss. Welcome to House for All Sinners and Saints. We will disappoint you. A few months after the ELCA policy change, an email from the Lutheran bishop in Northern California arrived in my inbox. Pastor Nadia, We are currently planning a festival Eucharist and rite of recognition here in San Francisco for six GLBTQ [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer) clergy to be officially brought onto the ELCA clergy roster. At that time, Pastor Ross Merkle of St. Paul Lutheran will be reinstated onto the clergy roster. They have 166

asked that you be the preacher for the event. Would you preach for us? My reply: “All day long.” But then they sent me the text from which I was to preach, and my heart sank. It was a Kingdom of God parable from Matthew’s Gospel. The Kingdom of God is a tricky concept, and I was always taught it referred to our heavenly reward for being good, which, now that I actually read the Bible for myself, makes very little sense. Others say that the Kingdom of God is another way of talking about the church, and still others say that it’s the dream God has for the wholeness of the world, a dream being made true little by little among us right here, right now. My answer? All of the above. What happens in the Kingdom of God parable I was given is that a landowner goes out and hires laborers in the morning and agrees to pay them the daily wage. But then every few hours he goes and finds more workers and brings them in. In the afternoon he goes again to the marketplace and sees folks standing around and is like, “Why aren’t you working?” and they say, “because no one would hire us,” and he sends them into his vineyard to work the last two hours of the day. When the work is done, he pays everyone the same thing, which pisses off the upstanding early risers who worked all day in the scorching heat because he has made the slept-till-noon new hires equal to them. The land owner is like, “Seriously? You’re angry because I am generous?” and then the final line of the parable is, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” This is exactly, when it comes down to it, why most people do not believe in grace. It is fucking offensive. But the job of a preacher is to find some kind of good news for people. And that good news really should be about who God is and how God works and what God has done and

what God will do. (What passes for preaching in many cases is more here’s the problem, and here’s what you can do about it, which I myself have never once heard as being “good news.”) So here’s why my heart sank when I received the text for the Eucharist: I worried that it might have been chosen in the hope that I would preach a different kind of good news, namely a sermon that said, “All those who are pissed that God is generous to LGBTQ folks can suck it. We’ve been last, but now we get to be first! [fist pump]” Yet that’s the problem with the whole concept of grace that the Lutherans themselves taught me. It can both sting and comfort. My own fundamentalist wiring will always lead me to want two sets of labeled containers in this case, Bad: the conservative people who hate the gays and Good: the liberal people who love the gays. I might always put people and things in those containers, but the problem comes when I start believing that God uses the same sorting system. Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, “Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn. I want the kingdom of God, and myself, and the ELCA, to be more impressive, more... spiritual. To look like I think it should. But I have learned that like this parable the kingdom of God is more like a workplace-filled with type A personalities, whose sense of entitlement would rival Paris Hilton’s, alongside slackers, who take too many smoke breaks and spend their money on scratch tickets. But here’s one of the things that sealed the deal for me with Lutheranism and set the tone for the kind of pastor I would try to be: What makes this the kingdom of God is not 167

the quality of the people in it. What makes Lutherans blessed is not, as I once thought, that they’re somehow different from the people in the Church of Christ where I was raised. Rather, what makes us all blessed is that, like the landowner in the parable, God comes and gets us, taps us on the shoulder, and says “Pay attention, this is for you.” Dumb as we are, smart and faithful as we are, just as we are. Which is just what I preached that day. As I stood in the imposing pulpit of St. Mark’s Lutheran church in San Francisco, I looked out into the faces of those who had been unfairly denied entrance into the leadership of the church. I looked out into the faces of Stuart and Jim, who had come from Denver to witness the celebration (and who, moments earlier, when standing outside with over a hundred clergy ready to process in full vestments, had looked at me and laughed, saying, “This looks like such a big deal, and you’re the preacher?”). I looked at sweet Ross Merkle who winked at me. I swallowed and began to preach. I said that the text for the day is not the parable of the workers. It’s the parable of the landowner. What makes this the kingdom of

God is not the worthiness or piety or social justicey-ness or the hard work of the laborers... none of that matters. It’s the fact that the trampy landowner couldn’t manage to keep out of the market place. He goes back and back and back, interrupting lives... coming to get his people. Grace tapping us on the shoulder. And so, I reminded those seven pastors specifically, including the man who introduced me to grace, that the kingdom of God was just like that exact moment in which sinners/saints are reconciled to God and to one another. The kingdom of God is like that very moment when God was making all things new. In the end, their calling, and their value in the kingdom of God comes not from the approval of a denomination or of the other workers, but in their having been come-and-gotten by God. It is the pure and unfathomable mercy of God that defines them and that says, “Pay attention, this is for you.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS pp.23-28: As appeared in Campus Compact Reader Winter 2003. This article was adapted from a talk by the authors at the conference of the American Political Assocaiation, August 2002, Boston, MA. Copyright 2003 by Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne. Reprinted with permission by the authors. The Campus Compact Reader is available online at www.compact.org/leader.

pp. 89-95: from The American Scholar, Volume 67, No. 4, Autumn 1998. Copyright, 1998 by William Cronon. pp. 97-100: from A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University by A. Bartlett Giamatti. Copyright © 1988, 1987, 1986, 1985, 1984, 1983, 1982, 1981, 1980, 1979, 1976 by A. Bartlett Giamatti. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

pp. 29-30: from TIME Magazine, published April 2020. Printed with permission.

pp. 107–112: from The Best Things in Life by Peter Kreeft. Copyright © 1984 by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA. Used by permission of the publisher via the Copyright Clearance Center.

pp.31-35 from Emergence Magazine, published March 2020. Printed with permission. pp.37-43 from a talk given at TEDGlobal 2009. Video and transcript available at ted.com. Printed with permission.

pp. 113-117: from Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. Copyright © 1970, 1993 by Paulo Freire. Reprinted by permission of The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc.

pp.43-45 from Leadership Can be Taught. Copyright © 2005 by Harvard Business Review Press. Boston, MA. Printed with permission.

pp. 125-131: from Who Needs a Lutheran College? by Thomas Christensen. Copyright © 2011 by Lutheran University Press. Minneapolis, MN. Printed with permission.

pp.47-56 from On Becoming a Leader. Copyright © 2009 by Ingram Publisher Services. New York, USA. Printed with permission.

pp. 133-146: from Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, The Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. Copyright © 2010 by Beacon Press. Boston, MA. Printed with permission.

pp.57-70 Brene Brown from Dare To Lead.. Copyright © 2018 by Ebury Publishing. London, UK.. Printed with permission. pp. 71-76: from Strength to Love by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Copyright © 1963 by Martin Luther King, Jr., copyright renewed 1991 by Coretta Scott King. Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, NY.

pp. 147-160: from Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious by Chris Stedman. Copyright © 2013 by Beacon Press. Boston, MA. Printed with permission. pp.161-168: from Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint by Nadia Bolz-Weber. Copyright © 2014 by Jericho Books. New York. Printed with permission.

pp.77-85 from Discover Your True North Fieldbook.. Copyright © 2015 by John Wiley & Sons Inc. New York, USA. Printed with permission. pp.87-88 from And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou. Copyright 1978 by Maya Angelou.

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