How do we put the kind back in human? How do we move forward into living with generosity as a spiritual practice, with open hearts and open hands when—in our country—fear, polarization, and cynicism tell us to close ourselves off except to those who believe, think, behave, vote, and perhaps worship like us? How do we break habitual one-liners on social media and judgments (whether spoken or unspoken) such as: “If you are a Christian you couldn’t possibly have voted for such-and-such a candidate”?
We need to prioritize our ability actually to listen with intent to understand, with intent to honor the other as being created in the image of God, with intent to construct something that in mutually beneficial based on core values. Yelling louder and coming up with pithy memes is simply more of the same. Right now the last thing we need is more of the same.
To put the kind back in human is how we will find our common humanity. Let me differentiate: I’m not using kind and nice interchangeably. Some of us were raised with the advice that Thumper (in Bambi) received from his mother, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” And I happen to live in Minnesota, with its reputation for “Minnesota nice.” Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for politeness, respect, and civility, but “nice” has been used as a way to avoid challenging conversations, as a way to support the status quo; nice can even become passive-aggressive. Sometimes the truth that needs to be spoken isn’t nice to hear. Recently I’ve been working on becoming “Minnesota kind.”
Brené Brown, a grounded theory researcher, has some helpful insights for us. For the last 14 years, she has listened to people’s stories of struggle, courage, shame, and vulnerability. She studies the human condition by starting with lived experiences. I love that she starts with story because those of us in Christian churches also teach through story; we even know ourselves as co-creators in God’s story. At this point, Dr. Brown has over 200,000 pieces of data. I have facilitated her research for the past six years. Over and over again I see how this research makes people feel known and seen because Brené is naming their realty in ways that they recognize.
And so, what, according to this research, stops us from putting the kind back in human?
Vulnerability
Brown defines vulnerability as “risk, emotional exposure, and uncertainty.” Anything we do that is courageous involves risk, emotional exposure, and uncertainty. When we are vulnerable and own a truth that may not conform to majority culture, we know we will be judged. When we risk saying, “I need help; I don’t understand,” we are open to being wounded.
Many of us tell ourselves that we will have hard conversations about race, religion, immigration, debt reduction, or our own family histories only when we’re better prepared, when we’ve got all our facts straight, or after we’ve studied the topic more. In part, we believe that if we had all this organized, then having hard conversations would not be hard or uncomfortable or jarring. We believe that we could achieve a noble outcome without ever really changing:
without having to say, “I have white privilege and that shapes my biases,”
without having to say, “what you just said is giving me pause to re-think my view,”
without having to say, “this conversation is really hard for me and in the past when I’ve tried to talk about these things, I haven’t felt safe to express my perspective so just showing up here is a huge ask of me.”
And yet, the truth remains that vulnerability is the path back to each other. And God created us for each other. When I risk a bit with you, and you risk a bit with me, we now trust each other a bit more and are more deeply connected. We’ve seen God in each other.
Brown teaches this: “When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable.”
Courageous and Playful Truth-telling
I have volunteered with an organization called Better Angels, whose mission it is to de-polarize the United States through highly facilitated conversations between republicans and democrats. Last fall, on a rainy evening, a group gathered to engage in these conversations; the event was open to the public to watch, and the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune newspaper sent a reporter and photographer. Through a series of questions and exercises, participants were asked to reflect on and critique their own political party. Everyone was asked the question, “What don’t you like about your party?” The initial answers were about smaller policy issues, but eventually a woman said, “I don’t hold the same view on abortion as my party and I feel like I can’t say that—that there is no place within the party for me to say that.”
What do I most profoundly remember from that night? Of course, it is this woman speaking her courageous truth.
But there is another side to courageous truth telling, and it gets us back to the issue of kindness. I believe that God created us to play, to laugh, to create, to have moments of collective joy together. Jesus even prayed at the Last Supper that his followers would have joy!
“When any system—whether it be a family, a business, a faith community, a country, or a college—is anxious, playfulness is a way to stay connected through the conflict.”
Many of us often think we will do those things only after we’ve done the big things, when we have time. That isn’t getting us where we want to go. Instead, Dr. Stuart Brown, who studies play, writes, “The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression.” If you’ve worked in higher education for a number of years, have you seen the rate of depression among students increase? The opposite of play is depression.
According to family systems theorist Edwin Friedman, when any system—whether it be a family, a business, a faith community, a country, or a college—is anxious, playfulness is a way to stay connected through the conflict. When there is anxiety, we become serious to protect ourselves because it feels less exposed. But vulnerability is how we share our common humanity.
How would your world change if you played, connected, dwelt in joy and kindness more? And how would that change our world?
Works Cited
Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Brown, Stuart and Christopher Vaughan. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Friedman, Edwin. Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. New York: Guildford, 2011.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm frames the issue by reflecting on the Letter of James and the Lutheran tradition of “calling a thing what it is” — arguing that the standards of academic discourse, deeply rooted in Lutheran insistence on frankness and honesty alongside concern for the common good, give NECU institutions a solid platform for sustaining honest but not hateful discourse about divisive issues.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn recounts how a participant’s probing questions at the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference turned “civil discourse” from an innocuous theme into a contested one — and previews essays that variously urge listening and common ground, or speaking truthfully even when those words sound angry.
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Article
Vocation and Civil Discourse: Discerning and Defining
Lynn Hunnicutt
Hunnicutt draws on Rabbi Amy Eilberg’s reading of Moses’ calling to identify four features of vocational discernment — attention, wonder, communal consciousness, and humility — and argues that these same qualities are also key aspects of civil discourse, so that forming students for vocational discernment is simultaneously forming them for civility.
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Article
Polarization, Incivility, and a Need for "Change"
Guy Nave
Nave argues that when Americans demand “change,” they usually mean that “others” need to see things their way — and that meaningful transformative change requires acknowledging the provisional nature of our perspectives, seeking to understand as much as to be understood, and bursting the ideological echo chambers of social media through projects like Clamoring for Change.
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Article
It's Time to Rewrite the Rules of Civility
Jon Micheels Leiseth
Leiseth contends that the prevailing rules of civility too often function as the majority’s rules, stifling those facing real harm — and proposes that NECU institutions rewrite civility as “neighboring,” guided by the ELCA’s five values of accompaniment: mutuality, inclusivity, empowerment, sustainability, and vulnerability.
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Poem
Original Song Lyrics: "Just a Little"
Mike Blair
Lyrics for an original song inspired by biblical images and stories, by Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” and by the faith, hope, love, and courage of immigrant friends and neighbors — led as a devotion during the 2018 Vocation of a Lutheran College conference.
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Article
The Musician's Vocation
Jeffrey Bell-Hanson
Bell-Hanson argues that musicians, who exercise profound influence over the emotional flavor of a moment, are called not merely to technical proficiency but to a sense of vocation: understanding their art well enough to use it responsibly, to intend truthfulness rather than manipulation, and to articulate its significance in dialog with other disciplines.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 3 · Summer 1997
Christenson explains that this issue breaks from the first two issues’ single-focus pattern to feature three principal papers on the environment, the education of desire, and hiring and personnel policies, plus two poems and a piece of reflective bemusement. He then commends George Marsden’s The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997) and challenges Lutheran scholars to articulate how the particulars of their faith inform their scholarship—in conversation with Calvinist work like Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and Art in Action—rather than remaining silently complicit in the view that faith has no place in the academy.
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Article
A River Runs Through It: CLU as a Church-Related University
A. Joseph Everson
No. 12 · Summer 2001
Everson borrows Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and the small creek that flows through California Lutheran University’s Kingsman Park as images for the quiet stream of Christian tradition on campus, describes the dialectic of faith and reason (with a “Lord of Life” student congregation, two required religion courses, and a voluntary Wednesday chapel) as the “theology of paradox” that runs from Luther’s simul justus et peccator through Richard Solberg and Richard Hughes, and names six commitments that constitute the CLU ethos—academic freedom (Jeremiah 29:7 and John 8:32), vocation, service (Amos and Habitat for Humanity), grace and graciousness (Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice), diversity, and reverence (Proverbs 9 as awe and wonder).
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Article
Cultivating Transformative Responsible Dialogue: Community of Moral Deliberation and Lutheran Higher Education
Per Anderson
No. 35 · Spring 2012
Anderson proposes that ELCA colleges and universities embrace a project of “transformative responsible dialogue” that advances the ELCA’s commitment to be a “community of moral deliberation” and answers the LIFT Report’s call for a culture of faithful discernment. Drawing on Michael Meyer’s “liberal civility,” Martha Nussbaum, Hans Jonas’s responsibility ethic, Patrick Keifert’s ecclesiology of strangers, and Kathryn Tanner on culture, he argues that liberal education at our schools can form students whose dialogue knits together civility, responsibility, and Christian openness to the other.
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Article
Learning and Teaching as an Exercise in Christian Freedom
Tom Christenson
No. 6 · Winter 1999
Christenson, the 1998 Wittenberg keynote, argues that what makes our institutions Lutheran is not the percentage of Lutherans served or employed, ethnic celebration, or self-conscious difference, but a theologically informed vision of the educational task framed by the linked ideas of gift, freedom, and vocation. Drawing on Joe Sittler, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Harold Kushner, John Updike, Frederick Buechner, and Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, he reframes the liberal arts as four “liberating arts”—critical/deconstructive, embodying/connecting, melioristic/creative, and arts of enablement and change—and closes with his mother’s “end-of-the-month soup” as an image of vocation in a particular place.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation—Wide Perspective Questions
Mary-Paula Cancienne
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Cancienne, drawing on Iain McGilchrist, asks whether higher education has prioritized micro lenses at the expense of the macro view, and invites educators to hold the drama of individual vocation stories within a wider plot that includes James Webb Telescope wonder, climate grief, the long shadow of enslavement, and the resilience of native populations.
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Article
Business as Usual? Marketing, God, and the Limits of Christian Callings
Emily Beth Hill
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Hill, a former corporate marketing consultant turned theologian, returns to Luther’s claim that no vocation is more holy than another — and uses Luther’s Large Catechism definition of God to argue that the modern practice of branding intentionally redirects the love and worship of human beings toward capital, raising the question of whether Christian neighbor-love places limits on what professions Christians should pursue.