October 20-21, 2025
Have you ever seen one of those ads that starts off with a supposed brand confession and apology? “We admit it, we were wrong when we said we were one of the best skin care lines. We’re so sorry to everyone who purchased our products.”
The big reveal is utterly predictable, even as it keeps you hanging on: “Turns out we’re not one of the best because of our incredible products. . . .
“Our amazing customer service. . . .
“The cute poodles we routinely show in our ads for no reason other than clickbait. . . .
“We’re actually THE best. And now we’re half off. Buy now!”
If you haven’t seen these, I’m sorry you’re missing out on this special genre of short films.
So I feel like the Center for Christianity and Public Life could make one of these for its recent For the Good of the Public Summit. “We lied when we said it would be a lot of good content with big names from diverse political perspectives . . .
“Actually, it’s a mind-bending feast of thought and inspiration coming at you like a very delicious and very large pie in your face (that somehow isn’t gross or weird, sorry, faulty metaphor) and you probably need to take a couple days off afterward to process and reflect and lick up all the frosting. We’re so sorry!”
(Oh, and buy next year’s ticket’s now. I have! No really, this is me speaking here, not CCPL in character.)
Even a few days of reflection won’t be sufficient to absorb it all; this could be a year-long class in faithful public living. In fact, one presenter, introduced if I recall correctly, as the funniest philosopher I know, described her “God and the Good Life” course at Notre Dame, asking a series of questions about what it means to live well in different arenas (with hands on exercises and a final reflection on death!), which sounds like a more eloquent version of my journal. (Try it yourself with her book, the Good Life Method). If that’s 101, the Summit could easily form 201.
(My other Summit suggestion: on-site prayer ministers for attendees’ confession and repentance needs. There’s no way you’re exposed to this without your heart breaking over your own contributory failings. And healing prayer for those of us battling envious comparisons that surface upon witnessing so many incredible examples of people doing this well!)
One central theme was our approach to ‘the other,’ whoever we deem that to be. Often these days it is people who disagree with us politically, increasingly, not only on a policy topic (a specific answer to a specific question of how to handle something at a societal level) but in an overall approach to how society should be ordered, how we should view and treat one another.
Justin Giboney kicked it off with a mic drop moment for cynics: It’s the job of the Christian to fight against the idea that its naïve to love our enemy instead of annihilate them.
OK, sure—but I notice myself griping about the fact that I have to do this work when (as I imagine) they on the other side are not. But let’s say that’s true. So what? You don’t see your enemy working hard to love you back? Tough beans, kid—as I tell my own kids—which is what I think Jesus is really saying in Luke 6: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” I can feel irked that (as I perceive it) they aren’t doing the work—it’s not fair! I have to be loving, and they get to be mired in hate and self-righteousness!
But wait. Do I want to be mired in hate and self-righteousness? Isn’t that its own kind of prison?
No, I want freedom. I want to see, honor, value as fully human—to love—not because its reciprocated, but out of the overflow of what I’ve received from God, and ultimately, because it is the way of life. If nothing else, the Summit reminded me of this, reinvigorating a commitment to (try to!) keep pursuing it with a community of people who can keep reminding me, at least until CCPL kicks of that year-long course.
(Now you see why I recommend prayer ministers for confession.)
Over lunch, we were asked to discuss—in my case, with a table full of strangers—the question of how we stay present and engaged with those whom we disagree.
This presumes first, that we do engage with those we disagree, something increasingly rare given the ease with which we can surround ourselves with people who think like us. I’m guilty of that. How do we step out of our bubble?
Practically, to engage across difference requires places where you meet people who are different. For some of us perhaps it is as simple as waltzing up to someone cracking open a chat, but for many people it feels a gap too far. We need translation, a bridge, a convener. Institutions and third spaces play a valuable role in closing that gap, bringing people together, creating wide belonging, serving as safe spaces and footholds for people to connect across difference.
Let’s get practical: It is easier to engage with people who are different when we share a place (school), activity (sports league) or goal (service together). Even paying attention to fellow bus or metro passengers can be an initiation into loving across difference. One presenter shared about the vital role of libraries as third spaces, describing a library event called ‘living books,’ where people served as a ‘living book’ about the kind of person they are, able for “check out” to tell their story to visitors. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive: “I always wanted to share my story but no one asked” / “I always wanted to ask but didn’t know how.” The library functions like a broker, in seeming distance, making visible the overlap between desires. Churches can offer this too—something I experienced where a former church’s weeknight dinner brought me to the same table as people experiencing homelessness—when we resist the call to function as social clubs for those who already think alike, resist becoming a refugee from all that difference than a bridge across it.
In a Summit on the public good, you’d have a good chance at Bingo with “parable of the good Samaritan” on your card. (If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a story with a moral, like a fable, Jesus told about several men passing an injured person on the road before an ethnic enemy finally stopped to offer care, taking the victim to an inn to heal. One of my favorite insights was the hiding-in-plain-sight observation that in this famous story of injustice, not having time to love vs. heroic love, there’s a key character who rarely gets screentime. Do you see it?
The innkeeper.
The heroic love of the traveling Samaritan wouldn’t have been possible without a system enabling him to offer it, a place to take the injured man for recuperation, an innkeeper willing to enact the care.
This insight frames vital institutions which enable us to love—neighbors and enemies alike—as the modern innkeeper. Places like libraries. Policies like food stamps. Institution sponsored systems like the school hosted coat drive which allows my outgrown clothes to a warm a new child, like the diverse church dinner table where Mama Jean praised God for finally realizing her dream of parquet floors in an apartment obtained through the public housing voucher system, after a lifetime of homelessness. Our individual acts of love are, or can be, when they function effectively, magnified by systems, spaces, institutions which allow love to be bigger than our own individualized capacity.
Back to polarization.
So, we struggle to speak across difference. We’re polarized. But is that the real problem? Or is polarization simply the symptom of something deeper: the dehumanization we allow to grow in our hearts, which turns difference into problems, which breeds contempt?
At times I’m tempted to contempt precisely because of the contempt I perceive another feels towards people I believe are worthy of love, dignity, honor. Yet if that is true and wrong, how is my own response of contempt an apt weapon with which to fight it?
If the core of what I object to in another’s beliefs relates to how those beliefs dehumanize others, maybe the response is: seek to re-humanize.
Where do dehumanizing beliefs come from? What if they are rooted in the fear of being less than, unaccepted, not enough? What if combating dehumanizing beliefs requires making more space for the person holding them, not less? Not space to be right, and that distinction feels important if tricky—but space to exist, be reassured, be seen and safe—their own re-humanization? (It’s not for nothing these are the qualities of secure attachment: attunement and containment, psychologically, the secure place from which to go out into the world.)
What if we approach difference with the goal of creating more net re-humanization?
What if we seek in our engagement across difference primarily to allow the other to be seen (even as we ask to be seen, because real engagement is mutual, not one-way), not to convince? Could approaching hard conversations, even wrong and harmful ideas, with a re-humanizing aim ultimately create more space for freedom from underlying fear and shame? Could it eventually filter its way up into more humane beliefs, greater charity, empathy, kindness, respect? Incidentally some of the more moving real-life accounts, like co-panelists Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra‘s and Dr. Julia Robinson Moore‘s stories of, respectively, pursuing peace after (armed) civil conflict and inviting racial reconciliation, relied on re-humanization as a foundation for crossing divides. I don’t know if it “works”—but I believe love has a way of changing the beloved, even if love relinquishes the right to control that change.
As Fr. Greg Boyle stated in his award acceptance address, “Systems change when people change, and people change when they are cherished.”
Let it be so.
