Fall 2024 | A Listening Heart: Can We Temper Polarization?

What would a healthier spiritual politics look like? How to resist feelings of mutual suspicion and overload—a polarization monetized by algorithms and metabolized by human nervous systems? In such conditions, “a listening heart” (from 1 Kings 3) is hardly fashionable. It never was. These Reflections writers nevertheless summon a spirit akin to that heartfelt plea. They describe the grace of face-to-face encounters with supposed enemies, or unearth lessons from the nation’s agonized moral history, or through faith find liberation from the brutalities of all status quos, whether old or new. “Let us,” writes Andrea Barton Reeves ‘26 M.A.R., “be courageous enough to assert our vision of peace over discord, of faith over fear.”
Cover image by Jean-Luc Benazet/Unsplash

Reflections

From the Dean's Desk

By Gregory E. Sterling, Dean of Yale Divinity School

The recent presidential election made glaring what we all knew: We are polarized as a society. The polarization exists across our society and within most American families. In quiet conversations, a good number of people have said to me regretfully that they can no longer have a political conversation with members of their own families. The polarization is real and painful.

Contents

By Mark Beckwith ’78 M.Div.

Today’s “pandemic of polarization” will soften only if people are willing to risk a little vulnerability to create spaces of humane encounter, which can lead to reconciliation. The author has seen it happen.

By Emily Bruce ’19 M.Div.

A hate crime at church last summer led a congregation through anger and grief to a new echelon of compassion. Being upset at the condition of the world doesn’t mean writing off other people.

Interpreters of scripture should think carefully about their theological concepts of destination, home, and belonging, given the power of the Book of Revelation’s imagery to shape immigration policy or inflame political conflict.

By Stephen G. Ray Jr. ’93 M.Div., ’00 Ph.D.

A contemporary backlash against civil rights progress keeps coursing through the land, yet Sojourner Truth’s reminder, “No, God is not dead,” still resounds.

By Scott Bader-Saye ’91 M.Div.

The challenge of contemporary Christian witness is to lead the way in dismantling two walls—the wall of polarization and the wall of exclusion. Everyone belongs at God’s banquet of life.

By Wes Avram

The question is whether democracy can survive a culture of purposeless acceleration without the habits of religious faith as a counterweight—a sense of mortal self-restraint, transcendent imagination, and a quality of listening that make it possible to live nonviolently together.

By Jeffrey D. Braun ’04 M.Div.

Church leaders should stand in, and to point to, Jesus’ incarnate Word of love, yet in a way that does not predetermine or prescribe what people need to think, say, or do.

By Dafne Villanueva ’24 M.A.R.

The spiraling temptation to keep doomscrolling can be defused by a counter-commitment to heart-soothing daily routines and physical-world connections.

Even as institutions languish in a period of historic weakness, religious communities are finding resilience when they avoid political capture, honor the tradition’s supernatural claims, and stir conversations about the ultimate meaning of the universe.

By John Aden ’23 M.A.R.

By starting from a place of common concern, congregationally oriented local activism discovers common-sense solutions that most of us want to see, even across partisan lines, and without compromising values.

By Ademuyiwa T. Bamiduro ’13 M.Div.

The spiritual disease at the root of society’s poisonous discourse requires a spiritual antidote: a turn toward the indwelling Holy Spirit, a healing path untethered from the daily machine of entrenched enmity.

By Tom Krattenmaker

If we’re going to salvage democracy, we have no choice but to get to know each other better. This will mean depleting the power of demonization and disinformation over our lives.

By Jim Sherblom ’77 B.A.

People find the space to become their truest and best selves in congregational life, learning to trust God and each other, pursuing a story larger than the one bullied by political despair.

By Becky Garrison ’92 M.Div./M.S.W.

Nearly four centuries after his death, Roger Williams is enjoying a contemporary moment. The life of this early American prophet of religious liberty offers inspiration to spiritual seekers who dissent from politicized religion in post-denominational America.

By Noah Humphrey ’23 M.Div.

A true spiritual politics unmasks the hidden misalignments of a broken society and confronts the harm caused by systems that prioritize profit over people.

By Gary Dorrien

With its beginnings in the 19th century, the Black social gospel tradition became the moral epicenter of American religious thought and politics in the 20th century, and it remains so in the 21st. The future of America’s spiritual politics depends on it.

By Andrea Barton Reeves ’26 M.A.R.

Even after a contentious election, we still have a daily vote to cast—for resilience, for God’s grace, for difficult conversations.

By Robin Stern
Marc Brackett

Without the ability to understand and manage our emotions, and to connect with others on that level, we’re setting ourselves up for deeper division, more bewilderment, and more panic. That’s where emotional intelligence comes in.

By Chris Freimuth ’25 M.Div.

Every patch of home ground or garden or refuge contains a history of the nation, its land and social relations, a complicated story of violence, blessings, and dreams.

By Ray Waddle

In one sense, we’re hardly divided at all: Nearly everybody accepts the commercial terms of the media ecology that keep us glued to screens and newsfeeds. The dynamic of faith has other ideas: defiance and redemption.

Reflections is a publication of Yale Divinity School