A Systems Approach to Faith and Pluralism - Michael Trice

Michael Trice combines theological training with an executive MBA to engage business leaders, nonprofits, and diverse religious communities. As founding director of Seattle University's Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement, he works at the intersection of faith traditions and public life. Our conversation explores what "public theology" means in practice and the tensions inherent in pluralistic engagement.

Show Notes:

• Encountering Cruelty: The Fracture of the Human Heart (https://brill.com/display/title/18104?rskey=cf10gy&result=1)

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:03

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host. Chip Gruen. Today's guest is Michael Trice, who is the founding director of the Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement at Seattle University. He also holds the Spehar Halligan professorship at that same institution. Dr. Trice's biography and professional experience, what I like to call his vocational arc, is really broad and interesting. The reason that we have him on today is a really interesting choice that he made a number of years ago being trained as a constructive theologian. He made the choice post pandemic to pursue the executive leadership MBA. When you talk to him, and I think you'll hear this today, he has seen this as being just a really transformative and interesting and useful educational tool in inter religious engagement and his work at at the university in the center there, as you will hear, he describes himself as a bridge builder, and he feels like that executive MBA gave him the tools to do a lot of that work. Before we get started with the conversation, I just want to give a shout out to a previous guest on the podcast, Vicki Garlock, who actually introduced me to Michael a little less than a year ago, and it's been great getting to know him, and I look forward to many fruitful and interesting conversations in the future. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Michael Trice. Michael Trice, thanks for coming on ReligionWise, I really appreciate it.

Michael Trice: 1:48

Chip, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation to join.

Chip Gruen: 1:52

So I want to start a little bit about you before we get into the broader questions about the center that you direct and the work that you do, but think about your professional trajectory and training, that this has been multidisciplinary in lots of ways. It has taken a few twists and turns that may seem totally logical to you, but I think would be surprising to some of our listeners. Can you talk a little bit about the arc of your, both educational and vocational, trajectory and how that's led you to where you are now?

Michael Trice: 2:29

When I look back, Chip, on the arc of my career, I see a long conversation between three commitments that have shaped me from the beginning, and the questions I think that we're going to address together are, just fit in so nicely to that, which is, you know, the search for theological depth, the responsibility of public engagement and the craft of organizational leadership. Those three things I began, as you know, in the theological world. I trained in several divinity schools and different universities, and then through my doctoral work at Loyola in Chicago, I was really drawn to these big questions, like, how do we live meaningfully with one another? How do we confront suffering and injustice and cruelty amidst an ecological crisis, and what does dignity require in moments of significant conflict in our communities or, and in the world? At the same time, I found myself increasingly involved in ecumenical and interreligious work, both nationally and globally. So, it's in that space between traditions and cultures and systems that I realized something essential in my own leadership, that these deep moral and spiritual questions don't stay within the walls of the academy or the sanctuary or the religious space alone. They spill immediately into the public square. They show up in how institutions function, how leaders navigate complexity, and how organizations form or fracture their culture. And I just I needed a wider vocabulary to meet that reality. So I engage in this conversation. I'm happy to say a few words about about what that path was like before your questions, if you like, or we can just get right into it.

Chip Gruen: 4:02

No, I think that you're anticipating where I want to go exactly. I mean, we can think a little bit about your your history and trajectory, but I mean, honestly, one of the things that's really captured my imagination from our conversations has been not only the theological arc, but also how that arc led you to the Executive MBA, and thinking about leadership and the kinds of doors that that training opened for you. So I just want to kind of leave it open to you now to sort of think about, think through that with us, about about the trajectory of education generally, and how you felt. You know, I don't know. Maybe called is too strong a word to the Executive MBA.

Michael Trice: 4:46

I think it was in the space between traditions and cultures and systems, I realized something, something essential, as I'm as I mentioned earlier, about how truth arrives. It's an insight that led me into the field of constructive theology, which is interdisciplinary, and you'll use sociology and psychology and the humanities and the sciences more generally. But I was also always interested in systems, and I worked in death penalty appellate cases early on, in my early 20s at Central North Carolina prison where we had a number of inmates who we were not able to, to move them from the death penalty to life in prison, so many of them were executed. A keen interest, therefore developed in systems. So I went on later, and I pursued, after years of teaching in constructive theology, pursued an executive MBA and on the service. That may feel like a turn away from theology, perhaps, but for me, it was exactly the opposite. It gave me this, this language and tools to engage with the for profit sector, with with with business leaders and nonprofit executives, as well as civic partners in the public sector who are asking many of the same questions I was about meaning, about responsibility, sustainability and belonging, but now in a for profit context, through the lens of systems and structure and strategy. So it allowed me to bridge two worlds I think many of your listeners may also kind of contend with, which is, what's the idea that I think is relevant and needs to take up residence in the world, and how do I strategically get there? So today, in my role as executive director at the Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious engagement, where I also serve as the Spehar Halligan professor, I see this work as helping leaders across religious traditions and sectors and identities as we're as we're talking about. So I think that's that's especially become true in the post pandemic period, where leaders are asking not only what to do, but how to be how to stay resilient, how to navigate exhaustion, how to lead with integrity amidst complex cultural forces. So it's public theology engaged strategically in systems through an executive MBA as well. But you mentioned the term arc. I love that kind of career narrative of an arc, and if I was going to say anything else about that from a theological context, I'm rooted intellectually as I ask questions about religious traditions speaking meaningfully into the world that we inhabit many of those questions are even underneath, say, daily morality. But fundamentally, what does it mean to be a human being ensconced in conflicts and suffering and rapid cultural change? Who are we as a species in a world that requires us to show up personally, vocationally, professionally. I use the kind of aperture for that, the kind of lens for that of ecumenical and interreligious, but I think all of us organizationally are looking for the places where we can show up most, where our mission and passions collate in areas of, that allow us to be our best professional selves or vocational selves. So finally, the arc of my career has been about weaving together all of these threads, the reflective depth of theology, the practical urgency of public life and the structural thinking around systems and leadership and organizational strategy, and that's the weft and weave of that. It's just been really near and dear to my to my professional heart and to my personal walk.

Chip Gruen: 8:31

So I want to, I want to get to the idea, idea of translation in a second, because I think that that's really important to what you do. And again on this, this stage of your arc, it seems like something you've really pursued, but before we get there, you use a word that I want to interrogate a little bit - system. Because, as a trained theologian, I think, you know, you, not me, think about systematics, you know. And I think about systems that way. But I also hear in your use of that word, echoes of institutions, right, of systems in a in a broader way. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you're using that word. Is this ideological? Is this about, you know, about thought worlds and about the way that our ideas all string together. Or is it about the brick and mortar and the systems and the policy? Or is it both? And if it's both, how are those things all connected to one another? Because it seems like, when you use this word system, it's really pregnant.

Michael Trice: 9:36

It is, great, and I really appreciate your question of it. I mean, if we imagine the fact that, no matter where we are at any given time, for the moment, we've been born, and even long before, we are surrounded by systems, circulatory system, the system of the rotation of orbs in the cosmos, how we understand expectations around systems that govern everything from plumbing and electricity in our house to the greater systems that guide and govern social and political life. And I was always interested in all of those, although I had a knee jerk reaction to them. In theology, I didn't pursue systematic theology. I pursued constructive theology, which is in many ways, an interrogation of systems. And I think the reason for that is I started in law school and moved away as we were working with these, these folks who would who were inmates and and were on death row in in North Carolina Central Prison, I developed a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion around what systems say and how they govern our lives daily, and what they actually commit themselves to doing so, for instance, we may use a language of of justice that is, that is at least on its surface, assumes to have the best interests of, of all of those within the, within the system at heart. But we know, of course, there's prejudicial injury and there's bias and discrimination that, that shows up. So justice itself may, in fact, be a term that's concealing a tremendous amount of systemic cruelty of negligence, either planned or unplanned, that gets baked into systems, and often the problem with cruelty within systems is that doesn't like to disclose itself, doesn't like to be seen. It often also has a way of drawing us into into it and subverting our own best values. So what I thought was Justice yesterday toward a particular population like Somalis in the United States now, is governed by a rhetoric that assumes it's speaking from justice, but it's actually a manifestation of cruel intent. And understanding systems in that way is important, so let me just say that theologically that was really important for me. At the same time, we know, because we're governed by systems all around us, that when they're working well and effectively, they can do a lot to alleviate the very kinds of discrimination we're we're discussing. So I felt like both of those went well together, but there was a deeper reason as well, in terms of the constituencies I was working with, those who come from the nonprofit sector and those who come from the for profit sector may share a lot of the same values around how they understand the systems that govern our lives, but they often use a very different language for it, pastors, imams, rabbis, and deacons, and others may use a language that is values based and, as you were mentioning the word call earlier, like something you and I understand together come from a particular religious system, whereas those coming from nonprofit spaces and some of the industries we might identify are not using that. So when I combine theological training with systems and Leadership Theory, at least two things happen for me. The first is that a new collaboration becomes possible the more we are fluent across different systems, so theological leaders can suddenly engage business executives or civic leaders on organizational culture, on decision making, on things like adaptive leadership and for profit, leaders will listen to nonprofit leaders talking about moral injury within systems in ways that they haven't considered before. So there's a reciprocal relationship between theology and business and these, these conversations open because we're working within a shared kind of conceptual grammar. So a lot of my work is bridge building, frankly, between language systems. That's the first the first point, the second is that the work, I think, with an unders, an understanding of how systems function as much as possible, because they're pretty slippery in in society, our work, the my work, theologically, becomes more grounded. It's more grounded in the moral imagination of what's possible for people who are suffering. You know, I think of the last US presidential election, and we know that there was reason why a large population working in, pardon me, in the working class, voted in a particular direction over another, like, why is that? What was happening in the systems that are governing life economically, that have created stringent factors so people would vote one way or another? I mean staying away from the partisan realities for a moment and just identifying that if you want to do good theological work and really tap into where people are in their humanity. You have to understand the systems that are governing their lives and be able to speak directly to those such as deep economic inequality that is impacting the working class today in the United States, just as an example, so systems thinking. Brings theological clarity and structure and scale, structure and scalability as well, and it helps to ask critical questions in all of these spaces between theology and business, you know, what should we be doing together now that we know how these systems are impacting us, how do we operationalize in ways that are mutually beneficial for all, and I think those are critical questions that all religious leadership needs to be attuned to today, not just in the for profit sector, but also in terms of how they're given engaging those in civic spaces, their representatives, for instance, at local, state and national offices, who are representing their best interests.

Chip Gruen: 15:40

So I want to hesitate just one more second, if you'll bear with me, on on your arc, on your trajectory of your career, because it seems to me like you were involved, obviously, with legal work, with that legal system, very intimately early on, but you chose to, I mean, I know that you're still involved with that work, but you chose to engage in that work from a different system, from a different seat. You know, in your work as a scholar, theologically, your work as a director, as you say, where you like to you know, think of yourself as a bridge builder, can you talk about that turn right? If you see injustice, why not stick within the justice system in order to affect that system? Why? How did you see yourself, sort of, you know, seated in another place in order to affect the change that you wanted to see.

Michael Trice: 16:41

I really appreciate this question, Chip, because I think it gets to the kind of hinge that we all in one form or another in our walk, whether that be through a call or through an occupational trajectory, or certainly in family dynamics, where we have to make decisions because we don't have enough information that is life giving to move us forward in any of these areas, and that creates an existential crisis point for a lot of people, like, what do I trust in? Whatever we have these big questions, what can I count on? What do I hope for? Those are the big existential questions in our lives walking through the world, you know, as we're passing through this time, where we can pause and ask ourselves the question is showing me something about the uncertainty I'm experiencing, and pay attention to that uncertainty and the impact it has on our lives. And so for me, I was I was a young person. I was 24 I was working in death penalty appellate cases. I was, I was through my first semester of law school. I was really ready to move forward. And it was, it was just a great position between North Carolina, Durham, North Carolina and, and Washington, DC, where I served with the Chief Justice of the Military Court of Appeals for the armed forces. There a man named Robinson Everett. And so here, in the midst of of this working with these inmates who, one in particular, had received the death penalty, was going to be executed. And indeed was executed on Friday, October 13 in 2001 and and that experience of calling his experience just felt totally askew to how I understood not just theological depth, but the depth and capacity of law. I mean, it was one of those crises where there was no specific terrain to go to. So I knew that the answers I was looking for in law were not going to suffice for an interrogation of injustice by using the same discourse of justice to get there, if that makes sense. So I opened up a kind of, what we called a window in inside of theology, for a deeper assessment of cruelty, which had not really been done before. Like, what's, what's the, Thomas Aquinas had talked about a little bit Augustine had somewhat, Theresa von Avila had a few things on cruelty, but like, what is this thing that seems to emerge as an excess in life that tears down, even though the public discourse around it is that it's building up. There's something singularly deceptive about cruelty and interrogating that, on the one hand, was really important, so I had to move in that direction in theology by building out something that hadn't existed before, and at the same time, it meant surrendering, surrendering law school, surrendering a trajectory I was on, moving to Germany and working on a doctorate with scholars I knew could help, help alleviate some of this existential kind of anxiety and move into a deeper space for understanding cruelty in systems. And then that led to, that led to, you know, that was a, what would they call that? There was a dream deferred a bit in terms of law school, but it led to a kind of a deeper appreciation for this new road that I was on. I think it's one we all have to choose when the systems that, that are governing our lives are not, they run out of vocabulary that we believe is meaningfully, like, substantially true for us as human beings, and then we have to find our own way. That's what that was about.

Chip Gruen: 20:31

Yeah, so just because you didn't do it, I'm going to do it for you to just plug the the book you wrote as a result of that working, Encountering Cruelty, The Fracture of the Human Heart, where you deal, you know, at length, with these issues. So we'll put a link in the in the show notes for that as well.

Michael Trice: 20:51

Thanks, Chip, yeah.

Chip Gruen: 20:52

So you keep coming back to this idea of translation of bridge building, etc. Can you give us an example of how, and maybe even from your work? We'll talk more about your work as the director of your center shortly. But you know you went on, you did this, this, MBA, right? You see yourself as as this link between systems. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of things, I mean, you've talked about values, for example, but the kinds of things that the academy might think are self evident, right? But once you start thinking more carefully about the discourses, vocabularies, worldview, of these for profit systems, you realize that the kinds of things, the kinds of ways we talk in the academy, don't always land, right? Can you talk a little bit more specifically about about what you've learned about that and about maybe some success stories about about helping some of the concepts that are important to you land in those in those different venues.

Michael Trice: 22:10

Well, I think first of all, stepping out into liminal spaces between things, like between systems and creating new vocabulary, because you need to. Something we do, all of us right in our relationships, sometimes we have to reframe things. It requires us to reimagine and to and that reimagination comes with new stories and new language that frames those stories and that can feel very unsettling and create a disequilibrium in our lives at first, because we're still kind of looking for the next step to lean into at the same time it's being it's being created. That means that one as a, as a constructive theologian, I'm always in a in a posture of translating both what I'm learning for, you know, theological purposes, into, into, some cases, managerial language. But I think, I think you're absolutely right, if I understand this intent, your question too, there is within the academy a certain, also a certain kind of parlance or grammar for how certain terms are received and interpreted and kind of recast. And I think part of the work between systems is to recognize that has value. It's relatively adequate in terms of its value, but it's not sufficient. And what's sufficient and necessary is for all of us to be able to become as precise as possible about what we mean by the guiding values in terms of that that that move us through, through the world. So an example of this is just last Friday, I was teaching in systems analysis in the Albert School of Business and Economics. Here we have, I guess, about 20 students, and they're all executive leaders in their own right. They're coming from from all the industries we might imagine out here in the region. And we were reading two texts. One of those texts was from Robin Wall Kimmerer, who wrote a book called The Gift of Strawberries. And she's a botanist, but also an indigenous leader. So she's code switching also, right? She's finding all kinds of which is another language. She's looking for all kinds of language to describe, both in botany, how to talk about the natural world, but also to infuse it with this kind of indigenous spirit, spiritual spirituality. And the other text we were reading was by Pope Francis on a encyclical that came out 10 years ago, called Laudato Si in particular chapter three that really identifies. Well, here's he calls it the technocratic age. It's a long standing idea out there that is also a word he's received from some other philosophy, but he's framing it into a call. For the kind of, what he calls the integral ecology, what needs to take place for all of us to evolve in our fundamental humanity. So you have these two thinkers right that are posing that they're both coming from both nonprofit and for profit spaces, depending on how you see them, and they're they're asking all of these executive leaders who are clearly in the for profit spaces, to think about wonder and awe, to think about our responsibility to the natural world, to think about how the way that we create biodiverse, rich teams is also a reflection of our own interior health and well being that's projected out into those teams, and how we then engage in the world, addressing major systemic injustices or issues that seem external to us. Actually, we have something to say from the from the seat of our values, from the core of our values, from the code of our character. And I think really good theology and really good executive leadership actually has two things in mind, which is to help move people out of the confines of their own limitations, wherever they may be, and get them to ask critically important questions, not just for themselves, but for the communities around them that, around them that transcend their own specific identity. Like, what is it that what I'm doing here has an impact on some of the populations in my community that don't have the same advantages that I do, and don't I have a moral obligation in some way to them. Kimmerer and Francis would say yes, you and I might say yes. But how we get there and helping people move from, you know, really, from like, what's the wonder and all the cosmos, to what do I have to do on Tuesday morning with my team in order to ensure that those same values are, are taking, are lit up in the world in a way? I think that's, that's really quite a tall order, but it's, it's a, you know what I was doing last Friday, and to watch these folks kind of, the lights turn on, and talk about why these things matter, and to do that, to articulate that with one another and and to do so, so that their mission in their workspaces and their personal and vocational passions in their daily lives are aligned to one another. So finally, I'd say a lot of that success, the barometer for success on that is something that Pope Francis is talking about. What is the integrity of that integration in our lives, so that who we say we are and what we do every day are consistent and coherent with how we show up in the world whenever we do.

Chip Gruen: 27:39

Alright, so, these issues maybe from a slightly different angle I'd like to think about, because I'm very interested in, you know, what I would call religion in public life, right? The idea that whether you're religious or not, knowing something about the way that religion works, knowing why it might be important in people's lives. You know, thinking about how we talk about religion in the public square, like that. All of that is super important, and the way that you encounter the question of public is related, but I think maybe a little bit different. You use the term public theology as a framework for your engagement? Yeah, and I think that for our listeners, like there might be some contradiction right, or a sense of contradiction between the idea of the public and the theological right, because we live, or at least we say we live in a world where the religious is separate. We have the separation of church and state. I mean, you've addressed this a little bit, and already, I think in talking about values that sort of transcend particular religious difference. But can you talk a little bit about how you see those ideas of the public and the theology theological working together and how that impacts your work?

Michael Trice: 29:05

Sure. I mean, I I really resonate with the need when we look at the proper operations of government and a healthy democracy to make this distinction between church and state, as we call the separation clause and the establishment clause, and those are as the, as the viewer knows, listener knows, are in the Bill of Rights, which precede the rest of the Constitution were actually written after the 1787 kind of first draft of the or second draft of The US Constitution. And the reason was actually to ensure that the distance and the integrity of the operations of the government and the operations of religious traditions were distinct enough that one wasn't assuming the power of the other or coercively corrupting the power of the other. So public theology may sound like too close an iteration of those two terms, but in do you, if you think about the reality of faith in action every day, how does my faith show up in the world? How does my religious consciousness and the values that shape me and the ones I want to share with my family, and that should be a part of the things I'm thinking about as I'm even kind of getting over to my community, where we have rituals that reinvest my family, like holiday rituals, particular liturgies, that are so important to our shared life, the public theology is the practice of of safeguarding that space too, like who we are in our theologies should be able to have, I don't know, public purchase for how we care about our neighbor. For instance, if I have to care for my neighbor, then I want my personal theology, which is also part of a larger community to be evident in the world, and how I treat my neighbor, right, even if I don't use those words. So public theology is first and foremost, not about proselytizing, right? It's not about getting to one theology or religious system over another, but it is about, having said that, it is about the moral imagination for each of us for how our faith is active in the world and made more public in order to not just protect but further the thriving of our neighbors around us. So in a time marked by like say, polarization and cultural fragmentation, systems degradation, public theology matters because people are searching for meaning beyond ideological battle lines, and we can see those battle lines all around us today that are having, you know, an unfortunate diminishing effect on our trust for the Commons around us. Public theology actually welcomes numerous wisdom traditions, religious traditions, faith traditions, indigenous traditions, into an assumed healthier commons, because those are places that require we're not marked by polarization or loneliness, but that the moral imagination is actually rich and and seeking the best for our communities, for our neighbors and for our families. So, so that's a really important contribution. So the separation of church and state does not in any way create a place of of a kind of solitary space for theology only evident in personal lives. In fact, it's public theology that is engaging with other disciplines as well in order to ensure that the Commons is rich with meaning making and where we have less polarization. So we know that religious traditions going back 1000s of years, hold deep reservoirs for moral imagination, for wisdom as a form of resilience, for hope as a shared value, and for communal repair amidst times of fragmentation, where precisely you want people of good will and religious leaders to be leaning in toward one another. Here's when public theology becomes problematic, when it is so closely aligned to a particular, a particular political ideology of one kind or another that refuses to see the goodness of our shared humanity and of the neighbor right next door, and instead paints paints across them a veneer of the alien or the infidel or the enemy, and that when that happens, I would suggest that's precisely what we talked about earlier, in terms of cruelty, political or even religious ideologies that forget the wholeness of the neighbor and their relationship the transcendent and loving divine presence. I'm going to hesitate on saying God for a moment, just because different religious traditions frame it differently, where those are forgotten, our sense of direction to God or the transcendent and our relationship to the neighbor, we, we run into into peril, actually really dangerous territory. And I wouldn't call that public theology. I would call that more kind of political, ideological and ideological religious coercion, which is quite a different animal.

Chip Gruen: 34:36

So you mentioned pluralism here, so I think this is a good place to kind of jump in to the work that you do right now as the founding director of the Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious engagement at Seattle University, that this is the mission that you serve as both interdisciplinary and rooted in the Jesuit tradition of Seattle University as well, but can you talk about how that work growing out of that tradition, can still be pluralistic, can still have the cross cultural values and kind of the examples of the kinds of ways that you reach out in the community to make, you know, some of the ideas that we've been talking about, about cross working across systems and translation, meaningful and useful for your community.

Michael Trice: 35:28

So it's interesting a word like pluralism for for the listener, it's a packed word as well. And what does it really mean? Like it means, it certainly means more than singularity. It means a lot of things, but it's more than say, I don't know the aggregate that would be dropped off on, on on the sidewalk to build a driveway in my house, like it's, it's not just a collection of things in their singularity. It's about the relationship between those little pebbles that make the, the concrete, in this case that's going to be able to be the driveway. I can't think of a better image at the moment, but that's the one I came up with. So it's more than the aggregate in this case. So it's not a vague affirmation, let's say, of everyone getting along. It's a disciplined commitment to at least three things. The first is that it sees the dignity in difference, not difference first as something to be suspicious of, but there are reasons why there is unique features in our humanity, from our families, one to the next, in our own personal ambitions and, and that that separation is actually healthy and and so the dignity of differences is essential. The second is that staying, pluralism encourages all of us across religious lines, across lines of industry, as I mentioned, teams we're working on at work, whatever those specific projects may be, it is its premise. It's guiding values to stay in constructive relationship. Keep asking questions, keep engaging where those levels of differences are, because, after all, we don't have suspicion about what those differences are, first and foremost, it's not a polyadic view of the universe. There are things to have suspicions about, clearly, but the preferential option for staying in constructive relationship is the second, I would suggest, and the third is refusing to collapse another tradition into one's own, or vice versa. Oh, all those Buddhists are just like us Lutheran Christians, or all those Hindus are just like the Zoroastrians. Well, no, I mean, if you hold those things distinct enough, it's like two different sources of light. You know, they shine in their own luminescence, and you need and want them to do that, because the first principle we identified so some communities will view pluralism as a as a delusion, as a delusion, or as a kind of watering down of the truth. Some communities will see it that way, but I frame it differently. It's not a substitute for conviction. It's a way of holding conviction in public and and there are limits to pluralism. Yes, it cannot support ideologies that diminish the dignity of others, right? That's the first principle. So the moment you start chipping away at your neighbor and, and creating these kind of broad messaging that sees others as criminals, you've missed the opportunity to engage them, not just in religion and theology, but also in the kind of the deeper values based work that takes place in government, for instance, where you need to have a proper understanding of the communities, the ethnicities, the backgrounds, where they're located in the in the country, we're talking about the US context. now I think, for a moment, in order to honor the cultural and ethnic and religious distinctions that make them who they are, that's pluralism. It has boundaries. Pluralism is not about the work of inculcating spaces of harm, but it is about the work of bridge building around shared value. So I'll give you an example. Three nights ago, I was in a meeting with about 20, I guess it was about 20 religious leaders in in the area in the Pacific Northwest, where I live, you mentioned Seattle University, and we had a number of folks there from the Muslim, Jewish, Christian, I mentioned Zoroastrian, by the way, and other communities who are around that table, and we were talking about the fear that seems to be induced in our society right now, like, what do we do with it? What is the nature of this fear? Where is it coming from? Were lots of different responses. There were areas of a recognition of similarity in terms of how these, these different leaders were seeing it, but they all felt a kind of anxiety, existential anxiety about what's happening. They were recognizing that the importance of this moment to be operating as a ready bench of leaders working together because two things were important, the safety of those in our communities and outside of our communities, and the thriving of all in the municipalities. So those religious leaders shared that across the unique identities of their own communities and the dignity there. And in that conversation, we asked, as I mentioned, what's the nature of fear? And I said, what about, what about, you know, fear of something I can see like in the movies, you know, where we see the Terminator coming toward us, and we're like, I fear that I see that. That's something to fear. But the fear that a lot of people and that's a specific kind of fear, right? It's object it's, it's object based fear. But a lot of the fear that people are feeling right now, I would say it's more along the lines of dread. It's objectless fear. It's like, it's like the B rated movie you saw, the Swamp Thing that hasn't yet arrived yet, and objectless fear, dread of the unseen thing is real and people, and it can be incredibly dissonant. I mean, I mean that like the sound, people could feel in their bodies when they drive to work in the morning and don't know how they're going to be able to pay the light bill at the end of the month. I mean, these, this is the kind of dread we're talking about, or or whole communities are feeling like they're being spoken about in a way that's really derogatory. That will create existential dread, the fear of the thing I can't see, but maybe it's coming like the Swamp Thing, okay, in a in a context of pluralistic leadership, when we identify fear of that kind as a very specific thing, then the beauty of all of our traditions has a way of responding to it. And if we're listening to all of our, all of those folks at once, it's like listening to your favorite song on your best stereo. You know the stereophonic resonance of lots of different parts of instruments that are speaking to what you really want to know more about. That's what pluralism is, and responding to dread in that way, where a Zoroastrian will discuss the nature of gratitude that should illuminate our lot and generosity toward others, and someone in the Buddhist community will discuss the notion of the lotus blossom that must grow, because it always does, out of the kind of recesses of the muck and mire and that that's how beauty arrives out of cruelty. But we have to search for it together, like these two different views coming from two unique religious perspectives pay credence to the idea of pluralism as the shared wealth of resources, reservoir in the moral, moral imagination we can all draw from. It takes time and temperance and patience, but it's so worth it, if what we have at stake is the care of our communities and the thriving of the individuals and families within those spaces. Don't we have a moral obligation to show up in our diversity, to meet a shared challenge?

Chip Gruen: 42:51

So here's an angle of this that that I continually puzzle over, and I think a lot of people disagree with me on this, but I want to throw it at this very well put kind of model of how pluralism should and could and must, in some, some sense, work. But what is the price of admission for those conversations? What are the table stakes that it requires for you to be there? And I say this because so for example, and you know, we've sort of hinted around a few political things, and I will sort of, this is the best example I can think of, is that our vice president, JD Vance was talking about, you know, that his Catholic faith, you know, inspires him to take care of his family and his community. And he talked about it in such a way that, it was Pope Francis who's getting a lot of airtime today, maybe that's an indication of something said. You know, no Catholic love and the love that we, we imitate you know, from God does not have concentric circles, that it can't be you care about your family first, and you care about your local community next, and you know, and on and on and on until, you know, those, those starving people in some other country are the 10th circle out. And maybe, if there's anything left over, we care about them as well. And you know, one of the things that I mean, my thing that I talked to my students about, and I talked in my in my community about a lot is being empathetic to worldviews that are not our own. And I think I can be empathetic to, though I am not in lots of ways, to our vice president's worldview, but I can be empathetic to the idea that some communities might define their obligations and their neighbors differently. Yeah, right. And that can go off the rails and go wrong, right, very quickly, right? That, that path leads to the white nationalism that we see growing up. Right? I care for my race, right? Before I care for others, etc. But that disagreement, right, that different framing of to put it in the most basic terms, who is my neighbor? This gets back to the question of like, what is the price for admission of being at that pluralistic table? Right? Does the definition of neighbor supersede the convers-, or precede, I should say, the conversation that you want to have in order to do some of this healing that you're you're talking about. I say people disagree with me on this. I don't know. I am a proponent of bringing those voices, even the ones we don't like, even the ones we find distasteful, into the conversation. And I get nervous about the idea that that there is a kind of this is the wrong word, shared progressivism that is necessary to be part of the conversation in the first place. What do you think about that?

Michael Trice: 46:16

Well, you're reminding me, first of a friend who's a was a bishop for years, and 20 plus years ago, told me the story of how he had he was from a small rural community in the United States, and his mother had saved and scrimped to get him to go to college. He was first generation to go to college. He went to college and came back after his freshman year in the winter for winter holiday. She was a very faithful Catholic practitioner went to her parish church every every week, and served in volunteer positions, and was just such a faithful person. He used to talk about how he could hear her praying in a small, such a small house, that the only place she could go for privacy was to just go to the to the bathroom, and she would stand in that space or sit down and pray, and he has the memory of that when she was when he was a child. So he comes back after his freshman year. He's taken a couple of undergraduate religion courses, and he's so sure that faith itself is for a less mature consciousness, you know, a less mature person. And he, I think, unintentionally, for a 19 year old, and what she receives is that he berates her for, you know, like you don't really like, let me tell you how it really is, Mom, it's not like that. Faith is like this. And he said he would never forget the look on her face, when, when, when he realized that he was telescoping a kind of critique, not just of her, but of her core. In that moment, the woman who had made it possible for him to even sit for a second, any of those classes, she still loved him. They got through that. But it's a lesson on not diminishing the person right in front of you who has who has come to a season of their, you know, their their religious, philosophical, whatever language we use, their belief system shows up. They know certain things about the world. And if my first reaction is to attempt to deconstruct what they know, because I think I can or have a right to that, I'll learn what this bishop learned, that on the receiving end of that is actually nothing that will move a conversation really forward. I just want to say that from the start that that was an early lesson for him, and it's one that, that stays with me. So the price of admission to dialog, to real engagement, I think, begins with with showing up honestly. It's about listening without without intent to convert or diminish. It's about acknowledging the dignity of the person that we're talking about. And all of that can happen at the same time. Happen the same time that I can virulently disagree with the Vice President of the United States. So for instance, if, if, if St Augustine really thought that love was as limited, as, as, as, as the vice president thought, then it certainly would be preferential for just a very small circle of people kind of scaling out if he felt that. And, and Augustine, of course, gets that from a number of thinkers through 400 years before he even gets to 450 years before he even gets to to Jesus of Nazareth, who is credited for having a particular view of love of the neighbor that escapes the bounds of my own provisions for what I think is right or admissible, which is why eating with taxpayers and lepers was so distasteful to some, and yet was right. The tuning fork for that in terms of caring for your neighbor, seemed to hum right along in a manner that 2000 years is reflected by both Pope Francis and Pope Leo in addressing a Vice President or anyone who would put limitations on the love of the transcendent for humanity so you can believe all of those things and speak up honestly from our respective traditions, to listen without intention, to convert or diminish, to acknowledge the dignity of of this individual to hold that view, but to also recognize and assert that the history of this discourse, the theological framing of it, going back millennia, is not in agreement, and sometimes that may feel like a bitter pill, like well, Is that too much in a time in our history where we believe in the dominance of the opinion as the guiding authority, and I think that's tough. There's, there are histories that show, when we take a certain stance in the ordering of love, that the diminishments that we, that we may not intend in that take place anyway, and theologians and others people of faith have a right to call that into question, just as this Bishop's mother called into question his perceptions of her when she said, "My faith makes me whole. My faith gets me through every day", good, pluralistic, bridge building. And think about this in our own lives. It's true in our you know, even our most important relationships in our life, we're always trying to find a way to reach the person we're with, including ourselves. It's, healthy skepticism has a place, but not all voices are shaped equally. That may sound like, that may, that may sound like that's, that's an intrusion to the very things I'm mentioning, but positions that fundamentally demand deny the humanity of others is participating in something that is on a false start from this, from the beginning, progress is possible with full participation, but I cannot begin by demolishing those who have views other than mine. So to this last point, I think you're right, is what I'm hearing in your question. For too long, religious voices in this country. I'll just come out and say it this way. It's like a you know, conservatives speak with conservatives. Progressives speak with progressives. Progressives often hold bilateral, we're called bilateral, multilateral dialogs between different religious traditions. We get into rooms. Have potlucks with one another. We love to share with one another, but we're all likely to have a least common denominator approach to the world, shared worldviews, and we kind of see each other and get it, and we can feel kind of fulfilled, and even a little sanctimonious or self righteous, like, don't we feel good? We've had this great experience, right? But who's not at the table? Asking, who's not at the table? I'm always mindful. I'll go back to this example again. Have I made space for those who have led dedicated lives, faithful lives, in their communities, who are trying to do their utmost, given what they know from seats of wisdom and experience that are not my own. And yet, don't I have an obligation as someone who's a constructive person working in my community, wherever I may be in for profit or nonprofit, as a theologian or as a carpenter, it doesn't matter all these things, don't I have an obligation to try to understand well meaning people on their own terms and elicit from them the stories that shape their lives, which, here's the last point, if I understand the stories that shape the lives, let's say, of my good friends in Newton, Kansas, who live in that area and have been faithful members of that particular church for all of these years, and so are their parents and grandparents. Don't I have an obligation and even a genuine curiosity and wonder that's appreciative of who they are, also called by God to be in the world, to get to know them. Agreement and consensus is not the first thing that I'm trying to reach when I'm in conversation with us. I'm just trying to become more aware because we're limited, because human, human life is short, because we have this amount of time together. And so it's meaningful to try to get to know others, and then getting to know one another will shape the agenda of what we need to talk about next. So together, we'll determine what the future has to be. I mentioned all of that because in a time where our Commons is less healthy, those with moral imaginations, who can help bridge build toward the center where these stories have legitimacy and matter, will do better, will do a lot better. There's a story last week that came out that I'm mindful of, of a man from Detroit, Michigan. He was in the middle class for most of his, he and his wife for for most of their lives. His wife unfortunately died both of his, his, their financial situation was considerably diminished, and both of his children ended up working in positions that were not of their first, second, or even third, choice just to make it through, like, there are a lot of people living in that way who don't have time to have a conversation about faith or how it should guide our lives. So reaching those folks, providing an elixir or some kind of respect that is due to all of us, I think, is a really important first step of pluralism. And so none of this work should be considered as this kind of theoretical, esoteric, 50,000 foot view, although I can't help but talk in those spaces often, my heart is right down there in the center of those spaces with that young woman in the bathroom praying. That's true, too.

Chip Gruen: 55:52

So I've taken a good deal of your time, so I want to be mindful of that, and I want to finish up with one more question that is my, has become my signature sign off. What are we not talking about, right? What have I not asked you about that you think is really germane to this conversation? What does our audience need to, need to consider or think about, or what perspective can you offer that that you know, that we really need to be mindful of?

Michael Trice: 56:20

I think one of the things that pluralism does and engaged public theology. But I would suggest it's true in in business, whether I'm a mid manager or wherever I may be in the in the panoply of systems that we just started to talk about from the start, that and this may sound really kind of far reaching. It is, like if you go back 20,000 years to the first, first footprint in the New Mexico desert, where I'm from, and you follow that trajectory all the way up to the point we're in now, you'll discover that in the footfall those footprints are human communities, there's a community walking through there. It wasn't just someone solitary out there alone. You couldn't survive that desert alone. They were together, and they were shaped by events, by traveling, by need for safety, by water and food resources, and over time, they were also shaped because none of those things alone will keep us in community. They were shaped by story and by how stories have kind of truths and gems and values inside of them, about our ancestors and also about where we're going into the future as we're walking through these lands with broad, open vistas. You can imagine horizons and the night sky with full of stars looking down on us before we had any ambient light. Imagine that, the power of story, the importance of ritual, and the thing that sustained us as human beings through all of those times was actually not cruelty, because there was enough of that. It was the obverse. It was the other. We are drawn and attracted to relationships and stories and liturgy, rituals and memories that remind us of what's meant to be beautiful about the cosmos and our place in it, too. Like beauty, beauty shows us two things. It shows us that we're human and that we're filled up with this sense at awe and wonder at what we may be looking at right there, we often talk about a rose, for instance. You know, the beauty of a rose. But the second thing we also recognize staying with that image is that beauty is also fading like a rose, like it's limited, which makes it all that much more precious. I think what's important in our lives, in our relationships, in our families, in our communities, is to ask ourselves, from those first footfalls to now, where we live right now in our lives, what is the essence of the beauty, the most meaningful that is at core of my life. And in what way do I intend to share that with others, with my family, with my neighbor, whoever they may be, in ways that are non coercive and non constrictive, and yet are part of a base of stories that must be told, because what we find precious, even the limitations of our own lives, are essential, not just for the now, but they're essential features of our shared humanity. We're, as far as we know, the only species on record yet that articulates the value of the world and the cosmos around us through an esthetic, through a sense of beauty, which has a way of deeply resonating with us emotionally. We call that catharsis, deep recognition of connection. Good public theology is doing that. Good leadership on teams is doing that too, seeing the beauty in others so. Seeing how we participate and facilitate that, I'd say, if we can all give some thought to that and ask ourselves a core question, you know, how is beauty showing up amidst all of this uniqueness and difference, and what's my role in being an advocate for it in the world? That would be quite an important task for our daily life.

Chip Gruen: 1:00:21

All right. Well, I think we will leave it there for today. Michael Trice, thank you so much for coming on ReligionWise. This has been great.

Michael Trice: 1:00:28

Thank you. Thanks so much. Chip.

Chip Gruen: 1:00:32

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.