JI: The question I’m asking is whether we can see the people around us as human beings and image bearers of God, and not just problems and interruptions to our day, which is an important predicate to disagreeing well. It’s going to be very hard to disagree well with someone if you don’t recognize their humanity, or if you see them as just an inconvenience to you.  

On this day, I had spent a few hours writing this book, and then had to go to the County Records Office and encounter my own frustration. I was processing my own limitations in real time as I was trying to tell other people how they should be thinking about engaging with disagreement and difference. That afternoon, I encountered this woman who really did brighten my day in an unexpected way, in the middle of a process that was frustrating and annoying and not very efficient. The thought experiment I was having with myself was – if she hadn’t been nice to me, would I have responded differently? Would this story have had a happy ending?  

It was an invitation to myself to think about the work I still have to do in these situations, and a reminder that in the ordinary course of our days we encounter all kinds of human beings who are all very complex, who are dealing with their own challenges and problems. If we don’t pause to remember that, we’ll go through our days hurting and dismissing a lot of people who could use a little humanity and decency. 

C.S. Lewis has this wonderful quote in “The Weight of Glory,” “You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Everybody you encounter is this eternal being with a destiny ahead of them, and you’re pushing them closer or farther away from that destiny depending on the way you engage with them. I love that reminder. I don’t always keep it top of mind, but it’s a really important one. 

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

MJ: You tell your law students to find the cases and ideas they think are best, and then force themselves to figure out the best arguments on the other side. Why is this so important for your students? And what does this look like outside of a law school classroom for the rest of us? 

JI: The connection between what we do in the law school classroom and how it applies to everyday life is one of the key themes of the book. My intuition is that the work of wrapping your head around the fullness, complexity, and strength of the argument on the other side forces you into an act of empathy, whether you want it to or not.  

If you can take the time to think deeply about an argument from the other side,  think about why this person made that argument, what resources they drew from, what authorities they considered, and what are the strengths of the points that they’re making – which is what you have to do to be a good lawyer or a good law student – then it’s very difficult, at the end of that process, to come away with the same sense of dismissal that you might have had without having done that work.  

I think that lesson is applicable to our everyday interactions at the family dinner table or with a neighbor. And there are ways to practice this. In a conversation with someone, you could ask them, “How did I do? Am I getting your point here?” We will still disagree. But it’s going to leave us with fewer black and white arguments because most of our complex arguments in society involve people of good faith who see the world differently and come to very different views about an important issue or policy.  

MJ: You make the point that it’s not wise to jump right into conversations about a controversial topic with someone you just met. Instead, you need time to build a relationship before diving into the hard stuff.  

As you know well, that’s the heart of Interfaith America’s model. But it can be challenging to create spaces where people are choosing to reach out and interact with people who think differently than they do in this divisive cultural moment. What advice do you give to students about how to take that first step to try to get to know someone with whom they disagree? 

JI: The real opportunity of the college environment is that it allows for so many informal interactions and informal spaces. You need a framework and a culture that promotes authentic dialogue, and that allows people to try things out and make mistakes rather than jump to condemn every malformed statement.  

But that’s not going to happen well in a 300-person lecture hall or a public debate. These things are best when they’re in small and sustained groups, whether it’s a small seminar, or a dorm discussion. Part of this is encouraging the right mix of the social and the superficial with the deep and the challenging, so that these relationships can unfold in a larger context, where people are sharing meals, playing games together, and enjoying each other’s presence within an institutional structure rather than simply sitting down to have a hard conversation over an area of difference. That’s not how we function best. The gift of the university is that it has the potential to offer that holistic experience. 

MJ: Later in the book, you write, “As with other faith commitments, you will likely find that encouraging greater honesty about different beliefs leads to more authentic relationships.” Can you say more about that? What do you see as the interplay in your mind – and in your experience – between interfaith engagement and the tools and skills required to engage across religious difference, and how you might bridge ideological divides more broadly? 

JI: Interfaith engagement done well can be a model for other kinds of engagement across difference, particularly as we are increasingly becoming a country where people’s political identities start to take on religious-like significance. We’ve got a lot of lessons to draw from the interfaith context, where somebody says, “This is not just my belief, or this is not just my viewpoint, but this is so much of who I am and how I see the world, and why I live a certain way.” That’s always been true with a number of different identity characteristics, but I think religion most prominently foregrounds the connection between beliefs and practices, especially related to issues of cosmic significance. 

One of the things I love about Interfaith America is that it encourages an authentic engagement that asks people to bring the complete versions of themselves and their beliefs and actions – which is going to result in some stark differences and some similarities with others. It doesn’t gloss over the differences or pretend that they don’t exist.  

In our broader society and across a whole number of difficult legal and policy issues over which we disagree, it’s not going to help anyone to pretend like the differences aren’t there, or that they don’t matter. And just like some interfaith efforts of a generation ago didn’t make much inroads into people who actually embodied significant differences, I think that if a cross-ideological effort doesn’t take differences seriously then, it is unlikely to sustain lasting friendships and relationships. 

Interfaith engagement done well can be a model for other kinds of engagement across difference.

MJ: What brings you hope these days, and what do you hope people take away from your book?  

JI: Hope is a tricky concept. It might be a uniquely theological concept. As a Christian, I have hope in the object of my faith. I want to be careful about naming hope in too many other things. I do have optimism, though, in a lot of other areas.  

I have optimism regularly, when I talk to college-age audiences. I see a student population that like all student generations of the past, is passionate, has a lot of energy, is restless, and wants to see change. They have also been raised in a more diverse and pluralistic environment. Some of the discomfort and anxiety that older generations might be feeling with the changing America isn’t as acute to younger generations who are more interested in engaging. They’ve also seen some of the negative lessons of earlier generations, namely that we’re holding on to too much institutional control, and they want to see a different way of engaging in the world. I think this is particularly true in certain Christian circles, where membership in majority culture has been taken for granted by some older generations and the change feels like a loss, but for younger generations change feels like a real opportunity. So I’m optimistic about that.  

And I’m optimistic about the local. I’m optimistic about real people who have to work with other real people, not in the social media world but in the real world where things happen in complex and sometimes messy ways. And people want to make that work.  

I hope the book is encouraging, but also practical. I wrote it with the goal of having people read it and discuss it with others. It’s not a how-to guide; it’s not a “here are 10 steps to better disagreement,” but I’m trying to model a kind of thinking and a way of reading that might lead people to a different kind of action. It’s only that action over time, in community, within institutions, that will actually change people’s behavior. So there’s nothing that a single book or a single talk is going to do, but if people can begin to see things differently and try to practice those new ways of seeing things, then that would be a great first step.