the only site I can think of where there is a greater likelihood of individual transformation, where one must negotiate more contending forces pushing against you, and where there is closer attention to the potential for growth and the reshaping of relationships than the academy is the birth canal. 

Mark’s presentation and mine make for a complete “bible” for the public square.

It seems to me that civility isn’t what comes after neighbor love (contra Tony’s suggestion that “You first need love, then you need civility”).  Civility is the way neighbor-love expresses itself in that context.  Civility is a form of neighbor-love.

A breach of civility is obnoxious to the orderly mind and a threat to civil peace. However, it probably doesn’t destroy the social bonds as much as lovelessness. You need first love, then you need civility.

Christian faith begins in a grace-filled revelation that is always disruptive and never determined by the prior holiness or the moral rectitude of either the speaker or the recipient of a revelatory word.  To the extent that living out a Christian faith is a continual project of discerning the word and work of God and responding appropriately, it is therefore hard for me to imagine any context in which Christians should refuse to listen to another person.  Of course, listening to another person is not the same thing as accepting what that other person has to say: discerning how one who is Wholly Other may be speaking also means rejecting words that are antithetical to the witness of the gospel.  And since the Christian life is a kind of pilgrimage, the practices of listening and discerning are wrapped in processes of developing particular virtues and resisting the temptations of particular vices.

It is a privilege to once again participate in one of Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversations. As Harold emphasized in last month’s conversation, one cannot predict where a respectful conversation will go. Nevertheless, I’m glad to be “going” somewhere in this conversation with Julia Stronks as we follow up a rather provocative showing last month. I will also say from the start how grateful I am that we can have in conversation freely in the most literal sense. Neither Julia nor I, nor the previous discussants, need to be looking over our shoulders worrying about being arrested for our musings here. The American constitutional commitment to free speech, even if imperfectly realized, is a significant accomplishment that has been and continues to be all too rare in the world. We do well to remember our neighbors in other regimes who literally sit in prison cells because their governments do not value free speech.

I find that I agree with much of what Harold has said about the need for Christians to engage with humility, courage and love. But I also agree with Greg that our culture is struggling with problems that are deeper than managing the mode by which we engage. Civility is a good thing—of course it is. But I am wary of calls for civility, especially because those calls often come from people in power irritated by others who are angry about injustices that they have experienced.