Cultural Division and Civil Discourse with Dr. John Rose

Religion and modern America

It is difficult to conceive of human beings independent of our relationship with religion. For all of history, religion has captivated the minds, hearts, and lives of every human society. It has driven our politics, shaped and divided families, and built our countries. But the modern West has a unique relationship with religion. It has rejected it, secularized key institutions, and now seems to be giving organized religion, and specifically Christianity, another look. Is the human person fundamentally religious? Can we escape a religious impulse? How do religious ideals contribute to our American governance and political makeup? Understanding religion reveals something about the human person. It says something about how we engage politically, within culture, and how we treat other people. I sat down with Dr. Molly Worthen to discuss these questions, our American religious and political moment, and more. Dr. Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the religious and intellectual history of North America. She is a freelance journalist who regularly writes about religion, politics, and education for the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker. Dr. Worthen’s new book Spellbound details the role of charisma in American political and religious history.

Cultural Division and Civil Discourse with Dr. John Rose

We live in a cultural moment that is fraught with division and ideological war. It’s a moment where the civic and moral duty has become to act with contempt and hatred for one’s ideological and political enemies. Civic duty has become noticeably uncivil. Perhaps nowhere is this trend more prevalent than at universities. In a space where the young adults who will lead and play foundational roles in forming culture are growing and developing, these universities are not places for struggle and engagement with important and opposing ideas, but places where a status quo is built, strengthened, and forcefully kept. However, there are notable efforts for renewal in important cultural and political spheres. Dr. John Rose is a professor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, a program that works to cultivate civil discourse and engagement with the fundamental questions of life. Dr. Rose teaches classes that cultivate student engagement across differences, exploring some of the most controversial debates in the modern world with an eye toward developing love and charity in his students. Dr. Rose is an important figure in the civil discourse movement and his Wall Street Journal opinion, “How I liberated my college classroom”, detailed the success and importance of his efforts to cultivate charitable dialogue amidst controversial questions in his classroom at his previous institution, Duke University.