Church Potluck: A Smorgasbord of Christian Curiosity
Church Potluck serves up thoughtful, friendly, informal conversation at the intersection of Christianity and contemporary culture. Just like a church potluck, we offer variety: a variety of topics, a variety of academic disciplines, and a variety of Christian traditions. Guests are friends and colleagues who are also experts in the fields of sociology, political science, theology, philosophy, divinity, and more.
Church Potluck: A Smorgasbord of Christian Curiosity
Love Your Enemies, Protect Your Neighbors: The Ethics of Acrimony
What happens when Christians disagree so deeply that dialogue itself feels dangerous? Can churches balance the call to love enemies with the responsibility to protect neighbors? And how do we speak the truth in love without sliding into silence—or into shouting?
In this episode, newbie Dr. Kathryn Heidelberger (comparative Christian–Islamic ethics) and relative newbie Dr. David Barr (Christian ethics) join oldie Michael Bailey and host Dale McConkey for a searching conversation about the ethics of Christian disagreement. The conversation reckons with real tensions in the Christian life: persuasion versus coercion, civility versus complicity, and the danger of dehumanizing those we oppose.
Drawing on Aquinas’s vision of virtue, Martin Luther King Jr.’s practice of nonviolence, Howard Thurman’s insistence on dignity, and Luther’s defense of the neighbor, the panel explores how rhetoric, motives, and methods shape the church’s witness.
To close, we lighten the mood with “Engage or Enrage”—a quick game where we test our tolerance for delightfully trivial habits.
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.