April 24, 2025 - David Brooks - Faith & Connection: How to Know a Person

Heat. Heat. [Music] Maybe we should all just go home now. Um, good evening everyone. I'm Pastor Tim Westermire, senior pastor of St. Philip to Deacon, uh, which is privileged to put on these community services we call the faith and life lecture series. Uh thank you all for being here. Thank you to those of you who are at home uh for being here. This is the 22nd uh season of Faith and Life and the end of the 22nd season. So tonight you are experiencing the 110th speaker for this amazing community series. For 22 years we have

brought people in. I was talking to our speaker tonight about this. Most of them are not theologians or pastors. most are lay people in any variety of kinds of work uh who come simply to talk about how Christian faith informs what they do. And so again, we've had um academics, we've had authors, we've had journalists, we've had doctors, we've had scientists, we've had artists, we've had athletes, and on and on and on. I will give you a word about tonight's speaker in a minute. Before I do that though, I'll just give you a sense of

the flow of the evening after I get down and I introduce our speaker. uh he'll be up here for 40 minutes or so for his talk. Um I'll have a few words of thanks after that. Following that, there will be a chance for Q&A. We've been doing Q&As's for 22 years. Um this is a slightly larger crowd than most. So in terms of of setting expectations, um we I really do believe very strongly in giving people a chance to ask their questions directly. And so there's a mic there and a mic there. Uh for those

of you at home, um you can either write your questions into the box below the the live stream. Um or you can email us a question at social [Music] sdlc.org. So socialc.org. My point about the large attendance is I I'm going to guarantee we're not going to get through all the questions. Okay? So there will come a point where I will call last question. I'm just going to ask please don't hate me. Okay. Um please accept that and and you there'll be a chance by the way after the talk to chat with our speaker. Uh

we have a book seller here subtext books. You can buy a book he'll inscribe it. Um so our speaker tonight uh is an author. Uh he is a columnist. He is someone who many of you know probably through PBS through the NewsHour. Uh, interestingly, he's been really important to this congregation. I've shared a little bit about this with him. Two of his books, uh, one, The Road to Character, uh, which came out in 2015, I believe, and more recently, How to Know a Person, which he is speaking about tonight, um, were really important for how

we think about what we do as a congregation and have been an important part of our strategic planning and reflecting on the culture in which we live. Um, every speaker that we have, I always ask them for something that's a little off thebeaten path or a quirky interest or hobby that they have that might not be on their formal bio. Um, in his case, I didn't have to do that because those of you who know this book, how to know a person, uh, which again he's talking about tonight is it's a book really at some

level about how to have a effective conversation. And so, among many other things, he gives you tips for questions you can ask people. Uh, one of those which I have grown to love is what's your favorite unimportant thing about yourself. You can reflect on that and share your answer with someone later. His answer though or one of his answers is I like early Taylor Swift better than late Taylor Swift. So, will you help me welcome author, columnist, PBS consultant, and early Swifty David Brooks. Thank you, Tim. I I asked that question of a very prominent

theologian once and I learned that he watches way more trashy reality dating TV than I wish. I wish I didn't know that about him, but now I do. So, uh, it's good to be here, uh, with you, Tim, and it's good to be here back in Minnesota. I spent a lot of time in, especially in the Twin Cities area. I had family, uh, who were from Detroit Lakes, um, and Ottertale. Uh, and, um, I remember first hearing about Detroit Lakes, I was like, that's like Newark acres. Like, that didn't make sense to me. Um, uh,

and it's also always a thrill and an honor for me to be on any sort of pulpit Um, I went to a small school in in New York City in elementary school called Grace Church School. Uh, and I was actually in the choir for a little while and uh, because it was New York City, our choir was about 30 or 40% Jewish. Uh, and uh, so we would sing the hymns, but to square it with our religion, we wouldn't sing the word Jesus. And so the volume would drop down in the church and then it

would come back in. uh and then I lived my adult life and then in my 50s uh I came to faith uh and I and I learned during that process that when you're seeking uh Christians sends you books and so in the course of about 6 months I got about seven or 800 books sent to me only 500 of which were different copies of Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. And then I came to faith in 2013 or so. And then the politics of the last eight years happened. And when I came to faith, I thought,

I know what Christians are like. They they read Henry Dowen, they read Frederick Bner, uh they read Tolken and and people like that, Tim Keller. And I said this to a friend of mine who runs a seminary a year or two ago, and he said, "Oh, you thought it was all the Shire. You thought it was just the hobbits." But no, there's a bigger world out there and I' since come to learn that. So, I'm going to try to talk a bit about faith, a bit about um the world we're in right now that we

can have questions about that later. Uh and a bit about human connection. And I am not naturally the sort of person who is good at talking about human connection. Uh if you ever saw that movie Fiddler on the Roof, um you know how warm and huggy Jewish families can be. And they're always singing and laughing and dancing. And so I came from the other kind of Jewish family. And so the the slogan in my household was think Yiddish, act British. Uh and so we're super emotionally reserved, stiff upper lip. And then when I was um

seven, I read a book called Paddington the Bear. And I decided at that moment I wanted to become a writer. And being a writer is a lonely profession. It's a pretty solitary profession. So human connection is not really required. Uh but being a writer was part of my identity. And I remember in high school I wanted to date this woman named Bernice. And she didn't date want to date me. She dated some other guy. And I remember thinking, what is she thinking? I write way better than that guy. So, uh, those were my values. Uh,

and then when I was 18, the admissions officers at Columbia, Wesley, and Brown universities decided I should go to the University of Chicago. And, uh, if you know anything about Chicago, the famous saying, it's where fun goes to die. It's not actually a social circus there at Chicago. It's super cerebral, super intellectual. My favorite saying about Chicago, it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas. So very cerebral and I fit right in. Uh I had a double major there in history and celibacy uh while I was there and I freshman

year I entered my college roommate in the Golden Gloves boxing competition. uh he had never boxed a day in his life and we gave him a nickname the kosher killer. Uh and then we trained the University of Chicago way which is we didn't actually practice boxing but we read a lot of books about boxing and then I got out of school and I went into journalism. Uh and again very cerebral. I was hired I was hired as a conservative columnist at the New York Times in 2003 a job I likened to being the chief rabbi

of Mecca. Uh, not a lot of company there. And then I got a job in TV. And you would have thought that would loosen me up a little cuz TV is a more emotional medium than writing, sitting alone in a room and writing. But I got a job on the most cerebral part of TV, which was the PBS NewsHour. And um, we do these like 14-minute conversations about fiscal policy and things like that. And we have a very thoughtful uh viewership. Uh somewhat seasoned. Uh and so um if a 93y old lady comes up to

me in the airport, I know what she's going to say. Uh I don't watch your program, but my mother loves it. So all this to say is I'm not naturally that social and so I had to work on it. And so I wrote a book called The Social Animal. I wrote a book about emotion to learn what emotions are. And then I wrote a book, as Tim said, called the road to character to try to understand what character development had was. And I learned writing that book, writing a book on character doesn't actually give you

good character. And even reading a book on character doesn't give you good character, but buying a book on character does give you good character. And I think eventually I evolved. And I can prove it because a couple years ago I was at in Nantucket in Massachusetts at a conference and the speaker, it's a room like this. We were in a church and he has a piece of paper he hands out to everybody and it has lyrics to a love song on it. And uh he says, "Okay, I want you all to find a stranger, gaze

into their eyes, and sing the love song to them." And if you had asked me to do that 15 years ago, I would have spontaneously combusted. But I found some old guy. I gazed into his eyes and I sang the love song to him and there was no spark. There was no chemistry between us sadly. But um but it it showed that you know you can evolve and I've tried to become a little more human. Now the problem is that as I've become slightly more human, American society has become slightly more dehumanized. And so I

won't recite all the statistics just a few. You probably know mental health crisis. The mental health problems are rising significantly. Depression rates by about 30%. 36% of Americans say they're persistently lonely. 45% of high school students say they're persistently hopeless and despondent. The number of uh people in America who say they have no friends is up by four-fold since 2000. The number of Americans not in a romantic relationship is up by a third since 2000. uh the American number of Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up by 50% since 2000. So

we've just become sadder and when you become sadder you become meaner because you feel we we evolved to be surrounded by people looking out for each others. Uh and when you feel nobody sees you you feel you're under threat and you want to lash out. And so I won't recite all the mean statistics. The one that gets me is that a generation ago, twothirds of Americans gave to charity every year. Now, fewer than half of Americans give to charity. Uh my sister-in-law is a a nurse at a hospital in New Jersey. And she says their

main problem is keeping staff because the patients have become so abusive, the nurses burn out and want to leave the profession. Uh and this meanness shows up in our politics. Uh and it shows up in the form of uh people trying to use politics as a um as to fill the hole in their soul because politics gives you the illusion you can be a member of a community, but you're not really in a community. You're just on team red or team blue. Politics gives you the illusion of uh that you're doing righteous action for the

country, but you're not sitting with the widow or serving the poor. you're just hating people on Twitter. And so what you if you try to solve and there was a study by a guy name Ryan Streer who found that people who say they're lonely are seven times more likely to volunteer for political activity than other people. And so if you're trying to use politics to fill that hole in your soul, you're asking more of politics than it can deliver. And you're also le trying to escape loneliness, but you're winding up in a state of cultural

war. And so the most important statistic to me in American society is the decline in trust. Two generations ago, you asked people, "Do you trust your neighbors?" And 60% said, "Yeah, my neighbors are trustworthy." Now that's down to 30%. And it's very age related. People in Boomer and X generation are pretty still pretty trusting. But among Gen Z and millennials, only 19% say they trust their neighbor. Uh they did a survey recently. They asked Gen Z, younger people in their 20s, uh, do you think most people are selfish and out to get you? And 72%

of young adults agreed with that statement. So imagine going through life like that. And so there are a lot of different stories to explain what's going on. And I agree with most of them. There's a technology story, social media is driving us crazy. That's partially true. There's a a sociology story, which is we're not we're not we're we're not we're bowling alone. We're less active in civic life, so we don't know each other as much. There's an economic story. We're more unequal. But I'll just focus on two stories which I think are related. And the

one is what you might call the loss of a secure base. One of my favorite sayings in child psychology is from a guy named John Bulby. And he said, "All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base." We need that secure base if we're going to adventure in life. And for most of us, the most important secure base, of course, is a secure attachment to mom or dad or some caregiver in childhood. But there are other forms of secure base. There's the having a safe neighborhood, having a group of friends around

you, and I think the most one now that I'm standing on an altar uh is to be believe that you're enscconced in a moral order. that there's something by which you can judge right and wrong. There's something morally that holds a community and a nation together. George Marson was a historian who wrote of Martin Luther King that what gave King's rhetoric such force was the belief that there was a moral order built into the universe that slavery and segregation and betrayal are not just wrong in some places and sometimes but they are always wrong. And

so there is a such a thing as a moral law. And over the last few years or maybe decades, we've as we've grown more individualistic as a society, we've privatized morality. We've told people uh come up with your own values. Come up with your own truth. And if your name is Aristotle, maybe you can do that. Most of us can't do that. But more important, if we don't have shared morals, we can't trust each other because we don't think we I don't I can't know that you're going to do what you ought to do. Walter

Litman was a a great columnist in the 1950s and he said he wrote way back in 1955, "If what is right or wrong is just something each individual decides based on his or her own feelings, then we are outside the bounds of civilization." And I I we talk about all the causes of social fracture, but I think the loss of a coherent moral order is a real undermining of of our shared values and our shared lives together. The second story I'll emphasize is the most simple, which is that over the last couple generations, we've failed

to teach young people how to be kind and considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life. These are just basic moral skills. How do you sit with someone who's grieving? How do you ask for an offer forgiveness? How do you break up with somebody without crushing their heart? These are just basic moral skills that could be taught, but somehow are not. For example, I was never taught how to end a conversation gracefully. I remember I went to my fifth high school reunion and um my only trick for getting out of a a conversation

in a cocktail party setting was to say, "Oh, I've got to go to the bar and get another drink." So, 20 minutes into my high school reunion, I'm so drunk I have to leave the place. And there's one skill that rises above all the other social skills and that's the ability to make other people feel seen, heard, respected and understood. Every family, church, company or society is based on that skill. So, how good are you in this room at that skill? Uh, well, I don't know most of you, aside from the fact you're all very

nice. Um, but I can tell you with great confidence, you're not as good as you think you are. There's a guy at the University of Texas who studies this and the average person uh understands what's going on in another person's mind when they're talking to them about 22% of the time. Some people are pretty good. They're 55% of the time. A lot of people are 0% of the time, but think they're 100%. And those are the people who miss all the social cues you're sending them. So, I've come to believe that in any group of

people, there are two general sorts. There's diminishers and there illuminators. Diminishers are never curious about you. They make you feel small and unseen. Sometimes I'll leave a party and I'll think, you know, that whole time nobody asked me a question. I've come to think only about 30% of humanity are question askers. The rest are nice people. They're just not curious about you. Stere diminishers do a thing called stacking. They learn one fact about you and they make a whole series of generalizations about who you must be. They're stereotypers. Illuminators on the other hand are are

curious about you. They interact with you and they make you feel warm and lit up. There was a novelist named Imam Foster who wrote about 120 years ago and his biographer wrote of him to speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest and best self. Be great to be able to listen to other people with that level of intensity. There's a story told about Jenny Jerome who was later on would become Winston Churchill's mom and

uh but when she was a young woman in Victorian England she uh was seated at a dinner party next to the prime minister William Gladstone and she left that dinner I think thinking that Gladstone was the cleverest person in England and then sometime later she's at a different dinner party and she happens to be seated next to Gladstone's great political rival Benjamin Israeli and she left that dinner thinking that she was the cleverest person in England. So, it's nice to be a Gladstone. It's better to be Draeli. So, how do you get better? I'll just

walk us through a few of the steps. The first is the gaze. When you meet somebody for the first time, you're unconsciously asking yourself the same questions they're unconsciously asking themselves, which is, is this person going to be nice to me? Am I a person to this person? Am I a priority to this person? And the answer to that question will be answered in by the gaze, by the warmth of your eyes before any words come out of your mouth. In life, we tend to think we're being judged by our competence, but mostly we're being

judged by our warmth. And so I was at a diner in Waco, Texas some years ago, and I was having breakfast with a lady named Laru Dorsy who was like 92, 93, and she presented herself as a stern disciplinarian to me. She had been a teacher and she said, "I love my students enough to be tough with them." And I was a little intimidated by this drill sergeant type lady. And into the diner walks a a mutual friend of ours, a pastor named Jimmy Derell, who caters to the homeless in Waco. The homeless were not

comfortable coming into his church. So, he started having services under Highwaypass with the where the homeless live. And he sees us both and he knows us both. He comes over to the table and he grabs Mrs. Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulder and he shakes her way harder than he should ever shake a 93y old. And he says to her, "Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsy, you're the best. You're the best. I love you. I love you." And that stern drill sergeant lady I'd been talking to turns in an instant into a bright eye shining nine-year-old girl. He

had brought forth a different version of him with the warmth of her ga his gaze. And that's partly because Jimmy is a warmer personality than I have. But it's also because he's a pastor. And so when he meets anybody, he meets somebody made in the image of God. He meets somebody of a soul of infinite value and dignity. He meets somebody so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person. And I don't care if you're Lutheran or Presbyterian or Christian or Jewish or Muslim or atheist or whatever, but greeting each person you see

with that level of reverence and respect is an absolute precondition for seeing them well. So that's the gaze. The second is accompaniment. Most of the time in life, we're not having deep conversations. We're just hanging out. We're picking up our kids. We're playing golf. Whatever. Accompaniment is an other centered way of being with another person. Think of the way a pianist accompanies a singer trying to make her shine. So it's just being thinking about what's is going through this person's head right now and trying to be other centered. Sometimes accompaniment is just showing up for

people. I had a student um named Jillian Sawyer and I had her as a grad student but when she was in college um she um her dad got pancreatic cancer and they had the conversation that he probably wouldn't be around to see a lot of her big old events like or her wedding and some years later uh he died after college and in between college and grad school she was invited to be a bridesmaid at a friend's wedding and she uh watched the father of the bride at that wedding give a beautiful toast to his

daughter. And then it came time for the father-daughter dance. And Jillian decided, "It's still a little too soon. I don't want to see this." And so she went to the lady's room to have a cry. And when she got out of the lady's room, she noticed that all the people at her table and the adjacent table at the reception were waiting there in the hallway for her. And she wrote a paper about what happened next, which she's given me permission to quote. She wrote, "What I will remember forever is that no one said a word.

Each person, including newer newer boyfriends, who I knew less well, gave me a reaffirming hug and headed back to their table. No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief. They were there for me just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed." So, somebody at one of those tables had the presence of mind to say, "Let's go be in the hallway for Jillian." And that's accompaniment. The third and most important part of getting to know somebody is conversation. You can't guess what's in somebody else's head. You have to ask them. And

so I went around when read researching that book thinking, well, what are some tips for conver being a better conversationalist? I asked these experts and they they gave me a few. One is be a loud listener. I have a buddy uh who uh named Andy who um when you talk to him it's like talking to a one of those charismatic Pentecostal churches. He's like yes yes yes preach that. Amen. Amen. Love talking to that guy. Another is don't fear the pause. If we're having a meaningful conversation my comment starts on my shoulder and goes to

my fingertips. At what point have you stopped listening so you can think of what to say next? Probably about here. So, let me talk to my fingertips, then pause and then make a response. It's an honoring way to hear somebody. Don't be a topper. Uh, if you say to me, "Oh, I just had this horrible flight. We were on the tarmac for two hours." I'm likely to say to you, "Oh, I know what you were going through. I was on a horrible flight. We were on the tarmac for six hours." And it sounds like I'm

trying to relate, but really what I'm saying is let's pay less attention to your inferior set of experiences and more to my superior set. Finally, keep the gem statement at the center. If you're disagreeing about something, there's probably something deep down you agree upon. So, if my brother and I are fighting about our dad's healthcare, we may disagree about the kind of care he should get, but we both want what's best for our dad. That's the gem statement. And if we can keep returning to the gem statement, you can preserve the relationship amid disagreement. So

these are some tips. But then the most important thing for being a good conversationalist is asking good questions. The quality of your questions determine the quality of your um conversation. And I know everybody in this room was once a phenomenal question asker because you're all former three-year-olds. I just read a book by a woman named Susan Engel who found out that two or three year olds ask on average about 150 questions an hour and we've all been there. Um I have a friend named Naobi Wei who teaches uh eighth grade boys in New York City

how to be journalists. So the first time she wanted to teach them how to be interviewers. And so she went to the front of the room the first time she ever did this and said to the boys, "Ask me anything and I will answer you honestly. And so the first boy asked, "Are you married?" And she said, "No." And the second boy said, "Are you divorced?" And she said, "Yes." And the third boy said, "Do you still love him?" She was like, "Whoa, [Laughter] whoa." And she she started crying and said, "Yes." And the next

boy said, "Does he know you still love him?" And the next one, "Do your kids know?" They're like, And so I like to ask when I get to know somebody, I like to ask questions that get them thinking about their lives in a new way. They're sort of 30,000 ft questions. And so if this five years is a chapter in your life, what's the chapter about? Uh or what crossroads are you in the middle of? Most of us are in the middle of some life transition. What crossroads are you in the middle of? If you

died tonight, what would you regret not doing? What would you do if you weren't afraid? I had a friend who was being interviewed for a job and he asked, "What would you do of the job interview at the end of the interview? What would you do if you weren't afraid?" And she started crying because she wouldn't be doing HR at that company. I used to ask my students at Yale, what would you do if you weren't afraid? And every year after class, a couple would come up to me and say, you know, I wouldn't be

at Yale. It's a great school, but it's not right for me. but I'm afraid to lose the prestige. And so fear plays a role in our lives. Now, so far I've been talking about um conversations that are normal. We happen to now live in hard and divided times and we have to have a lot of conversations um across differences and often across angry difference. And I can't tell this story from a pulpit, but I was at a baseball game and uh a guy turned around and in the ninth inning and said, 'Are you uh David

Brooks? And I expect him to say I said, "Yeah." And he said, "I thought he'd say I like the NewsHour, whatever. I read your column. You're going to have to use your imaginations." Uh he said, "You're a bleep bleep." like he just cursed at me for a while and then he his hands shaking and he was like I'm in the presence of evil and my son was there who's significantly larger than I am. Uh and he said, "Sir, please calm down. We're just trying to watch the game." And he said, "You should be ashamed of

that guy as your dad." And then my wife said, "Sir, please." And he said, "Go off me, woman." And he was like really in a tirade. And I I wrote a book about seeing others. So I naturally should have said sir let's talk about this and see you know let's get to know each other but sadly I have [Laughter] testosterone and so I was a little harsher back than I should have been and actually my wife was a better person than me was angry really angry with me after uh and I I've come to believe

when you come when somebody critiques you from across some ideological difference your only job is to stand in their standpoint. It's to ask them three or four or five different ways, how did you come to believe that? I never ask people, what do you believe anymore? Because I want them to get in storytelling mode. So I ask, how'd you come to believe that? And then you get them telling about some experience or something. And if you ask them those questions, you may not agree and they may not like you at the end, but at least

you'll you'll show them the respect that comes with curiosity. And there's a really great book called Crucial Conversations by a guy named Joseph Granny and a bunch of other authors. And they say every conversation takes place on two levels. What we're nominally talking about and the flow of emotion passing between us as we're speaking. Everything we say to each other is either making us feel more respected or less respected. More safe or less safe. And Granny and the authors write in any conversation respect is like air. If it's when it's present, nobody notices. But when

it's absent, it's all anybody can think about. So showing people that respect across conversations. Now these days, I ask people to tell me about a time somebody really got them, a time when they really felt seen. And a lot of the stories are kind of normal. Like a woman who was in her late 30s told me, "When I was 13, I had my first drink of alcohol and I went to a party. I got so drunk my parents dropped me off at my French porch and I couldn't get up. And my dad, who was a

strict disciplinarian, came out and I thought he was going to scream at me all the things I was already thinking in my head. I'm bad. I'm bad. I'm bad. Instead, she said, "He just scooped me up, carried me inside, laid me on the sofa, and said, there'll be no punishment here. You've just had an experience." And that's like a nice bit of fathering. But 25 years later, she remembered that moment as a time when somebody got her. The number one category people mention when I ask them who got you is teachers. Uh I I have

a friend whose daughter was in second grade and he uh his she was suffering. She was just struggling in school and the teacher one day said to her, "You know, you're really good at thinking before you speak." And that turned what the girl thought was her social awkwardness into a strength. And it turned the girl's ear around because she the teacher believed in her. when he told me the story, I was reminding my eighth grade, my 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Dnap, and I remember one day in class, I was making some smartass comment, which

is now my job. Uh, and she said, "David, you're trying to get by on glibess. Stop it." On the one hand, I was humiliated in front of the whole class. On the other hand, I thought, "Wow, she really knows me. I'm so honored." Rabbi Elliot Kukla had a congregant in his synagogue who's who had suffered a brain injury and sometimes even when she was just walking across the the the floor she would just fall fall to the ground and people would pick her up and she told Kukla, "I think people rush to help me up

because they're so uncomfortable with seeing an adult lying on the floor. But what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me." That's a good definition of empathy. Not doing what makes you comfortable, but getting down the ground with another human being. Sometimes in history books, I read come across somebody who um got somebody else. I was uh reading a book about Franklin Roosevelt and in the early New Deals days like 1934 35 or so, he had an oval office meeting with a 28-year-old house member, member of Congress named Lyndon

Johnson. And after Johnson left the Oval Office, FDR turned to his aid, Harold Ikis, and said, "You know, Harold, that's the kind of uninhibited young pro I might have been as a young man if I hadn't gone to Harvard." And then he continued, "In the next couple of generations, the balance of power in this country is going to shift to the south and west. And that kid, Lyndon Johnson, could well be our first southwestern president." That's pretty good. I uh sometime the m moments I read about are beautiful. There's a beautiful memoir I wrote called

I wrote read um I'm already plagiarizing uh um called Lost and Found by a woman named Katherine Schultz. And the book is mostly about her dad, a guy named Isaac. And Isaac sounds like the best dad ever. He was warm. He had opinions about everything from whether apple cobbler is better than apple crisp. And he told them hilarious stories. And then at the end of his life, he just grew silent when he got really sick. And this befuddled the family and his doctors because talking was what Isaac did. But he just stopped talking. And on

the last day, the family gathered around him and uh they wanted to say the things they didn't want to leave unsaid. And in the book, Schultz describes what it was like. My father, mute but seemingly alert, looked from one face to the next as we spoke, his brown eyes shining with tears. I had always hated to see him cry and seldom did. But for once, I was grateful. It gave me hope that for what may have been the last time in his life, and perhaps the most important, he understood. If nothing else, I knew that

everywhere he looked that evening, he found himself where he'd always been with the family, the center of the circle, the source and subject of our abiding love. And so that was a guy who died well seen. And it's good to be this to be seen. It's also really beautiful to be the seer. Couple years ago, I was reading I was sitting at my dining room table in Washington DC reading a boring book, which is what I get paid to do. Uh, and my wife walked in the front door and she paused on the threshold and

it was summertime and the sun was coming in behind her and she just stood there with her eye resting on an orchid that we kept on the table by the front door and she didn't even realize that I was there in the room. Um, because that's the kind of charisma I have. Um, and I looked up at her and I thought, you know, I really know her. I know her through and through. And if you'd asked me what I knew about her at that moment, it wasn't like her resume. It wasn't even the way I

would describe her to a stranger. It was just like the whole eb and flow of her being, the lifts and harmonies of her music, the incandescent of her personality, the occasional flashes of fierceness, the occasional insecurities. And it was like almost as if I wasn't seeing her, I was seeing out from her. And when you really know somebody well, you have a little glimpse of how they see the world. And if you had asked me how I was looking at her at that moment, I wasn't inspecting her. I wasn't really even observing her. The only

word that I can think of in the English language that describes it is a biblical world word. I was beholding her and it just was a great moment. And I told it a couple weeks after it happened, I told it to two friends of mine, a couple, and they said, "Yeah, that's what we do with our grandkids. We just behold them and it's a beautiful way of seeing and we're commanded to try to see the way Jesus sees and that's the way he saw. So we live in a tough time. The famous dates of our

era are hard dates. September 11th, January 6th, October 7th. It's um tempting to be pessimistic. Uh but I remain an upturn an optimist about this. I in 2020 I read a book called The Promise of Disharmony by a guy named Samuel Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard. And he writes in this book uh that when he looks back on American history, he happens to notice that there's some six weird 60-year pattern. That every 60 years or so, America goes through what he calls a moral convulsion. And a moral convulsion is when people get disgusted with

established power. People want to tear everything down. Social trust plummets. Marginalized groups demand inclusion. a young generation comes on the scene with passionate fervor. There's a new communications technology. He says this happened in the 1770s with the revolutionary generation. It happened in the 1830s with Andrew Jackson's populist era. It happened in the 1890s with industrialization and the progressive era. And it happened in the 1960s with the assassinations and the riots and the bombings. People forget there were 4,000 bombings on American college campuses in 1969. It was a brutal time. And so writing in 1981, he

said, "I don't know if I believe in the six-year pattern, but if the pattern holds, then sometime around 2020, we'll go through another moral convulsion." I was like, "Well done, Professor Huntington." And the good news, we come out of them. And the pain you go through at those times is part of the solution. I often ask people, you know, tell me about the experience that made you who you are. Nobody ever says, you know, I took this vacation to Hawaii. It was fantastic. That made me the person I am today. Nobody ever says that. It's

going through some hard time. It's going through a process of rupture and repair. Paul Tillic, the great theologian, said that moments of suffering interrupt your life and remind you you're not the person you thought you were. They carve into the floor of your basement of your soul and they reveal a cavity below. And then they carve through that and they reveal a cavity below. And in those moments, you know yourself better than you ever did. And you uh you see that only spiritual and moral food and relational food will fill those cavities. I went I

went through a hard time. Somebody gave me a Henry Nan book and he writes in this book, you have to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you. And I thought, screw that. I want to get out of the pain. But he was right. And we, Tim and I were talking about Frederick Bner. He said, 'In those moments of suffering, you can either be broken or broken open. Uh, and so in my moments of suffering, I've said, "Well, I've got to get broken open. I'm not going to cover myself up. I'm

going to grow more vulnerable." And as a country, we have to grow more vulnerable with each other. And so when you look at these 60-year moments, we go through the hard times, but then we do come out of them. And we come out of them in a in I think a three-step process. The first is we have a change in culture. In the 1880s, for example, American culture was dominated by something called social Darwinism, a belief in survival of the fittest. Sharp elbowed. It was a belief that poor people deserve to be poor because they

don't work hard. And that was replaced by the social gospel movement which was more communal and people looked out for each other a little more. Then it was replaced by a civic renaissance in the 1890s. Within a few short years we uh saw the rise of all sorts of community groups. the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Sierra Club, the Settlement House Movement, Jane Adams in Chicago, the NAACP, the unions. Basically, Americans looked around and said, "We've designed all our civic institutions as if American children are grown up on the prairies of Kansas, but we got

a million kids in Chicago and Cleveland and Baltimore. We need to build community groups." And then finally that led to the political uh movement, the progressive movement in around 1900 which saw a revi that saw the creation of the FDA, cleaning up of government, the civil service reform act, eventually the Federal Reserve system. And so it went cultural, civic, and political. And that seems to be the right order of how nations do the process of rupture and repair. And this the book I wrote was meant to be a contribution to the civic change or to

the the cultural change just giving us the basic skills to treat each other more kindly. I'm part of a group which we have some representatives here uh called weave the social fabric project and what we try to do is celebrate the civic renaissance that we're in the middle of right now. We go to towns around the country and we say, "Who's trusted here?" And people start giving us names and there are people in local communities everywhere in America who are building trust, who are serving their neighbor and living in the communities they serve. And sometimes

they have big organizations and nonprofits. Sometimes they don't. We ran into a lady in Florida who said, and she was helping elementary kids cross the street after school. And we said to her, "Do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood?" And she said, "No, I have no time." And we said, "Are you getting paid to help the kids cross the street?" And she said, "No, but in the afternoons, I help the kids cross the street." And we said said, "What are you doing the rest of the day?" And she said, "Well, on Thursdays, I

take food to the hospital so the patients will have nicer food to eat." We said, "Do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood?" And she said, "No, I have no time at all." Um, and she didn't see that as volunteering. It's just what neighbors do. And that's the civic renaissance we're in the middle of. The political that'll take some time. But I'm convinced that this harsh moment we're going through is just part of another process of rupture and repair. Now, a couple well now it's almost a year ago or maybe a little more. Uh

after October 7th, maybe two or three months after October 7th, I was in a bar at a hotel and if you'd seen me, you would have said sad guy drinking alone, but I call it reporting. Uh uh and uh I was scrolling through all these brutal images from the Middle East and I get to an image of the novelist James Baldwin being interviewed. Little black and white video and he's speaking to an unseen interviewer and he says, "There's not as much humanity as one would like in the world, but there's more than you would think.

There's enough." And he says, 'What you've got to remember when you walk down the street, every person you meet, that could be you. You could be that person. You could be that man. You could be that woman. You could be that monster. You could be that saint. And you've got to decide for yourself who you want to be. And I looked at that little video and um James Baldwin had the right to be bitter. He had the right to close up because this country had treated him terribly because of his race and other things. And

yet he was still making the ultimate humanistic statement. Every person you meet, you could be that person. And the phrase that popped into my mind was defiant humanism. That even in harsh times, he was determined to be humanistic toward the people he met. And it seems to me in the harsh times we live in right now, that's our calling. Thank you very much. Thank you. We're going to let him rest his voice for a minute. Um, again, after I'm up here with a after a few announcements, you'll have a chance to ask questions again, either

here in the sanctuary. And by the way, I forgot at the beginning of the night to well, thank you all for being here. I I did forget to thank those of you who are sitting in some overflow areas of our congregation, of our church. So, if you're in the fellowship hall or the CFL or the learning center or I'm not sure where you all got stuck. Um, but there are more people right here tonight than we had at our largest service on Easter Sunday morning. So, um, thank that's a great thing. It's a great thing.

So, thank you all. I hope that the audio and the video has been working well and we're grateful for your accommodation for a wonderful event. Um, and again, thank you to those of you joining us online. Um, so again, questions will be asked in a minute. If you have some questions, I'll invite you to come up to the mics. If you're here, again, if you are sending them in from home, uh, email sociald.org or you can enter them into the box. Uh, please keep your questions brief. And as someone who does something like this said

once, please end with a question mark. Thank you for laughing. but also comply. Um, I always like to plug our next event. This is, as I said, this is the final event in the 2024 2025 season. Our next event, uh, and this is actually in your programs tonight, uh, will be next October, uh, October 23rd. It'll feature a gentleman named Brother Richard Hendrik, uh, who is a Capuchian Franciscan priest from Ireland. Um, and he will be talking about faith and meditation. Uh, and so I hope you'll mark that on your calendars and I hope we

have as large a crowd for him as we did tonight. Uh, if you would like to be reminded of that, you can sign up to all of our social media stuff and sign up for our email at our website and so forth. Um, I always and I hope you'll indulge me a little bit uh at more length tonight. Uh, it's so important to say thank you to the individuals and organizations that make this series possible. Uh, I've said a couple of times this is now the end of the 22nd season. Um, it is not uh

a budget item of the church that I'm privileged to serve. It is funded entirely 100% through generous donations from individuals and corporations. And I'm very proud of this. From day one uh or from year one, we have operated in the black as a result of those generous donations. Um, many many people uh make up the long list of individuals who support this uh series so generously. Many of them are here tonight. If you will permit me, I'll just say a word of thanks to some of our corporate underwriters. Uh Crossroads Financial Group, Jim and Elizabeth.

Um, thank you. I don't know where you ended up sitting. I hope you have a seat somewhere, Jim. Um, uh, Saviles, Jim and Ruth Anne Saviles used to be Cresa. Uh, thank you very much. Uh, Mali Design, Brian and Da Mastercraft Labels, Jeff and Patrice. Uh, the Valuation Group, Paul and Robin, Productivity Inc., Greg and Lisa. uh and Rapid Packaging, Phil and Mona, and then uh Bay Creek Dental, Paul and Patricia. Um and again, you see the names of many, many others. Um it's their generosity that make amazing events like this possible. Will you please

join me in thanking them? Um, I also want to at this point I would typically be saying thanks to a gentleman named Jeffstad. If you've been at events like this before, you'll know that he's been our intro and outro guitarist. Uh, from the very beginning of the of the series earlier today that he let me know there was a family emergency and he was not able to join us. So Jeff, I don't know if you're watching, but if you are, thank you for your music. So, Toybo Hanigan has been with us tonight. Toybo, thank you

for your music. And um and I also want to say a word of thanks to Subtext Books. Uh again, books are available for sale. If you didn't have a chance to purchase one before, uh I know that uh their representative will be out there in the uh fellowship hall afterward in the Narthx afterwards. I you know one thing I didn't ask at the very beginning which I usually do and this will be the last thing I say and then we'll bring David back up is um I do want to just uh uh find out how

many of you are here for your first ever faith and life event. Wow. Okay. Beautiful. Lovely. Special welcome to all of you. Yeah. Great. Thank you for coming out on a rainy night. Um so David, I'll ask you to come back up. Um if there are questions again we'll we'll take questions for 15 20 minutes and I will at some point need to call final question but if people in the house have a question please come to mic to my right or to my left um and uh we'll begin start over here. Um I am

fascinated with this idea of accompaniment and the beauty of how that relates to just being here with this organ and thinking about music. Um accompaniment in your book you say happens in an unhurried space where in the midst of play people relax and connect. I'm a teacher of 37 years first grade. Pray for me. And I worry that we're losing that intergenerational place to be unhurried and relax and connect. So, thinking of your statistics of all of the people and knowing that we are people of action here, but the people in the world that are

left out, the youth, the elderly, um what through weave have you seen or do you recommend that we can take action steps toward to accomplish accompaniment in more places? Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, it's striking. And first, thank you for teaching first graders for 37 years. I mean, I'm impressed. Um, as you were speaking, I was reminded um my eldest son was uh born in Brussels. We lived in Brussels and he, God bless him, uh woke up every morning for 3 years at at um 4 in the morning sharp. Um, and in Brussels in

the winter time, it doesn't get light until about 10:00 a.m. And so I would play with them for five or 6 hours before going off to work. Uh, and about a year and a bit in, it occurred to me that I knew him better than I'd ever known any human being because we played for five or six hours every morning and he knew be better than anybody had ever known me because I was more emotionally open. and we had never said a word because he couldn't talk yet. And so it it occurred to me how

much you can just through the sheer act of play, you can get to know somebody. And then um I was in a basketball game. I'm still periodically in it with a bunch of guys and you can imagine the quality of our play. Um, but we've never had a deep conversation, but just sheer through the sheer act of um, you know, passing a ball, trash talking, high-fiving, you get to know somebody. And I judge people by how well they are at passing. Like, generous people are really good basketball passers. Like, um, and so that's that's a

kind of play. And kids, of course, that's their natural go-to. Kids come out of the womb hungry for a face to see. Apparently, they have eyes like Rembrandt, like when they see faces, they're really good at focusing 18 inches away. These are babies. But beyond that, it's all kind of dark. And so, they're just wired to make that connection. If you go on YouTube and watch and type in still face experiment, if the mom shuts down emotionally, the kids panic because that connection is gone. And then I talked about the questions that they ask. And

one of the disturbing things is sometimes when they go to school and not first grade but later the teachers have to cover content. And so the stu if the student is asking a question the novelist Vladimir Navacov said curiosity is the ultimate form of insubordination because you're going off. You want I'm curious about that over there or that over there. And sometimes when there you've got the teachers have to cover content, they said, "No, we we can't ask questions here. We need to keep going covering content." And the woman who wrote the book on this

named Susan Engel was in a science class and the kids found this scale, one of these weighted scales, and they started experimenting with it. And the teacher said to them, "We don't have time to experiment now. We're doing science." And so my worry is not about teachers. All teachers love curiosity. Why would you not go to teaching if you don't love curiosity? But the systems we put people in. And I was at a a class last week at a very nice one of the elite colleges in the Northeast. And I asked the kids um how

much free time do you have? And if they had said I had none, I would have expected that. But the answer was um oh I hate free time. If I see an empty thing in my schedule, in my calendar, I fill it with something. And we've so programmed them to fill their time that there's they don't have time to just explore. And I told them when I went to college, I would finish class at 1 and dinner wasn't until 6. So I'd go to the library and I'd just wander around the stacks reading whatever seemed

interesting to me. And that was like half my education right there. And we have sort of sucked that out of them especially at the elite level. And one of the students I talked to was in he said well he was a senior but he said I got a job offer a job offer from a investment bank beginning of sophomore year which I took. I was like how do you know what you want beginning of sophomore year? How do you know what you want to do with your life? But the banks understand that the kids are

uncertain. They don't like ambiguity. And so they give them these offers and they suck them in at sophomore year. And so the kids don't have a chance to explore. And so I worry about living in a culture that um where we don't allow that just exploration period. And we we get them overscheduled. We get them overprotected and all the play is adult supervised travel sports. Uh and so I I worry about that that loss of play and really a loss of accompaniment. Thank you for the question. Hello. Thank you for your talk and that all

you do for uh us and the nation giving us hope. As I was listening to you, a sort of image came to mind that you were baking a cake and giving us some ingredients, you know, for how to get to know a person. And you add this and you add that. And I think sometimes when we do that, especially in psychology, we're looking at diatic relationships and we think that we miss that there's an actual bowl that all this actually that has to be contained in. So I I'd be curious where are those places those

containers do you think where these interactions can can um happen and how do we build them up in and some of your work with the weavers I think yeah might inform the one of the things the weavers have is a technology of convening sometimes it'll just be uh a barbecue table some I met a weaver in Louisiana who he wants to help young men, young boys, adolesccents. And so he has a bike club. And so we're not having a heart-to-he heart, but we're we're riding a bike and we're talking. In Chicago, there's a group called

Becoming a Man, which is for gang members. You know them. And they have check-ins. How you doing spiritually? How you doing emotionally? How you doing physically? And the guys who have all this armor, they check in. And so, and I ran into a woman who said, she didn't have any organization, but she said, "I practice aggressive friendship." And so she's the person who in the neighborhood organizes the Super Bowl party, open organizes July 4th and she said when I she was in a rural part of the country and she said when I go to the

Walmart and I need to get out of there fast. I look down the aisle to make sure I don't know anybody because I know so many people here it takes me an hour and a half to get out of the Walmart. And so I was I was fortunately part of a community which had a technology of convening and I was I was going through a hard time in my life and uh I was invited over to a couple's house named Kathy and David and uh they had a kid in the DC public schools named Santi

and Santi had a friend named James whose mom had some issues she was dealing with and she couldn't always feed or house her son and so they said well James can stay with us if he wants and then James had had a friend and that kid had a friend and that kid had a friend. And by the time I went over to that house on a Thursday evening one time in about 2014, there were 40 kids around the dinner table and 15 mattresses around the house. And I walk in there and I uh 17, we

call them kids with they were like 16, 17. And I greet him and I shake I reached my hand out. We said, "We're really not supposed to shake hands here. We just hug here." And I'm not the huggiest guy in the face of the earth, but I went back to that dinner table for the next seven years every Thursday night. And we vacationed together. We did holidays together. And those kids beamed. And we It was that table. We We went around the table. We talked about the high point of our life, the low point of

our week. And it was that table was the technology of convening. And the kids beamed their love at you, and they demanded you beam it back. And so that was a container for us all. And so I do think we need to fill our lives with those kind of containers. And the people that don't have them, it's it's hard. And so it's, you know, Minnesota's atypical because you guys have a lot of what they call social capital here. You have a lot of um interweaving social connections. Thank you, Norway. Thank you, Sweden. Uh and but

a lot of people don't have that. So the container is not it's you're right it's not just individual it has to be a social container a set of containers. I'm gonna um if you don't mind we we've got a ton of online questions um and they tend to not get asked quite as much. So I'm going to insert an online question here. Uh thank you again to everyone who's sending them in. Uh you state that the past several generations have not been taught the skills they need in order to see, understand, and respect other people

in all their depth and dignity. Do you have any hope that this trajectory can be changed? And if so, how do we go about it? Yeah, our founders um uh looked at the people they were creating this democracy out of and they said, "Human beings are wonderfully made but fundamentally broken." And if we're going to make a democracy out of these people, we have to do a thing called moral formation. We have to help them become better versions. And my I my favorite definition of moral formation is from the gospel of Ted Lasso. Uh which

is that um he said he was asked his first season what his goals for his football team were and he said I'm just trying to help these young fellas become better versions of themselves on and off the field. And it used to be from the founding, I think until shortly after World War II, institution after institution was doing moral formation. How do we help you become a better person? There was a headmaster at a thing called the Stow School. And he said, "We try to turn out young men who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable

at a shipwreck. It's the kind of people you can count on." Uh, and so the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts were doing it. The unions were doing it. Churches were obviously doing it and teaching virtues, teaching basic social skills. Then in my view after World War II, somehow the idea spread throughout the culture that America that human beings are not wonderfully made and be some but fundamentally broken. But it became we're wonderful inside and that if there's evil in the world, it's not because of us. It's because of institutions. And if you live in

a culture where people think, "Oh, I'm wonderful inside. I just need to worship the god inside." you don't need to do moral formation, you just do self-actualization. And a lot of organizations got out of the moral formation business and into the self-actualization business. And my students are not um obviously they're wonderful kids, but they're morally inarticulate. They don't know the basic vocabulary of how to improve. I was once before the road to character came out, I was on a show and I was talking about sin and a editor at another publishing house wrote me an

email. He said, 'I love the way you talk about your book, but I wouldn't mention the word sin. It's too dark. And he said, why don't you use the word insensitive? It's like, it's not exactly it. Um and uh so but I do think now people are rediscovering the need for moral formation and trying to do it in a pluralistic way. And so where's Mark Schwen who I just saw him can you raise your hand back there? Uh a gentleman who has the in my view the best anthology. If you want to read a book

on applied morality, how to lead a better life, the anthology the Mark edited called Leading Lives That Matter is the best one. And I said that before the second edition when I was in it. Um, but at Valpare Perezo where teaches they study the great books, but then they have to put on a group production uh a musical production. So, it's not just the ideas. You actually have to work together and cooperate and do a production. And I hope I'm not butchering this story, but Mark wrote a fine piece about it for the magazine my

wife edits called Cotment. And we went to visit Val Valareerezo in Northern Indiana. And um I remember one of the challenges, I think I remember this correctly, that you the students had to write the musical, play it, perform it, build the sets, all that kind of stuff. And I remember one of the people's there saying one year they had a a bunch of musicians, but almost all of them played the the trombone. And so you got to design a musical with a lot of trombone music. But it's that's an act. You come out of that

different. And I have found there are certain institutions that are just morally formative. You meet a Marine, you know you've met a Marine. You meet a Warhouse man, you know you've met a Morehouse man. I happen to be part of an institution that was morally formative to me which was oddly enough a TV show the PBS NewsHour. The first 10 years I did the show, I um my ho the host, I hope all of you remember, was Jim Lair. And Jim was very reticent on the air, but when the camera wasn't on it, his face

was very expressive. And when I said something he liked, thought was classy or smart or intelligent, I could see his eye crinkle with pleasure. And when I said something he didn't like, thought was crass or stupid, I could see his mouth downturned with displeasure. So for 10 years, I just chased the eye crinkle and tried to avoid the mouth. And he never had to say anything to me. It was just those subtle gestures that communicated this is the NewsHour way of doing things. These are our standards. And he didn't only teach it to me. He

taught it to the whole team. And so Jim has been dead for, I don't know, seven, eight years. But the moral ecology he created at the NewsHour is still living on after him. And that's a beautiful legacy to leave behind. And that's so I'm hopeful. Every school I go to now has somebody doing moral formation, a teacher, there's a guy in UVA named Mark Edmonson who um you know he I write he says I teach poetry to help my students become better people. I went to the University of Chicago and the professors I had thought

if you read these books carefully and think about them deeply. You will have the keys to the magic kingdom of how to live and their fervor wore off on all of us and once you've tasted the fine wine it's hard to settle for the grape juice and it leaves it leaves a legacy. So I'm I'm hopeful that so many institutions are now thinking yeah we got to be part of this. So over here, I'm sorry, over here. Uh David, with your permission, I'd like to take us more into the political arena. Um I'm thinking about

you and I are roughly the same age, which means we were in college at roughly the same time. And I think about um I studied political science and history, and I think about Tip O'Neal and Ronald Reagan making deals in the White House. Um and that all seems gone. And that part of the Republican party seems gone. uh the party of Ronald Reagan that believed in free trade and a generous immigration policy and I'm a veteran support for veterans all of the things that the Republican party was in those days and because I have to

get through these days and because I have children and hopefully someday grandchildren I have to think about a postTrump world how in your view does the Republican party find its way back to some degree of what Warren Harding called the return to normaly and I understand from what you said tonight that the quality of your answer depends on the quality of my question. So if this goes south, I'm ready to take I'm ready to take the plan. Thank you. Thank you for that. Um I had mentioned to Tim that my first wife, her dad was

uh college roommates with Walter Montdale and Don Frasier uh here. Uh and um he her dad she moved to Washington because when her dad went to work for Orville Freeman in the department of agriculture. Uh and her first job was with Dave Durburgger and uh he died I guess within the last two years. But I was here in Minneapolis at a church and I still call him Senator Durburgger came um to the to talk and I got a chance to be with him after the talk and I said uh Senator I just want to thank

you for you were the one who inspired me to become a moderate Republican. That was a really winning hand you dealt me there. Um that that really that really took off that whole moderate Republican thing. Um and uh so you know I I miss those days. But um I think what happened was you know my general rule is that Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question. And that a lot of that that social decay that social fragmentation that happened it's not equally distributed across America. It's highly bound by class. And class these

days is not so much about economics as about education. And so we've created a society where the college educated kids and affluent kids have an advantage starting at age three, 50% more likely to be in preschool programs. By sixth grade, affluent kids are four grade levels above less affluent kids. by college. Uh if you come from the top 1% of earners, your your kid is 77 times more likely to go to an Ivy League school than less affluent kids. A lot of the these fancy colleges, they have more kids from the top 1% of families

than the bottom 60%. At the beloved New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, 54% of our employees went to the same 32 elite colleges. So, we've created a cast system and high school educated people now die 10 to 15 years sooner than college educated people. They're five times more likely to have kids out of wedlock. They're five times more likely to die of opioid addiction and they're 2.4 times more likely to say they have no close friends. So if you build a system where one class of people gets to win generation after generation and

another class of people loses generation after the generation, they're going to flip the table. And that's what they did. And I ran into a guy in North Dakota, this several years ago now, who was a Trump supporter. And I always ask, you know, where'd that come from? Like what what tell me about how that happened? And this guy said, let me tell you about the best day of my life. He was 70 when I was talking to him and he said, "This happened to me when I was 35 and I was the foreman of a

section of a plant that made casings for uh air conditioning units that go on top of office buildings." And they changed the technology. I was no longer qualified. And so they laid me off. And so I was just going to pack up my bag in a little box and leave the plant quietly. And I opened the door of my little office. I walked out and there are 3,600 people forming a double line, all the employees at the plant. And I walked through that double line as they applauded me all the way from my office door

across the plant, across the parking lot to my car door. And he said, "That was the best day of my life." They just wanted to show him what a good guy he was. And he said, "Every job I've had since then has been worse. More job insecurity, lower pay, fewer hours. and my m my mother-in-law is very sick and we can never leave her alone. And so my job has been downhill for 35 years. And so that guy may be a jackass, but I need a change. And I may not agree with how he voted,

but as almost in everybody I talk to, I get where they're coming from. And frankly, if Donald Trump had come in and said, you know, we were elected disproportionately on the with the support of working-class voters, so our job is to fix the health disparities, fix the education disparities, fix the income disparities. If you come in saying that, I would like go Donald Trump. But he doesn't do any of that. He's just going after the elite institutions where he think progressives are. And so, um, will the Republican party come back to the way it was

under, you know, Jacob Javitz and Dave Durburgger? I kind of doubt it in our lifetime. But I do think there will be another party. Uh, and I'll just say one other final political thing that I've been thinking about. The president we've had in our history most like Donald Trump is Andrew Jackson. He was a populist, a bit of a narcissist, and his opponents accused him of shredding the Constitution. And he made some gigantic mistakes. And the biggest one was he got rid of something called the Second Bank of the United States, which was an early

version of the Federal Reserve system. And that led to the second longest depression in American history. And that opened up room, shifted the whole political momentum, and opened up room for the weak party. and the Wig Party. They were the descendants of moderate Republicans. If liberals believe in using government to enhance equality and libertarians believe in reducing government to enhance freedom, wigs believe in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. Starts with Alexander Hamilton. It goes to Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. And it goes to the politician most famous for growing up in the

wig party, Abraham Lincoln. and the wigs and then later the Republicans created the land grant college act, the Merurell Act, which you guys know something about in Minnesota, and they created the railroad legislation, the Homestead Act. They created a dynamic economy, and that to me that was the secret. And so now there are six wigs left. I'm one of them. Um, but it's just a tendency in American life and American history that doesn't yet right now have a political representation, but it's in our culture and it's in our legacy. And so some in some form,

whatever party, there are going to be wigs who believe in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility so poor boys and girls can rise and succeed. And so that'll come back, but I don't know in what form. All right. I told you all this time would come. There's No, there's Let's do Oh, okay. Fine. What? Let's do one final question if we could. And I apologize again. I knew that I would have to call that. So, and sorry to cut off the applause. I didn't mean to do that. Um, if you can't tell, I

am probably way below the medium age of the typical NewsHour viewer. I noticed. Thank you. Thank you. Um, I am very excited to actually meet you in person. Um, so a few months into the this new administration, my partner and I, who's also black, we looked at each other and we both went, "We're done." And we are currently getting our ducks in a row to currently move to Europe. So for those of us who are wanting to take a breath from the suffocating sea that we're currently in the midst in, taking a step back and

getting a 50 foot view of our country and what things can we learn from other cultures and other parts of the world to be able to potentially bring those back. What are your hopes for those of us who are just like we're done. This is we're done. Yeah. I guess my hope would be, you know, I I talked about one of the times where we turned around the culture and I mentioned the 1880s and 1990s with the cultural shift, the civic shift, and the political shift. One thing I should have mentioned about that period, which

was good and productive in many ways, but the 1890s were also a period of lynching and racial terrorism. And so there's never a moment where we're all good. In many ways, that was a horrendous period in American life. Uh especially for black people. And so I hope we've made progress on that front in the last 130 years. Um, and I hope that um, you know, we that we have slow stumbling progress. Uh, and when I look back and you know, I was a history major. I don't know what you your fascinations are, but I there

I can't think of a time in American history I'd want to go back to. Uh, and so I think things look grim now for a lot of people, a lot of groups who are afraid, uh, afraid of being discriminated, afraid of bigotry, afraid of being deported. And I've spent a lot of time on college campuses recently, and they don't know whether they can accept international kids anymore. And one of the things I think of the Trump administration is there are all sorts of groups we don't like, mostly foreigners. Uh, and so but will that be

a permanent state? I think it's a reminder of the undercurrent American life that has been here since the beginning. But I guess I would and I don't blame you for wanting to go to Europe. I ended my talk with James Baldwin. He decided to do that. Um, and but I would just ask you um not to take your talents elsewhere. I'm thinking of LeBron James. I'm taking my talents to Miami. Um, but I the one thing and again I'm I hope this doesn't sound to you like whistling through the graveyard, but one of the I

have a friend named Tyler Cowan who's an economist and he says, "Take a legal pad out and write on the left side all the problems in America." And then on the right side, write these words, "America has more talent than ever before." And his argument is that column B is more important than column A. And when you think about American history and we've built a great country, but think how much talent we squandered through most of American history. If you're a woman, your talents did not have most of the time full flowering. If you're black,

your talents did not have an opportunity for flowering. If you're Jewish, if you're Asian, if you're Hispanic. And so in my view, we're doing a little better at giving a wider variety of people of talents and harvesting all the wisdom and skill and interest and energy that they have. And so history, reading history, you just it reminds you how awful it always was in some ways. Uh, I grew up in New York and the I I just read this biography of Theonius Monk, the great jazz musician, and he was living on the West 60s in

Manhattan, and there were brutal race riots. And now, if you go back to those same neighborhoods, it's like Pilates studios, like um, and so the the ugliness has been there. But in my view, progress is there too. And so take some time. I would recommend France maybe. But I hope you come back. I forgot to tell you that don't applaud quite yet. Um although I understand the enthusiasm. We have a small I want to say thank you again for coming. Thanks to everyone who joined us online and in the outer darkness. Uh we have a

small gift for David. And I'm going to give a little stage direction because I forgot to tell you this before. After I give you this and after you all can applaud wildly again, David and I are going to walk through the center aisle back to the Narthx where he'll be at a table where you can greet him and have him inscribe your book. Okay? So, please allow us to part the Red Sea there. So, again, David, thank you so much for being here. The plaque says, "With thanks to David Brooks for bringing faith to life,

and we're so grateful for your business. Yeah. Heat.