I am excited to announce that I’ll be teaching a new undergraduate course this spring, “Learning to Disagree.” The course, offered through the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, will focus on how people with deeply different beliefs can live, learn, and argue together. If you’re a WashU undergraduate (any year) thinking about your spring schedule, I hope you’ll consider taking the course.

Course Overview

The course begins by considering our own backgrounds and beliefs. What have we learned from our families, communities, and experiences? Which assumptions do we take for granted? Why do some disagreements feel so much more threatening than others? Each of us brings a personal history, including those who are most confident that they are simply following the facts.

From there, we’ll turn to the disagreements that shape our everyday life. We’ll consider social media and the news, institutional trust, free speech, and campus protests. Later in the semester, we’ll work through cases involving punishment, self-defense, religious exemptions, and public education. These topics ask us to examine our understandings of justice, fairness, equality, and neutrality, and how those values can sometimes be in tension with one another. They also give us opportunities to clarify our positions even as we work to understand opposing arguments charitably.

We will have several guests who will help us think through these topics:

• Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, will join us as we consider how people build relationships and institutions across deep differences.

• Tane Danger and his colleagues at Danger Boat Productions will bring together improv and political disagreement in a skills-based workshop.

• Kristin Jackson and John Pedrie from Freespoke will help us think about how we engage with online news and information. We’ll examine how platforms shape what we see, and what we can do about it.

• Rachel Wahl, a professor at the University of Virginia and author of Keeping Our Enemies Closer, will join us by Zoom to discuss what political dialogue can accomplish and where its limits lie.

You can read the full syllabus on my website.

Course Goals

This course is intended for anyone who wants to think more serious about the challenges and opportunities of living in a diverse society where our deep differences are not going away, and how we can engage across those differences without papering over them.

Here are a few things this course is not trying to do:

• Prepare you for success in a Jubilee showdown

• Affirm your unique voice in the world

• Teach “viewpoint diversity,” “identity politics,” or “civil discourse”

Be prepared to read philosophy, law, and other hard texts, to share your views, and to have your views challenged for clarity and nuance.

Logistical Details

In addition to classes on Monday and Wednesday mornings, students will also participate in smaller discussion sections on Friday mornings. Each section will be led by a teaching assistant who is a second or third-year WashU Law student. You’ll get to know your teaching assistant in these smaller discussion sections and through individual qualitative interviews at the beginning and end of the semester.

You won’t have to buy any books for this class. I’ll provide excerpts of our readings, and I’ll give you copies of my books, Confident Pluralism and Learning to Disagree.

The course qualifies for the Humanities (HUM) curriculum area and Social Contrasts (SC) core attributes. It also counts toward the major (or minor) requirements for Political Science, American Culture Studies, and Legal Studies (Theme 4).

Hope to See You in the Spring!

Regardless of your major or career path, you are headed into a world of conflict and difference, as I was reminded of a few years ago speaking to medical school leaders at the Mayo Clinic. Learning how, why, and when to engage with conflict and difference will help you both personally and professionally in whatever field you enter.

If you are a WashU undergraduate, I hope you’ll consider taking this class. And if you know a WashU undergrad who might be interested, please pass along this post. (If you have been forwarded this post and want to learn about me, you can read about my professional background, some of my biggest failures, my new favorite city, my vision for the university, and my thoughts on high school reunions.)

The First Amendment protects the right of the people “peaceably to assemble.” We assemble in churches and union halls, on college campuses and public streets. We assemble in public, and we assemble in private. Sometimes we want our assemblies to be seen by others; other times, their secrecy is essential to their viability. Our gatherings, and the groups that precede them, help us form communities, sustain convictions, and challenge people who hold power.

As I have argued for many years, the Supreme Court has long neglected this foundational and textual First Amendment right.

My new article in the Notre Dame Law Review, “Assembling the Past: History, Tradition, and the Future of the Right of Assembly,” suggests that the Court’s recent interpretive emphasis on history, text, and tradition makes assembly even more likely to be revived in future constitutional developments.

Current federal cases involving litigants ranging from Black Lives Matter protesters to Christian student groups demonstrate the ongoing relevance of assembly and ask how seriously courts will protect the groups through which people live out their commitments.

How Assembly Disappeared

The neglect of assembly is rooted in a long history that I trace in my first book, Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly. Somewhat astonishingly, the Supreme Court has gradually pushed aside one of the First Amendment’s five individual rights through three consequential mistakes:

• First, a nineteenth-century Supreme Court decision, Presser v. Illinois, erroneously narrowed assembly to gatherings for the purpose of petitioning the government. That reading overlooked both the constitutional language and the many ways Americans had already claimed the right to gather.

• Second, in the mid-twentieth century, the Court absorbed constitutional analysis of public gatherings into free speech doctrine, ignoring the original anchoring of the public forum in the right of assembly. As a result, protests, marches, demonstrations, and vigils are now evaluated under speech-based categories that often give government officials considerable discretion to impose restrictions. Under current free speech law, a regulation can appear neutral on its face but still dilute the symbolic and expressive power of a gathering.

• Third, the Court recognized a “right of association” not found in the text of the Constitution and without a clear grounding in assembly. That development, which came in the 1958 decision, NAACP v. Alabama, helped protect the NAACP against Alabama’s efforts to obtain its membership lists. But the doctrine that followed splintered the associational right into confusing categories, including subcategories like “expressive,” “intimate,” and “political” association. The groups themselves, and the practices that sustain them, became harder to see.

Recovering assembly would help protect the groups upon which speech, expression, and political engagement depend. People often need space to meet, organize, and develop relationships before they have a polished message or a formal petition. Much of what makes a group meaningful happens in the ordinary work of being together.

Whose History Counts

The methodology underlying the Supreme Court’s embrace of history, text, and tradition is not entirely clear, but it appears to include at least three factors:

1. An initial consideration of the constitutional text.

2. Historical evidence of social practices related to that text.

3. The duration and consistency of that historical evidence over time.

This approach has generated considerable controversy, especially in cases involving abortion, guns, and religion. One objection is that historical arguments can privilege those who once held power while overlooking those they excluded. Others have suggested that focusing on tradition replicates indeterminacy problems found in originalism, historical arguments, and other interpretive methods.

But any interpretive method will be underspecified. Constitutional decisions are not math problems or physics equations to be solved; they are normative human judgments about complex and contested matters. Yet assembly has an unusually rich and varied history and tradition that mitigates the risk of its capture toward partisan ends. Early political societies gathered in taverns and meeting halls. Abolitionists and suffragists organized conventions. Labor organizers brought workers together, and Black churches helped sustain the civil rights movement. More recently, anti-abortion protesters, Black Lives Matter participants, and opponents of COVID restrictions have all claimed the right to assemble. The people who have assembled throughout our country’s history have done so for different reasons and in opposition to different political powers.

Assembly Spanning from Public Protests to Student Group Access

Current litigation throughout this country shows both the continued importance of assembly and its continued judicial neglect. Let me share just two examples from a number of active cases.

The first, which I have previously highlighted, is the dangerous doctrine of “negligent protest” that has emerged out of the Fifth Circuit. In 2016, a police officer who was seriously injured by an unidentified person at a Baton Rouge protest sued one of the protest organizers, Deray Mckesson. Although Mckesson himself did not engage in any violence, the officer alleged that Mckesson negligently led protesters onto a highway, creating a foreseeable risk of violent confrontation with police.

The lawsuit has bounced around in various courts for a decade. Most recently, in March 2026, a divided Fifth Circuit panel reversed a judgment for Mckesson and allowed the negligence claim to proceed. Then, in July, the full court declined to rehear his case, over a powerful dissent by Judge Willett joined by five of his colleagues. Mckesson has now petitioned for the Supreme Court to take his case.

The broader constitutional concern in Mckesson is the risk of making organizers answer financially for violence they neither committed nor directed. If organizing a protest carries that exposure, many people will decide that exercising the right is too costly.

The ongoing significance of assembly also unfolds in a much different context involving Christian student groups who are denied access to public school campuses. Two different ministries have brought separate lawsuits challenging SUNY Broome Community College’s refusal to recognize their groups. Both welcome all students to attend their meetings but impose leadership and membership requirements.

The college says its open-access policy applies across the board and that Campus Bible Fellowship remains free to meet, pray, and study the Bible. It relies on Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision upholding an all-comers policy, and invokes public-forum rules to analyze speech, assembly, and association together. The fellowship’s filings include arguments about assembly’s text, history, and tradition, drawing in part on my earlier scholarship. The disagreement over Christian Legal Society v. Martinez highlights some of the doctrinal problems I explore in my most recent article.

These disputes raise important religious liberty questions. They also implicate the broader freedom of groups to maintain their identities while participating in shared civic life. Recognition affects practical access to the spaces and resources that student groups use. Those burdens deserve attention as burdens on assembly, alongside the speech, association, and religion arguments.

Together, Mckesson and the litigation out of SUNY Broome Community College illustrate the scope and significance of the right of assembly—and why recovering its protections and its history continues to matter.

Next Steps

I have been encouraged by the growing number of assembly claims that have emerged over the past few years. But too many First Amendment challenges continue to bypass the assembly claim altogether, defaulting to speech or association frameworks that lack the historical and textual grounding of assembly.

Litigators can shift this pattern by explicitly framing collective action—whether marches, protests, membership meetings, or vigils—as exercises of the right of assembly. In practice, this might come as a secondary claim after arguing first on grounds of speech or association within current doctrine. But given the current Supreme Court’s focus on the importance of constitutional text, litigators should not shy away from asking lower courts to address the existence and meaning of “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

As I suggest in my article:

Even if trial courts remain slow to recognize assembly on its own terms, building the record and pressing the argument can lay the groundwork for appellate review. In this way, strategic litigation becomes part of the tradition it seeks to vindicate—an ongoing embodied argument about the constitutional goods worth preserving.

We will undoubtedly continue to disagree about the purposes of our common life. Assembly helps preserve the space in which people can form, sustain, and argue for different answers. Our constitutional law should give that freedom the attention it deserves.

For any litigators, clerks, or journalists interested in learning more, my book on the right of assembly is freely available online thanks to a Creative Commons license with Yale University Press.

Earlier this week, the Archdiocese of St. Louis sued the Ste. Genevieve County Detention Center for failing to accommodate the religious requests of detainees held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at that facility.

Some applications of religious freedom law are complicated and controversial; this one is not. Here are the basic facts and relevant law:

• Catholic detainees have requested clergy visits and access to the Eucharist (a big deal for Catholics).

• ICE allows priests to visit during a single four-hour block each week but does not permit in-person contact with detainees, citing prison safety concerns.

• The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause (as applied to the regulations in this case), federal law (in this instance, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA), and Missouri law (Missouri’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act) all require the government to advance a compelling interest in the least restrictive means possible to justify a substantial burden on religion.

• There are less restrictive ways to maintain prison safety and accommodate the Eucharist and priestly visits for Catholic detainees (search the priests, require a monitor who is within visual but not audible distance, and so forth). Prison officials don’t get to ignore the Constitution because compliance would be inconvenient.

• According to the Archdiocese’s lawsuit, prison officials have purportedly offered to have a priest “pass the Eucharist, ‘individually wrapped,’ to a prison guard who would then deliver it to a detainee.” That is not a sufficient accommodation for Catholics, and there are other less restrictive means available to satisfy the interest in prison safety.

It is true that courts defer to the expertise of prison officials. But this deference has limits, and the Supreme Court has not hesitated to find those limits when prison safety concerns have veered into the absurd. In 2015, a unanimous Supreme Court concluded in Holt v. Hobbs that permitting a Muslim inmate to grow a half-inch beard would not undermine concerns of identification or smuggling contraband. At the oral argument in that case, Justice Alito impatiently reassured the lawyer representing the prison that a half-inch beard would be unlikely to conceal a “tiny revolver.” In 2022, the Court held 8-1 in Ramirez v. Collier that a Texas prison must permit a pastor to physically touch a death row inmate during his execution despite the prison’s asserted interests in maintaining security in the execution chamber, preventing unnecessary suffering of the prisoner, and avoiding further emotional trauma to the victim’s family members. The Court also made clear in that case that “the resolution of RLUIPA claims in the prisoner context requires a case-specific consideration of the particular circumstances and claims.”

Holt and Ramirez were both decided under RLUIPA, which also grounds the strongest of three very good legal arguments in the Archdiocese’s complaint. The Archdiocese likely also prevails under the federal constitutional standard (in light of recent Supreme Court interpretations of that standard and the prison policy’s secular exemption for attorneys to meet with their clients) and the Missouri statutory standard.

You can read coverage of this lawsuit from St. Louis Public Radio. And legal types may be interested in the memorandum of law supporting the Archdiocese’s motion for a preliminary injunction filed on Monday by Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner. It convincingly shows why Missouri prison officials should act quickly to fix this situation.

I have previously critiqued a report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences released this summer and commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University.

Until recently, the report occupied an uneasy space at WashU: commissioned by our own chancellor but largely separate from the university’s own scholarly conversation about the humanities. That changed this past Wednesday when six of my colleagues challenged the report’s scholarly methods and substantive claims at a Town Hall organized by WashU’s Center for the Humanities. Collectively, their critiques call into question whether the report itself satisfies the scholarly standards it invokes.

The Humanities Report

When WashU Chancellor Andrew Martin and Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier commissioned the report, they expressed concern about “the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards” in humanities disciplines. They noted allegations of “widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists.” They also cited concerns from philosophers “about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge.”

The important question is not whether politicization, ideological conformity, or declining scholarly standards can occur in the humanities. Of course they can. The question the chancellors commissioned this report to answer was whether there is sufficient evidence to support those claims.

The report’s authors engaged in “extensive research” on “the quality of academic scholarship” in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. They identified “three main forms of politicized distortion” in recent humanistic scholarship:

1. Scholarly claims are constrained by the requirement that they cohere with an antecedently accepted political goal.

2. The scholarly goal of understanding the world is displaced by, or supplemented with, the aim of telling stories that serve a pragmatic purpose.

3. The idea that there are genuine facts about the world or about what the evidence supports independently of our political commitments is rejected.

The authors emphasize that these problems vary considerably by field and that serious scholarship exists throughout the humanities. But they found “grounds for concern, not just in individual disciplines, but systematically.”

The report also acknowledges that its conclusions “are not yet supported by the kind of quantitative evidence that would be expected in a peer-reviewed study of these matters,” with one of its coauthors explaining that it was “intended to be a high-level document for administrators.”

The Speakers and Critiques at WashU’s Town Hall

The senior scholars who spoke at the Town Hall include faculty who have held significant administrative positions at WashU:

• Adrienne Davis, William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law

• Rebecca Lester, Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology

• Dwight McBride, Gerald Early Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity

• Diana O’Brien, Bela Kornitzer Distinguished Professor, Chair of the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies

• Corinna Treitel, William Eliot Smith Endowed Professor, Chair of the Department of History

• Abram Van Engen, Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics

You can watch the full Town Hall here or in the video embedded at the end of this post.

Professor Davis argued that the report applies a double standard to the humanities. Fields such as public health, medicine, social work, design, and law openly pursue questions shaped by substantive goals, including reducing health disparities, structural racism, and racial segregation. Her concern was that the report does not apply the same tolerance for purpose-driven inquiry when evaluating comparable scholarship in the humanities, instead treating political purpose there as evidence of distortion.

Professor Lester suggested that the report lacks sufficient empirical support for its claims. Political pressures can influence scholarship, she acknowledged, but such pressures—from pharmaceutical funding, federal priorities, donors, and legislatures—operate throughout the university. Although the report acknowledges some of these pressures outside the humanities, Lester argued that a serious investigation should examine them comparatively across disciplines, define its terms carefully, and disclose its assumptions.

Professor McBride argued that, notwithstanding the report’s disclaimer that earlier scholarship was itself affected by political distortion and bias, its analysis risks taking an earlier academy as a baseline of greater objectivity. That academy excluded many voices, and those exclusions shaped what counted as knowledge. As he put it, “We should not confuse the diversification of inquiry with the abandonment of rigor.”

Professor O’Brien noted that one premise motivating the commission—that concerns about the state of humanities scholarship may be contributing to declining public support—is empirically testable. She reported that in a pilot study of 800 respondents, increased oversight of humanities departments did not increase trust, nor did exposure to professors researching social justice reduce it; closing a gender-studies program, by contrast, was associated with reduced trust.

Professor Treitel questioned the commission’s decision to focus on politicization rather than other problems that may be more consequential for the humanities’ future, including chronic underfunding, AI, graduate education, and barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration—concrete questions susceptible to comparative investigation.

Professor Van Engen faulted the report for failing to engage important strands of relevant literature and the strongest opposing arguments, including non-relativist thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, who challenge the report’s conception of “objective” inquiry. The result, he suggested, is a false choice between relativism and disinterested inquiry. In Van Engen’s view, the report “fails the most basic standards that we have.”

Together, these critiques call into question the report’s comparative logic, evidence, historical framing, methodology, and engagement with relevant scholarship. These objections are not ideological diatribes but substantive and methodological critiques from serious scholars.

Disavow this Report

Chancellor Martin is himself a serious scholar. Long before he was our chancellor, he was my faculty colleague at the law school, where I witnessed his intellectual rigor and commitment to academic integrity. That makes the appropriate response to this report clearer, not harder.

The most straightforward response would be for Chancellor Martin to disavow the report. Commissioning an inquiry creates no obligation to defend its conclusions; if anything, it gives its commissioners a heightened responsibility to assess whether the work adequately answers the questions it was asked to investigate.

It would not be the first time that those commissioning a report have disavowed it.

For example, earlier this year, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin concluded that a comprehensive review he commissioned of the 2024 presidential election “wasn’t ready for primetime,” principally because the outside strategist who wrote the report had not supplied the underlying interviews, data, or other source material. Chairman Martin said: “I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it,” and indicated that repairing its flaws would have required “starting over.”

In 1977, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission disavowed the executive summary of the 1975 Reactor Safety Study (WASH-1400). An NRC-commissioned outside review committee of the study critiqued its “indefensible” calculations, “incoherent” language, and “soothing tones” that ignored the uncertainty in its probability estimates.

Chancellor Martin need not repudiate the questions he asked. He can distinguish those questions from the document produced in response to them. He can say that the humanities report does not provide an adequate evidentiary basis for its conclusions and that he therefore does not endorse it as a satisfactory answer to the inquiry he commissioned.

Reframe the Charge for a New and Better Report

Disavowing this report could also create an opportunity to produce a better one. Here are two suggestions for clarifying the charge.

First, the initial charge expressed concern that “humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields” (emphasis added). As Professor Van Engen noted in his Town Hall remarks, and as I argued in my earlier critique of the report, decades of scholarship across multiple disciplines have challenged the idea that academic inquiry can proceed from a wholly neutral or unencumbered position. We all stand somewhere. Our goal as scholars, administrators, and trustees is not to transcend our own subjectivity but to exercise power and expertise responsibly.

Second, the initial charge focused on the humanities and humanistic social sciences. While there is little longitudinal evidence about public confidence specifically in these disciplines, there is substantial evidence of declining confidence in higher education generally. Gallup’s latest poll shows a 19-percentage-point decline since 2015 in the share of U.S. adults who have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Pew reports that 7 in 10 Americans believe higher education is going in the wrong direction. New America’s 2025 survey finds that only 54% of American adults said colleges and universities are having a positive effect on the country, down from 69% in 2019. These findings—from multiple national surveys—implicate higher education as a whole, not just a subset of academic disciplines.

A better report could pursue two related questions. First, is there persuasive evidence that ideological commitments or other pressures are systematically distorting scholarship in particular fields—and, if so, in which fields and through what mechanisms? Second, what broader forms of institutional power shape academic inquiry across the university?

The report at times points toward these questions, acknowledging that similar problems may exist outside the humanities and that external actors can distort scholarship. A revised charge would make those acknowledgments part of the design of the investigation itself, examining such pressures comparatively rather than treating them principally as qualifications to a humanities-focused inquiry. It could examine not only the humanities but also other disciplines (like political science and economics) and professions (like law, medicine, and social work). And it could explore all sources of improper influence on academic inquiry, whether from professional associations, regulatory agencies, foundations, government grants, private donors, corporations, or legislatures.

The current political context makes this harder, not less important. But it is worth noting that the DNC’s assessment of the 2024 presidential election and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s assessment of nuclear-reactor risks did not involve minor or uncontroversial matters. And in those cases, the leaders who had set these important but ultimately inadequate inquiries in motion shouldered the responsibility to disavow them.

Chancellor Martin should do the same with this report. The questions were worth asking. The report does not adequately answer them.

You can watch the September 16, 2026, Town Hall here:

Today marks 25 years since 9/11, and I am sharing a note I wrote to friends and family on September 12, 2001.

I have written a few times about my experience in the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 hit the building. But this is the first time I have shared publicly my contemporaneous reflections, which feel a bit more personal.

This is not my best writing (and I had apparently not yet discovered the bcc option on email), but I have resisted the urge to edit myself.

If you ever have the opportunity, I encourage you to visit one of the 9/11 memorials:

• World Trade Center

• The Pentagon

• Shanksville, PA

From: John Inazu
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 1:24 PM

Friends and family,

I wanted to take a moment and write down some of my thoughts from the last few hours. But first, as many of you have come to expect from me, a few caveats. I have not yet been able to begin to process what occurred in New York. I know only that the destruction and loss of life is orders of magnitude greater than what we felt in Washington. My reflections, in the midst of everything else yesterday, are quite trivial. I share them because the concern from so many of you was an encouragement to me, and because conveying my thoughts to you is one way that I can begin to comprehend this myself. I still don’t have a very good sense of time (and my hour of sleep last night isn’t helping my memory), so my chronology might not be precise. Feel free to forward this to others I may have inadvertently forgotten (I didn’t have email for Bart, Paul Y., Todd G. and some others)? I’m sorry that I have not been able to talk to all of you individually. Finally, please don’t reply to this whole list . . . it is quite an eclectic collection of people.

As most of you know by now, the majority of those of us at the Pentagon were not hurt in this attack. My office heard about New York shortly after the two planes hit the towers, and we went to a television to watch. I had an awful feeling about the tremendous loss of life, but I also knew that if this were any kind of coordinated attack, the Pentagon was a prime target. I told my boss my concerns, and he mentioned the same anxiety. Then we all went back to our offices. I made a few phone calls and then tried to log on the news websites, but they were all jammed. I was getting pretty anxious, so I basically sat at my desk praying for trust and the ability to focus on my work in a professional manner. I heard the plane, and that frightened me. But I didn’t hear any impact so I figured nothing had happened. (Given the structural design of the Pentagon, we neither felt nor heard the impact in our location.) The next thing we heard was people screaming frantically and crying in the halls. Then people were yelling to evacuate. My boss, Greg, and I walked out of our office down one of the corridors. But we both smelled smoke and Greg thought he smelled chemicals. So we started running in the other direction, only to find the staircase completely jammed with people. This moment was perhaps the most psychologically difficult, with the exit in sight but scores of people blocking the way. (I can’t imagine what that must have been in New York.) We went back in the other direction and ended up in a random office. Some woman screamed at us that a plane had crashed into the building and that we had to evacuate immediately. So we got back in the line at the staircase and made our way to the indoor mall area of the Pentagon. Security people were screaming at us to move fast, so we knew things were bad. But at this point, people were already moving rapidly. We went out the metro entrance.

The impact was two sides over from our point of exit, so all we could see was smoke and lots of sirens. Greg and I talked for a moment about trying to go volunteer to help, but then we realized that everyone exiting was being directed away by the emergency personnel. We tried calling Greg’s wife and my mom on my cell phone, but nothing was getting through. Finally, we found Greg’s car (mine was on the other side of the building) and drove out of the area.

Once we got to a phone, we called family and then called in to see what we were supposed to do. Our boss had been evacuated with the senior staff, so it took a while to reach him. Finally, we got word that everyone in our office was accounted for, and we were to standby until further notice. The rest of the day is a blur, but was mostly spent on the phone. I also went to some prayer services. Last night, we found out that we were ordered back to work today. The building was still on fire when I showed up this morning. There was soot from the smoke almost everywhere I walked, all over the building. My office wasn’t damaged, but the air still had a fair amount of smoke in it. Work this morning was rather uneasy, and then shortly after lunch we received another evacuation order. It turned out to be a false alarm, but people around me were pretty jittery about this one and any morning focus was lost. Now I am at home for the rest of the day, although we will probably work tomorrow.

I know many of you feel at a loss for what you can do, and quite frankly, so do I. Please continue to pray for the friends and family of those who died here and in New York. Please also pray that God would give all of us clear thinking in the midst of a very unsettling time. I have spoken to several coworkers who are very shaken, and I am beginning to realize the crippling capacity of fear. That, at least in the books I read, is part of the goal of terrorism, and we cannot permit such a goal to succeed. But here at the Pentagon, we are very susceptible to countering fear with the reassurance of military might. Pray that we would instead put our trust in the love that casts out fear.

I hope to speak with many of you in the coming weeks as we process together.

Thanks for thinking of me.

Love,

John

I have just returned from a week in Melbourne, where I gave a number of public talks and workshops related to pluralism, law, and disagreement. These engagements and other conversations gave me a great deal to think about in comparing the U.S. and Australia on issues related to my work. Three themes stood out during my visit: religion, pluralism, and protest.

Suspicion of Religion

One comment I heard repeatedly in my informal conversations was that Australians are uncomfortable talking about religion. This was usually followed by mention of how different the discourse about religion seems in the U.S.

I often found myself responding with the lawyerly “it depends.” It struck me that the Australians I encountered were largely forming their impressions of the U.S. from media depictions of red states. True, in red states, one can find many people eager to talk about religion, especially from the Christian majority in those places. But this is far less true in blue states and cities, or on most of the college and university campuses where I spend much of my time.

In fact, the more I talked with Australians in Melbourne, the more I sensed that their day-to-day experiences around issues of religion and pluralism were quite similar to mine in U.S. higher education. Perhaps it is fitting that Victoria (Melbourne’s state) refers to itself as “the education state.”

A reluctance to discuss and understand religious difference means that religion can easily be caricatured, misunderstood, or treated suspiciously. Of course, the same is true with any belief, ideology, or identity characteristic. But in Australia, as in many parts of elite U.S. higher education, the unfamiliarity with religion is noticeable and consequential given how much religious difference contributes to the tensions and complexities of living in a pluralistic and multicultural society.

Australians are starting to recognize these deficits. Concerns over antisemitism (particularly in light of the Bondi Beach shooting) and islamophobia (driven especially by the growing influence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation movement) are drawing attention to Australia’s need to understand religious difference better. In fact, earlier this year, the Australian government established a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

Suspicion of Pluralism

During a public dialogue at Ridley College, I joined Mike Bird and Simon Smart to discuss how Christians engage with and understand pluralism, not as an assertion that all beliefs are equally true, but as a civic framework in which people can live together across deep differences. Mike and Simon have been advocating for this kind of pluralism for some time (see, for example, Mike’s podcast interview with me about my book, Learning to Disagree).

One positive example that arose during my discussion at Ridley is an effort led by the Christian organization Faith Values to help bring into Australia’s primary and secondary schools a pluralistically-informed curriculum that provides a deeper understanding of all of Australia’s major faith traditions, including a form of secularism. The pragmatic and civic need for this sort of education seemed clear to me after learning about the widespread lack of engagement about religion that I referenced in the first part of this post. Australia will not be able to confront its deepest challenges to social cohesion unless it can address and understand the challenges and opportunities of religious pluralism.

While other discussions during my Melbourne visit highlighted suspicion of religious pluralism from non-religious demographics, the dialogue at Ridley College addressed suspicion from religious believers who were unfamiliar with and even distrustful of pluralism. Some of the questions that arose during our discussion at Ridley focused less on the pragmatic civic need for pluralism and more on a theological concern over whether Christians should be helping to advance the teaching and understanding of non-Christian faiths in Australian classrooms.

I suggested that the pluralistic context in Australia and in the U.S. should focus Christians on asking how they can live faithfully and neighborly in a world they don’t control. Part of this kind of engagement means advocating for your neighbor’s right and ability to believe and act differently from what you believe is true and good. Religious freedom in the U.S. offers a particularly clear example—it only works when people of all faiths and people of no faith are afforded religious protections from dominant majorities who often do not agree with, understand, or even like them.

Ambiguity about Protest

One of the most interesting parts of the trip was learning about the legal and cultural contexts for Australia’s understanding of protest and assembly, particularly during a workshop with some of the law faculty at Australia Catholic University. Australia recognizes no federal constitutional right to assembly, though some of its states have adopted charter statutory provisions modeled after the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

One practical implication of lacking a more robust constitutional framework for assembly is that a lot of deference and discretion goes to policymakers, judges, and police officers. Based on my conversations, I got the impression that Victorian officials have not wrestled enough with issues related to permits, counterprotests, and dispersals of assembly. The lack of clear procedural protections might be particularly important when in comes to more politically vulnerable protesters, including immigrants, refugees, and indigenous Australians.

On the other hand, the assembly framework in the U.S. continues to have its own set of challenges. For example, I have long been skeptical of free-speech based time, place, and manner restrictions that restrict protests and assemblies in our country. More recently, I have highlighted the worrisome concept of liability for “negligent protest” that has emerged out of the Fifth Circuit and will almost certainly have a chilling effect on protest organizers unless the Supreme Court intervenes.

During my visit to Australia, I observed what appeared to be an active protest culture on the ground. My hotel overlooked Parliament House, which was the site of nearly daily protests on various issues, all of which appeared both peaceful and passionate. On that note, if anyone in Parliament House wants to learn more about the importance of assembly in a democracy, please take a look at the free copy of my 2012 book on the history and theory of the U.S. right of assembly.

Fortunately, the trip wasn’t all work. My daughter Lauren traveled with me and thanks largely to her unending initiative, we managed to fit in quite a bit on the side. Some highlights included touring the Central Business District, visiting the Old Melbourne Gaol, walking along the city’s southern beaches, taking a spontaneous day trip to Sydney, attending the Melbourne International Film Festival (where we bumped into the philosopher Peter Singer at a screening of the documentary, Sentient), watching The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX on the Southern Hemisphere’s largest screen, and consuming lots of excellent coffee and gelato.

I am grateful to everyone who made this visit possible, especially Herbert Um at Faith Values; the theology faculty at Ridley College; the law, business, and education faculties at Australia Catholic University (and, in particular, Executive Dean Larissa McLean-Davies, Dean Lidia Zynas, and Dr. Allayne Horton); and the Victorian Council of Churches.

I have known Chad Wellmon for more than a decade and have long admired his refusal to accept familiar assumptions about higher education. Chad is a professor at the University of Virginia and a scholar of intellectual history and the modern research university. He recently joined a conference I hosted on what universities are for and what education requires. Those questions also animate his new book, After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work.

Drawing on a wide historical range, the book argues that the central issue for higher education today is not simply institutional decline but the fate of “disciplined study”—sustained practices of attention, reading, and inquiry that universities have sometimes supported but never fully contained. Chad’s title does not predict the disappearance of universities but asks us to imagine intellectual life without assuming that the university is its natural or exclusive home.

JOHN INAZU: Let’s start with a basic question: Why this book?

CHAD WELLMON: Honestly, the book began autobiographically. It came out of what I had been doing at the University of Virginia for the past decade and how my relationship to the university, to the profession, and my vocation as a professor had changed.

I started thinking seriously about the university in 2012, around the time I got tenure. That summer, UVA’s president, Teresa Sullivan, was fired. I found myself protesting alongside faculty, staff, students, alumni, and people from the Charlottesville community.

We had signs and chants. It felt almost liturgical. We were all there without much doubt about what was happening. But I remember looking around and thinking: What exactly are we doing?

That was when I started to see the university for the first time. Until then, I had mostly taken it for granted.

JI: But it’s not as though you encountered the university for the first time in 2012. You had been an undergraduate, a graduate student, and a professor. So what did you think the university was before then?

CW: It was my path out of Shelby, North Carolina.

I left home at sixteen to attend the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a public boarding school. That started a long process of moving away from and defining myself against the world I came from—my family, a particular religious upbringing, and what I understood at the time as its anti-intellectualism.

My parents did not have college degrees. We read the Bible, but we did not read the kinds of books I later encountered. So the university became the keystone of a redemptive arc: boarding school, college, graduate school, and then a faculty position at UVA. That path lifted me up and took me out, in all the positive and negative senses of that phrase.

I believed in the university because it worked for me. And I did not distinguish between its instrumental and intrinsic goods. I needed a job. I also loved reading. Then I discovered that I could get paid and have health insurance to keep reading and teaching.

JI: So the university was both a vocation and an escape route.

CW: Exactly. But I did not know enough to distinguish those things.

I also had a very simple sociology for my family. According to the American logic of success, the reason my parents and most of my siblings had struggled was that they did not have college degrees. The reason I had succeeded was that I did. That was basically my evidence. The university had worked for me. So I defended both the institution and the idealized version of it that I carried around in my head.

JI: And one reason that story works until 2012 is that you were basically a consumer of the university. You received the goods without having to confront any of the costs or downsides.

CW: One hundred percent.

JI: There’s a counterfactual version of your life where you get tenure, avoid academic service, keep writing books, teach your classes, and never worry about any of this. You get out of Shelby, read for a living, and everyone lives happily ever after.

CW: Yes. And the institution probably would have rewarded me just as much—maybe more—financially and materially.

This book is partly an attempt to understand why I began wanting to become the kind of person who was committed to an institution. That desire did not come naturally to me. It still does not. But after 2012, and then over the next several years, I started to think more about the university as an institution.

JI: What changed?

CW: Well, first I spent seven years helping redesign UVA’s general education curriculum. I assumed that if we could articulate what had gone wrong with general education, rebuild the curriculum, and recommit the faculty to it, we might revivify the university.

I was not completely naive. After all, it took seven years. But throughout that time I still thought the curriculum was the center of the institution of the university.

Then I became principal of Brown College, one of UVA’s residential colleges, and discovered what I sometimes call “the other university”: student affairs, residence life, career services, all the places where students actually spend a huge amount of their lives.

Before serving in the residential college, I had treated much of that world as extracurricular or administrative. But I came to learn it had a much more formative influence on students than I had understood. That realization upended a lot of what I thought I knew about university reform.

And then COVID happened.

So the book grew out of trying to understand this institution that had done so much for me but that I had not really seen.

JI: Are you an institutionalist now?

CW: I am an aspiring institutionalist.

I’m a good enough liberal to think we become free in and through institutions—in and through shared practices made real and durable. But writing this book clarified that the university itself is not finally what I am defending.

For a long time, I conflated the university with the intellectual goods it happened to house. I assumed that if I cared about reading, teaching, inquiry, and intellectual formation, then I had to defend the university in its present form.

I no longer think that.

My more primary commitment is to those practices and to the possibility of participating in them, sharing them, and carrying them forward. The university has cared for some of those practices for the past couple of centuries. In many ways, it is still materially hospitable to them. It gives us libraries, salaries, laboratories, students, and time.

But it has also become increasingly inhospitable to them.

JI: That sounds like a fairly significant shift. You thought you were writing a defense of the university and discovered that you were defending something else.

CW: Yes. Exactly.

And because my experience of those goods had occurred almost entirely through universities, I had assumed they were only possible there. I could not see the other places and forms in which they were alive—sometimes very much alive.

That was partly an autobiographical failure of imagination. I think back now to the example of my father. My father was an extraordinary Bible reader. He sat at the kitchen table with yellow legal pads, concordances, translations, and reference books. He was not getting paid. There was no prestige involved. He did it because he felt he had to.

For years, I could not recognize him as a model of intellectual virtue. I had defined myself against him. He was the uneducated, Bible-reading guy I had to leave behind.

But I eventually realized that he was my first model for what a reader was. We were different kinds of readers, but he was engaged in a serious intellectual practice.

JI: So does your father count as an example of the practice of “disciplined study,” or was he doing something adjacent to it? What are the minimum requirements of the practice?

CW: Disciplined study is more than private curiosity or reading books on your own. It involves practices shared among people over time: common objects of attention, habits, standards, responsibilities, and forms of accountability.

My father had some of that. He had texts, tools, and an interpretive tradition, even if he did not fully acknowledge his dependence on them. He thought he could bootstrap his way to truth by himself. But all those concordances and translations on the kitchen table existed because of traditions, communities, institutions, and the labor of many other people.

Disciplined study needs more than a committed individual. It needs some regularity, continuity, authority, and material support. In that broad sense, it needs institutions.

It does not necessarily need a modern university.

JI: This is where your argument starts to sound MacIntyrean. Healthy practices pursue internal goods, but institutions rely on external goods like money and power to survive. The practice needs the institution, and the institution threatens to corrupt the practice. Is that tension manageable, or is corruption built in from the beginning?

CW: That question haunts the whole book. And I do not have a clean answer.

The tension has always been there. The University of Paris in the thirteenth century faced pressure from the church about which of Aristotle’s works could be taught. The eighteenth-century University of Göttingen depended on a ruler who regarded it partly as a mercantilist enterprise and wanted tuition revenue from wealthy foreign students.

There was never a pure university devoted exclusively to the internal goods of study. Institutions have always required money, political authorization, and protection.

JI: So the standard decline narrative—there was once a more pure university devoted to truth, and then administrators, donors, politics, and capitalism ruined everything—is historically false.

CW: Completely false.

There was no golden age. The university has always been entangled with power.

But saying there was no golden age does not mean nothing has changed. The scale and structure of the modern university matter. Over the past two centuries, the tensions within the university have hardened into contradictions. The university began pursuing money and prestige not simply to support scholarly communities or satisfy the state, but to sustain and enlarge itself.

Once the structures and incentives become sufficiently powerful, the institution asks even virtuous people to spend most of their energy serving its own reproduction. You can have a good dean, a good president, or a group of committed faculty members. They may protect particular spaces for a time. But they are operating inside an institution that has its own interests—rankings, revenue, growth, prestige, political protection. Those interests have become embedded in the institution itself, and they change the institutional conditions for everyone who participates in it.

JI: Let me test the institutional argument with an example. I am part of a group of eight or nine law professors who have been reading and discussing your book on Zoom. Does that count as disciplined study? And what happens if someone gives us a billion dollars—enough to hire staff, create prestige, and sustain the group indefinitely? Have we become an institution, or have we ruined the practice?

CW: You may already be an institution. And you may be much better off without the billion dollars.

We have absorbed this idea that a good practice becomes legitimate only when it scales. We assume eight or nine people are not enough. It needs to become a national network, and then a larger organization, and then it needs staff, branding, assessment, and influence.

I now think that assumption is pernicious.

You have shared practices organized around a common time and common objects. Someone schedules the meetings. Someone chooses the reading. People accept obligations to one another. There are expectations about participation. That may be enough.

Think about baseball. Major League Baseball is one institution, but minor leagues, college teams, travel teams, and Little League teams all participate in the practice of baseball and comprise their own, sometimes several, institutions. We do not need one comprehensive institution that absorbs every local version of the game.

The university has so saturated our imagination that we have trouble seeing the many other forms through which intellectual practices have survived: monasteries, libraries, schools, museums, workshops, reading groups, and small communities.

Your group may already be practicing disciplined study. The billion dollars might make it more durable. But it might also burden the group with ambitions that have nothing to do with why you started meeting.

JI: The category of “the university” is doing a lot of work in our discussion. There are thousands of colleges and universities in the United States. Most of them are not research universities. Could smaller and less prestigious institutions be better homes for disciplined study?

CW: Possibly. But when I talk about “the university,” I often mean the system of American higher education, not just individual campuses.

Institutions exist relative to one another. The system ranks them, distributes prestige, and creates pressures to imitate the institutions above them.

A regional university or community college may look nothing like UVA. But it is still part of a larger system that defines what excellence, success, and institutional advancement look like.

In some cases, the pressure against disciplined study is even stronger in these institutions. Community colleges are frequently treated as sites of narrow job preparation. Their students are assumed to want credentials and employment, not liberal education or sustained intellectual inquiry.

The system effectively tells them: those goods are luxuries for other people.

JI: What alternatives do you see to the university?

CW: One example is the Catherine Project, founded by Zena Hitz. It organizes mostly online reading groups around great books led by trained facilitators. And the project is explicitly non-credentialing.

My oldest son recently joined a group reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. He is an engineer in Los Angeles. He was not an enthusiastic reader growing up, and now he meets every Friday with people from around the world to discuss a common text.

That tells us something. People want to read, think, and talk together without necessarily receiving a credential.

The Catherine Project is becoming an institution. But it is decentralized, and it is not directly tied to the labor market. That separation from credentialing is enormously liberating.

There are many small institutions trying to respond to that desire. None is a blueprint. But together they show how much intellectual longing exists outside the forms through which universities typically measure and monetize it.

JI: I want to press on the word “alternative.” Are these actually alternatives to universities, or are they supplements created by people whose education, status, and financial stability still depend on universities?

CW: That is a real problem. Many of these projects remain parasitic on the university in some sense. Their teachers were trained there. Their texts were preserved there. Their participants may have learned the relevant habits there.

We should not pretend we can simply walk away and start over.

But dependence does not mean identity. A practice may emerge from the university and still find a different institutional form. The question is whether these smaller communities can develop enough authority, continuity, memory, and material support to endure.

JI: Which historical traditions help you imagine that kind of endurance?

CW: The Christian tradition contains many examples, especially monastic communities organized around practices sustained over long periods of time. Those practices were directed toward ends beyond themselves, but those ends were embodied in daily forms of prayer, reading, study, work, and communal life.

The Black university tradition is another important example, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s. Its advocates were unusually candid about the uneasy relationship between intellectual work and political ends.

They understood that a community devoted only to protecting its internal practices could become blinkered. But they also asked whether Black intellectual life should remain within American higher education, transform it, or depart from it. That contested relationship to the larger system was at the center of the project.

JI: The Black university example is interesting because it represents a different kind of imagination within the institution of higher education. The monastic tradition and something like the Catherine Project stand at least partly outside it. What about religiously affiliated universities? Do their traditions give them resources that other universities lack, or is the modern institutional form simply too powerful?

CW: The Catholic tradition is full of examples, but so are the American denominational colleges that existed before the late nineteenth century.

There is no reason to romanticize those institutions. They had serious problems. But they often possessed an account of education whose purpose exceeded labor-market value, economic productivity, and graduate salaries. They could speak about forming a soul, a pastor, a citizen, or a particular kind of human being. That gave them an ethical and institutional logic for learning that was not entirely subordinate to money or state power.

Hillsdale is another example. Say what you want about Hillsdale, but its decision long ago to cut itself off from federal funding should at least make us pause and ask whether it was a good idea to turn American colleges and universities into something like federal contractors after World War II. Hillsdale preserved a degree of institutional independence that most universities no longer have.

JI: And the recent conflict between the Trump administration and universities exposed that dependence.

CW: The Trump administration understood exactly where the points of leverage were.

University presidents were often right to describe the administration’s actions as an assault on higher education. But their defenses of their institutions were also revealing. They talked about cancer research, scientific production, and human capital. They said almost nothing about education—about whether these institutions educate young people or shape the lives of the people who work in them. They defended outputs.

And that is striking because it is also the idiom in which the Trump administration operates: transactional, productive, and focused on measurable returns. The universities and the Trump administration oppose one another, but in some respects they speak the same language.

JI: Let’s come back to the title of your new book. When you say “after the university,” are you predicting that universities will disappear?

CW: No. Universities are not going anywhere. They are too wealthy, too powerful, and too useful. They will continue conducting scientific research, issuing credentials, and providing employment.

“After the university” is more about an intellectual and ethical condition. It means recognizing that the university is not identical with disciplined study and does not possess a monopoly over intellectual life.

Writing the book was strangely liberating. I thought the conclusion would be depressing. Instead, separating the practices I love from the institution that has housed them allowed me to see other possibilities.

Buy After The University

Last month, a group of scholars issued a curious report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University, the report argues that some humanistic fields have suffered from declining scholarly standards, especially where political commitments displace ordinary norms of evidence and argument. The report is not as crude as some of its critics suggest: it concedes that serious scholarship exists in every field it studied, limits the scope of its claims, and warns administrators against intrusive intervention. But those qualifications only make the report’s deeper problems more revealing.

The report proceeds from a narrow perspective of what counts as knowledge, a selective account of which disciplines are in trouble, and a remarkably thin understanding of the institutional realities of the universities whose leaders commissioned it. These oversights and omissions matter because they reveal not only a cramped understanding of the humanities but also a larger inability of the modern research university to say what kind of human beings, communities, and forms of knowledge it exists to cultivate.

What Counts as Knowledge

Universities and academic disciplines need standards, but this report implies that a crisis of standards could be solved simply by returning to a more careful version of “disinterested inquiry.” That phrase hides a much harder question: What kinds of knowledge and inquiry should a university recognize, and who gets to decide? Facts and evidence do not exhaust the work of the university, which also includes moral judgment, historical memory, attention to form and beauty, and the formation of people capable of asking not only what is true but what is worth loving, resisting, preserving, and becoming.

To be sure, parts of the humanities are a mess. Too many syllabi and scholarly articles substitute suspicion for judgment, jargon for argument, and identity performance for intellectual risk. And too many humanists respond to criticism by retreating into the same habits that helped make the criticism plausible in the first place.

The report could have highlighted some of these weaknesses to suggest a way that the best kind of university draws serious academic work together across a variety of disciplines and methodologies, constantly interrogating shortcomings and biases. But that is not what this report imagines.

It instead offers a purportedly neutral and objective account of scholarly insight and expertise. But that posture obscures the fact that every kind of knowledge rests on assumptions about what evidence matters, which forms of reasoning count, and which authorities are entitled to interpret them.

One of the report’s authors, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, unwittingly illustrates the problem in an interview defending the report when he describes an openness to “people of every sort of reasonable view, in the Rawlsian sense of reasonable, which is a very wide, capacious notion of reasonableness.”

The appeal to Rawls is not nearly as capacious as Professor Appiah suggests. Every account of reasonableness smuggles in judgments about what kinds of knowledge and argument count. Rawlsian reasonableness carries substantive assumptions about reciprocity, public justification, and the kinds of reasons that properly count in shared political life. Those assumptions may be defensible for some purposes, but they are not neutral. They tend to privilege arguments that can be translated into liberal, secular, or procedural terms and to disadvantage other forms of argument.

One consequence of this framework is its likely diminishment of tradition-dependent knowledge. For example, while the report does not openly call for less religion in the university, its account gives little indication of how religious forms of knowledge, theological anthropology, or metaphysical claims fit within a serious university. That omission matters. Religious traditions have generated some of the oldest and most durable forms of humanistic inquiry: accounts of personhood, obligation, memory, suffering, justice, and beauty. A report on the humanities that barely registers these modes of inquiry has not offered a capacious account of humanistic scholarship.

The report’s narrow focus on what counts as acceptable inquiry also ignores important changes to the composition of higher education. As my Washington University colleague Dwight McBride suggests, the report envisions “a nostalgic vision of the academy as a realm of apolitical objectivity—a place where scholars once pursued knowledge free from ideological commitments and where disciplinary standards were insulated from social and political concerns.” But as Professor McBride notes, “that imagined academy was also an academy from which women and people of color were largely excluded” and “even after formal barriers fell, their perspectives, experiences and intellectual contributions remained marginalized across much of the humanities and social sciences.” It should be no surprise that “once the academy broadened who could participate in knowledge production, it was always likely to broaden what counted as important knowledge and how that knowledge would be pursued.”

The report implies that these kinds of developments make today’s humanities scholarship less “reasonable.” But “reasonable” is itself a normative claim.

People in Glass Houses

A deeper irony is that the report’s strongest criticisms of the humanities also apply well beyond the humanities. If the problem is that certain disciplines develop gatekeeping norms, reward conformity, punish dissent, and mistake methodological fashion for rigor, then the humanities and humanistic social sciences like sociology and anthropology are hardly alone. As Thomas Kuhn and others have shown, all academic disciplines are prone to their own tradition-based limitations and norms. Every discipline has inherited assumptions about what counts as evidence, rigor, relevance, and expertise.

Strikingly, political science—the home discipline of both commissioning chancellors—does not receive the same scrutiny as other disciplines, even though it has its own long history of methodological gatekeeping, ideological contestation, and disputes over what counts as serious knowledge. As John Gunnell has documented, the fractured discipline of political science has long been mired in normative and ideological battles. I experienced one version of this as a political science graduate student, when a methodological dispute with one of my professors became a high-stakes gatekeeping exercise rather than a good-faith intellectual disagreement. I do not want to make too much of one personal episode, but it taught me something the report underplays: myopic methodological orthodoxy and abuses of power are not limited to the humanities.

Like any discipline, political science has careful and thoughtful scholars. I’ve worked with empirical political scientists throughout my career, and I have often admired their care and creativity. I’ve also worked with and learned from extremely smart and careful anthropologists, feminists, and critical race theorists, among others. And in those domains, as in empirical political science, I have also encountered ideologues and mediocre scholars.

Perhaps the current challenges in higher education are less about entire disciplines or departments and more about individuals—often prominent and vocal ones—whose reputations exceed their abilities and whose institutional platforms shield them from meaningful critique or accountability.

This is where the report’s evidentiary posture becomes frustrating. It acknowledges that many of its examples are merely illustrative, and that the systematic study of politicized scholarship remains underdeveloped. But the rhetoric of the report often outruns the caveat. That gap matters because this is not an obscure academic paper; it is a report commissioned by university leaders and addressed to other university leaders. A handful of disturbing examples can show that something has gone wrong; they cannot, without more, show how widespread the problem is, whether it is increasing, whether it is worse than comparable pathologies in other fields, or whether it is best addressed by administrators, departments, professional associations, or ordinary scholarly contestation.

The report is right to worry about conformity, gatekeeping, ideological capture, and methodological fashions that masquerade as rigor. But those are not uniquely humanistic problems. Every discipline has its orthodoxies, its prestige hierarchies, its incentives for conformity, and its ways of excluding questions that do not fit the dominant method. Political science, economics, the natural sciences, law, and medicine all have their own forms of disciplinary power and self-protection. That does not excuse bad work in the humanities. It does mean that a serious diagnosis of the university cannot isolate a few disfavored fields as uniquely corrupted while leaving untouched the broader institutional habits by which universities reward narrow expertise, protect mediocrity, and confuse methodological confidence with wisdom.

Another Missed Opportunity

The report’s narrow account of knowledge is matched by its insufficient framing of institutional power, treating the humanities as if their problems can be diagnosed and addressed apart from the university structures that now marginalize, incentivize, and manage them. This framing is particularly dispiriting in a political, cultural, and technological environment that offers a unique opportunity for serious reflection and reform in higher education. But that kind of reform requires collaboration and coalition building with some of the very people the report targets and caricatures. More fundamentally, genuine reform would require some shared account of what the university is for—something more than growth, excellence, or market relevance.

Lacking any of these ambitions, the report instead—perhaps unintentionally—shows why modern research universities like WashU and Vanderbilt have long moved past any serious account of the humanities. The reason has little to do with progressive politics. But it reveals why any outrage or resistance from humanists at these kinds of schools is unlikely to go very far.

The reason, if you’ll permit a humanist to invoke science, is simple math. Washington University employs nearly 5,000 faculty, over 3,000 of whom are in medicine. I don’t think many medical school faculty will have the institutional incentive, time, or professional reason to go to bat for the humanities. And I don’t blame them. Sure, a few cardiologists and neurologists may have once majored in English or anthropology, but at this stage in their careers, they have other priorities and other interests to protect. I’d probably do the same if I were in their shoes.

My hunch is that most of the faculty in natural sciences, economics, and business are similarly inclined—probably another 500 or 600 faculty at WashU. Then there are all of the untenured or pre-tenure humanities faculty who, with some exceptions, probably won’t risk their livelihood to die on this hill. Again, I don’t blame them.

What’s left? A few hundred tenured humanists, like me. If even half of us vocally protested a misguided humanities report commissioned by our own chancellor, we would be slightly larger than WashU’s football team. If you’re herding the faculty cats at WashU, all you have to do is—accurately—characterize the noisy humanists as a small fraction of your faculty. Probably fewer than 5 percent. You could also spin that as a 95 percent approval rating.

And then, as with any good corporate leader, you turn to the bottom line. The humanities aren’t making much money, and they are financially vulnerable in a university increasingly shaped by grants, clinical revenue, rankings, and endowment growth. Show a bunch of successful KPIs and revenue generators in a board meeting, and the trustees probably aren’t going to lose sleep over the humanities, as long as they don’t create a PR crisis for the university. And resistance to a report critical of progressive capture in the humanities is not going to create a PR crisis for a university driven by fiscal growth and “excellence.”

The power dynamics might work differently at liberal arts colleges or religiously affiliated universities whose trustees still understand themselves as stewards of a distinctive educational mission. Maybe the humanities faculty at research universities like Notre Dame and Baylor or liberal arts colleges like Williams and Davidson can get the attention of the trustees. But not at Vanderbilt and not at WashU—not unless the humanities become relevant to reputation, rankings, or some other institutional metric administrators and trustees already care about.

A better report on the state of the humanities would have asked why departments so often fail to explain the value of their own fields, why administrators invoke the humanities ceremonially while starving them institutionally, and why universities have become so much better at accelerating growth than understanding purpose. It would still have criticized bad scholarship, ideological conformity, and the suppression of dissent. Those are real problems. But it would have treated them as part of a broader institutional crisis.

The university’s real problem is not that it has been captured ideologically. It is that it lacks a soul or even a vision to find one. I would much rather confront ideological capture, which at least would be fixable over time. It is a lot harder to find a soul.

My friend Tish Harrison Warren has a new book out, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience. It is a wise and humane book about how Christian faith is tested and sustained through long seasons of weariness, discontent, and disorientation. Tish turns to early monastic wisdom, especially the Desert Fathers and Mothers, for practices like stability, silence, and solitude. She offers these not as heroic feats for unusually holy people, but as concrete ways of resisting our modern habits of frenzy, noise, and busyness.

What I appreciate most about the book is that Tish does not treat resilience as a productivity hack or a vague encouragement to try harder. She treats it as a form of Christian formation: the slow work by which God orients us toward faith, hope, and love when we are restless and wandering.

One of the book’s most helpful distinctions is between dramatic crisis and mundane aridity. There are many useful books about death, loss, and suffering. Tish is especially good on the less dramatic but still very real experience of feeling stuck, restless, or vaguely lost, those times of life when “we feel incomplete, disoriented, or discouraged, and we aren’t sure how long it will take to get to some better next scene.”

I think this names a lot of life for a lot of people—as Tish notes, “the desert comes for us all.” And not only at midlife. These seasons can arrive whenever life feels less like a crisis than a treadmill. And they can be hard to acknowledge because they do not always look like suffering from the outside. They may even arrive in lives that look pretty good by most measures, with meaningful work, people we love, and obligations we chose. That is part of what makes these stretches so isolating: You feel like you either have to fake contentment or risk sounding moody, self-absorbed, or ungrateful.

Perhaps a way forward is to balance a kind of everyday pragmatism with Christian hope. Tish writes: “We come to a point, often but not always around midlife, when the decisions we have made along the way seem to wall us in. We find, perhaps with horror or sadness, that we have painted ourselves in a corner by the paths we’ve chosen, the people we have loved, the promises we’ve made, and the unchosen circumstances and obligations of our lives.”

That observation reminds me of Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Burkeman’s claim that all of us must settle, choose, and compromise helps us surrender the fantasy of endless options. Our choices, promises, and struggles inevitably constrain us, though not in the same ways or to the same degree. But no human life escapes limitations, and all of us must give up the lives we will not live to learn to be faithful in the life before us.

But Christian resilience cannot end with lowered expectations. The deeper challenge is not just accepting the life we have but learning to receive it as a site of grace, formation, and hope.

The Catholic writer Henri Nouwen says something similar in his little book, With Burning Hearts. He warns Christians that without participating in God’s story, we shrink into “little people with little concerns who live little lives and die little deaths.” Christian hope acknowledges our limits and our finitude but insists that they are not the whole truth about us or the whole story in which we participate.

If you’re in St. Louis on the evening of July 6, please join us at Grace & Peace Fellowship. We’ll talk about ancient Christian practices, cell phones, Henri Nouwen, and what it means to stay faithful in the long middle. We may also revisit the intervention that helped lead Tish to leave social media—a story she tells in the book, though not quite with all the details I remember.

You can find more details and RSVP here or livestream the event here.

My recent post on Alasdair MacIntyre highlighted his attention to our dependence on one another:

Dependence is not an embarrassing exception to the human condition. It is the human condition. We all begin life dependent on others. Most of us will end life either suddenly and without warning or dependent on others. Between those two points, we experience illness, confusion, grief, weakness, disability, failure, and need.

In other work, MacIntyre criticizes the modern university for its general lack of purpose and its failure to cultivate wisdom. The university no longer helps students ask “what their knowledge is for, what kinds of people they are, and what forms of truth their disciplines disclose or obscure.”

MacIntyre’s points about dependence, purpose, and wisdom converged for me in a new way this past weekend as I re-read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. I first read the book as my dad was dying in 2019, so returning to it was personal. But this time I also read it with MacIntyre on my mind. That pairing clarified the argument I want to make here: universities should stop treating dependence as a problem to be hidden or outsourced and start designing places where dependence, learning, care, and purpose can be shared—even across generations.

Gawande shows how modern medicine often extends life without asking what makes life worth living, especially for the aging and seriously ill. One of his most important insights is that we have confused safety with purpose. We built hospitals to treat disease. We built nursing homes to manage frailty. We built routines, regulations, hallways, handrails, meal schedules, medication charts, and fall-prevention protocols. Many of these things matter, but we too often forgot to ask what kind of life we were saving people for.

Gawande describes reformers trying to “turn nursing homes upside down,” and he highlights alternatives that look less like institutions and more like homes. Most of today’s facilities for the elderly, he argues, were built around the wrong question of how to minimize risk. We might instead ask: “What makes life worth living here?”

My friend Sara Hendren presses the point even further. In What Can a Body Do?, Hendren argues that our bodies always meet a built world, and that world either expands or constrains what those bodies can do. Disability, dependence, aging, and vulnerability are not merely private medical facts. They are also design questions. A staircase, a classroom, and a kitchen all carry a theory of the human person.

Hendren is not simply making a point about disability; she is making a social and political claim. We build environments around imagined users, and then we pretend that the people who do not fit those imagined users are the problem. And we do this not only at the level of political imagination but also in the specific places that we build.

Universities, which claim to form whole persons across generations, should be especially attentive to the built environments that make dependence visible, ordinary, and shared. And this led me to wonder:

What if a university built a residential community for people at the beginning and near the end of adulthood, and treated both groups not as consumers to be managed but as neighbors to be formed?

Here is the basic idea: a mixed-use residential community on or near a college campus where residents of all ages share ordinary life together. Not a dorm with a few older people added as ornaments. Not a retirement community with occasional student volunteers. A real residential community designed around encounter, privacy, care, learning, and mutual dependence.

There are already hints of this kind of possibility. The most common examples are faculty-in-residence programs that incentivize faculty and their families to live with students in the dorms. But aside from some slight adjustments to the interior dorm space of the faculty apartment, there is no design integration: the building remains a dorm for undergraduates, now joined by a faculty interloper.

I experienced a modest version of more integrated university life during physical therapy appointments over the past seven months as I recovered from arm surgery. The clinic is housed in an undergraduate dorm on WashU’s campus, just a few minutes’ walk from my law school office. I received excellent care from Aubrey, Jeff, Elliott, and the rest of the team. But the care also felt different because of where it happened. I was not driving to a detached medical complex and returning to campus afterward. I was walking across the same campus where I teach, grabbing coffee downstairs, and occasionally bumping into one of my undergraduate students. The ordinary work of healing felt less like a private errand and more like part of a shared community life.

More ambitiously, a few colleges and universities have facilitated intentional residential relationships between students and older people. I glimpsed one of these during a recent visit to Saint John’s University (Collegeville, MN), where students can participate in a “Benedictine Living & Learning Community” that provides them “the unique opportunity to develop relationships with monks and sisters who spend regular time in the residential suites” and “foster community through common meals, activities, and service projects.” NYU has partnered with the New York Foundation for Senior Citizens on an intergenerational home-share program that matches graduate students with adults over sixty who have spare rooms, aiming to strengthen housing stability, economic security, and meaningful social bonds. A retirement community on ASU’s Tempe campus offers free housing for graduate students in music and dance in exchange for regular performances.

One of the most robust examples is Trinity Woods, an intergenerational housing community that opened in 2022 at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee. Formed by a three-way partnership between the university, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and Milwaukee Catholic Home, Trinity Woods now houses independent living seniors, retired School Sisters of Notre Dame, and undergraduate student single mothers with children under the age of twelve. The following year, Milwaukee’s NPR affiliate highlighted the friendship between 92-year-old Sister Gina, 27-year-old Diana Fontanez (a single mom and student at Mount Mary), and Diana’s 7-year-old daughter, Mila:

“One of her best friends here is Sister Gina,” Fontanez says. “So every time they see each other, they strike up a conversation. Or when me and Mila are eating dinnertime and she sees Sister Gina she invites her to sit with us.”

Fontanez says the sisters have also provided moral support for her. She remembers one lunch they had together where she confided in them.

“I remember venting about how I was struggling with [Mila] in school a little bit, and I remember having this conversation [with the sisters] like, ‘This is normal, I can navigate this,’” Fontanez says.

The sisters bought gifts for the moms and kids at Christmas. Soon, the two groups will get together to decorate cookies for Valentine’s Day.

As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, Trinity Woods also offers a “living laboratory” for students to apply their studies in a real-world setting: “Education students work as teachers in the day care center, nursing and occupational therapy students help care for residents, and dietetics students help out in the kitchen.”

Trinity Woods offers a compelling example of what is possible, but we can imagine something even larger and more integrated. Imagine a mixed-use residential facility on or near a college campus that housed undergraduates, older adults, and perhaps some graduate students, fellows, visiting scholars, and resident staff. The older residents might include retired faculty, alumni, former staff, and neighbors from the surrounding community—not as mascots for institutional nostalgia, but as full participants in a shared community. One could even envision incentivizing older faculty members to give up their tenure in exchange for reduced cost membership in the residential community.

Design would matter. As Hendren reminds us, design is not decoration. The architecture would need to make encounters possible without making them compulsory. Shared dining spaces. Small kitchens. Common rooms that invite conversation. Gardens. A library. Classrooms. Wide hallways with places to sit. Accessible apartments that do not look like medical afterthoughts. Outdoor paths designed for varied bodies moving at varied speeds.

Imagine the music room where the undergraduate student playing the piano as a break from studying can also share that music with older residents no longer able to play themselves. Or the older person who can be a listening ear to a lonely undergraduate. Or the group of undergraduates and retirees who play the kind of board game that engages all of them without boring any of them.

The programming would matter too, but it should not overwhelm the ordinary life of the place. A weekly seminar taught by a retired historian and a current faculty member. Shared meals. Oral history projects. Student writing groups paired with alumni readers. Music recitals. Legal clinics. Technology help desks that become friendships. End-of-life ethics courses taught within earshot of people who have actually thought about the end of life. Mentoring that runs in both directions: students learning patience, memory, and perspective; older residents learning from the questions, anxieties, and ambitions of the young. The test would be whether both groups could plausibly say, “This place is for us,” not merely “We are being used to benefit someone else.”

But why stop there? Add a daycare facility for young children of university employees and an aftercare facility where older residents could volunteer in carefully supervised but meaningful roles. Build actual community in ways that give people more margins to rest, more trust, and more reasons to remain connected to one another.

This kind of project would not work everywhere. It would require land, capital, professional schools, clinical capacity, operational competence, and a university willing to think beyond the usual categories of dormitory, retirement community, and medical facility. But some places have those ingredients.

WashU, for example, recently acquired a sixteen-acre campus next to its main grounds. It already has a major medical school, social work, public health, law, architecture, occupational therapy, and other professional resources that could support proximate clinics and services. Add a large endowment, a billion dollar windfall from a SpaceX investment, and a sophisticated development team, and the idea becomes less fanciful than it first sounds.

A residential facility could include on-site or nearby geriatric care, physical therapy, counseling, legal assistance, and community health programs. But the point would not be to medicalize or instrumentalize the building or its residents. The point would be to integrate care into a thicker account of community. Doing so would also strengthen the elusive quest to identify the institution’s purpose beyond vague words like “excellence.” One could imagine building an actual community over time, a community that in turn helps establish and anchor the purpose of the institution.

Of course, intergenerational housing is not an elixir. Students can be immature. Older adults can be lonely, stubborn, or ill. Liability concerns are real. Medical needs vary widely. Some residents will want privacy more than programming. Some students will sign up for the housing discount and underestimate the relational commitment. Bad design could produce condescension in one direction and resentment in the other.

But those are reasons to design carefully, not reasons to surrender the imagination to risk mitigation.

The deeper problem is that our institutions often separate people precisely when they most need each other. We put young adults with young adults, older adults with older adults, professionals with professionals, patients with patients. Then we wonder why everyone is lonely, anxious, and unsure what their lives are for.

MacIntyre would tell us that we learn practical reason in communities where people help us name and pursue real goods. Gawande would tell us that safety severed from purpose cannot sustain a human life. Hendren would tell us that the built world is never neutral: it either welcomes our dependence or hides it badly.

A university of all places should understand this. At its best, a university is not just a knowledge factory or credentialing machine. It is a community ordered toward learning across generations. It gathers people who know different things, inhabit different stages of life, and need different forms of help. It should be one of the few places in our society capable of resisting the fantasy that we flourish by sorting ourselves into ever narrower demographic bands.

We are, as MacIntyre says, dependent rational animals. That means we need books and buildings, arguments and meals, clinics and gardens, privacy and friendship, handrails and hard questions. It means the young need the old, the old need the young, and all of us need communities that make our dependence visible without making it shameful. That can start in the university, and it can start when we build with purpose.

I owe my (just-graduated!) research assistant Perri Wilson a big thanks for introducing me to Stephen West’s podcast, Philosophize This. In particular, Perri alerted me to four recent episodes West devoted to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre.

As someone who has long been influenced by MacIntyre, I found West’s summaries clear, insightful, and engaging. I plan to use them as a bridge from MacIntyre to our classroom discussions:

1. Do the hard work of reading (at least some!) MacIntyre

2. Listen to West’s excellent podcast summaries to see if you are understanding the moves that MacIntyre is making

3. Come to class and think together about what MacIntyre is saying and why it matters to your life.

One of the reasons I want students to encounter MacIntyre is that he helps name a problem that now permeates our universities, professions, politics, and technologies: we have become very good at technique and very bad at explaining what our techniques are for. Our deficiencies begin when we fail to realize how we are shaped to live in and see the world.

There is no view from nowhere

MacIntyre insists that nobody reasons from nowhere. Not the religious person. Not the secular person. Not the scientist or the judge. Not the university administrator drafting the next missive about justice, diversity, or free speech.

We all reason from somewhere. We inherit languages, practices, institutions, loyalties, memories, wounds, hopes, and fears. We learn what counts as an argument, what counts as evidence, what counts as cruelty, what counts as courage, what counts as harm, what counts as freedom, and what counts as love. We do not simply discover these things as free-floating rational agents. We receive them, revise them, and sometimes reject them. But even our rejection comes from somewhere.

And our rejection also leads somewhere. As my friend Kavin Rowe has noted in his book, One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions: “the human condition is such that you have to choose how to live from among options that rule one another out.” And we make those choices trusting in things unseen: “we wager our lives, one way or the other,” because “we cannot know ahead of the lives we live that the truth to which we devote ourselves is the truth worth devoting ourselves to.”

This is one of the reasons so many of our public arguments feel exhausting and futile. It is why we increasingly struggle to distinguish between facts, laws, and moral judgments. We imagine we are disagreeing only about conclusions when we are often disagreeing about the assumptions that make conclusions possible.

West explains MacIntyre’s three rival approaches to moral inquiry: the encyclopedic, the genealogical, and the tradition-based. The encyclopedic approach assumes that with enough information, conceptual clarity, and rational procedure, reasonable people will converge on the right answer. The genealogical approach suspects that moral claims often mask power, interest, or domination. The tradition-based approach, which MacIntyre endorses, begins with the recognition that moral reasoning always occurs within inherited practices and communities.

That does not mean all traditions are equally good. Traditions can be judged by whether they can explain the world, form virtuous people, confront their own failures, learn from rivals, and survive internal contradictions. But the way to judge a tradition is not to pretend we can step outside of it. It is to ask whether a tradition can tell the truth about the human beings we actually are. This matters a great deal for a pluralistic society.

We are dependent rational animals

One of MacIntyre’s most important later moves is describing human beings as “dependent rational animals.” We are rational, but our rationality is not self-generating. We become rational through dependence: through parents, teachers, friends, nurses, mentors, communities, institutions, and countless acts of care we did not earn and could not repay.

This is a direct challenge to one of the great myths of modern life, which suggests that the most flourishing human being is an autonomous individual who needs as little as possible from others. MacIntyre insists that dependence is not an embarrassing exception to the human condition. It is the human condition.

We all begin life dependent on others. Most of us will end life either suddenly and without warning or dependent on others. Between those two points, we experience illness, confusion, grief, weakness, disability, failure, and need. Even our moments of apparent strength are sustained by social arrangements we rarely notice: the person who taught us to read, the neighbor who showed up, the colleague who told us the truth, the doctor who listened, the friend who forgave, the family member who stayed.

For MacIntyre, the basic unit of moral life is not the isolated individual making rational contracts from a position of strength. It is what he calls networks of giving and receiving. Moral life depends on relationships in which the needs of others are sufficient reason for action, not merely occasions for contract, exchange, or rights-claiming.

This has obvious implications for politics. A society cannot be judged only by the wealth of its strongest members, the efficiency of its markets, the credentials of its elites, or the sophistication of its technologies. It must also be judged by whether children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the lonely, the poor, and the socially inconvenient can exist as members rather than burdens.

Universities neglect our formation and our dependence

MacIntyre believes the university often produces the kind of person who fails to realize that there is no view from nowhere and who ignores or downplays his dependence on others.

That may not sound terribly deficient, but its implications are far-reaching. For MacIntyre, the university is good at producing expertise, but it is much less good at cultivating wisdom. It produces experts who know their field but not always what their work means. It produces graduates who have not learned to ask the right questions.

As West notes, MacIntyre draws from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University for “the understanding that receiving an education at the highest level should be doing your work in consideration of a number of deeper questions that are just bracketed off in the modern university.”

These are questions like:

• What kind of person am I becoming?

• What goods are internal to the work I am doing?

• What forms of excellence should I pursue?

• What temptations are built into this profession?

• Whose suffering am I trained not to see?

• What do I owe to the communities that made my life possible?

West’s summary of MacIntyre’s reading of Newman is especially helpful here. A university, on this account, is not merely a place that transmits technical competence. It is supposed to help students ask what their knowledge is for, what kinds of people they are, and what forms of truth their disciplines disclose or obscure.

West draws out one of MacIntyre’s deeper points:

Every institution is built and organized on top of answers that are assumed to these fundamental questions. And our institutions are this way even when the people living in them pretend like they are value neutral, and even when the institution itself claims to not have set answers to these questions.

And imagine if this was the blind spot of the place that gave you your education on the world. It would no doubt produce people that are experts in their field. . . . Consider how possible it is for someone to become world class at manipulating one little slice of reality, while simultaneously becoming worse at understanding what their job means inside a life or a society.

That indictment encompasses a lot of doctors and lawyers. Which brings me to the professions.

Professions like medicine and law are especially impoverished by the failure of the university

Several years ago, I was honored to speak to a gathering of doctors and senior administrators at the Mayo Clinic. My topic was “Contemporary Challenges to Professionalism: The importance of organizational purpose, values, and mission.” As I noted in my remarks:

Most doctors and lawyers I know—and most students aspiring to those professions—are drawn to these career fields because of their desire to help people and help society. At their healthiest, law and medicine play vital roles in peacekeeping and healing. But when they lose their sense of purpose—their true north—both disciplines can quickly become deflating and disorienting.

I didn’t name MacIntyre in my comments at the Mayo Clinic, but his influence was underneath most of the argument I was making.

West picks up on a similar observation about modern medicine:

Notice how easy it is for the doctor in this scenario to be a total expert when it comes to medicine, a technical skill, but be completely oblivious to the moral foundations that their shared practice of medicine is steeped in, to be removed from the reasons why it’s important to us to have people studying medicine at all.

In contrast:

We want somebody who can judge what that diagnosis means in the life of this real person who’s standing in front of me. Someone who gets that this is more than just about reading test results or protecting themselves legally. Someone who gets that they’re dealing with a human being here where certain ends matter to them in their life.

A good doctor is not simply a body mechanic with access to advanced instruments. A good doctor must know bodies and people, protocols and judgment. She must know when to intervene, when to wait, when to speak plainly, when to sit quietly, when to hope, and when not to lie.

That kind of judgment cannot be reduced to technique.

Law is similar. A good lawyer is not merely a technician of rules, risks, and leverage. A good lawyer must know the law, but he must also know the goods the law serves and the harms the law inflicts. She must know how to win, but also when winning is not the highest good.

Law schools are not especially good at this kind of formation. We are good at teaching students to spot issues, parse doctrine, construct arguments, and anticipate counterarguments. Those are real skills, and they matter. But if we teach those skills without asking what kind of person should use them, and for what ends, then we have formed technicians more than practitioners.

Every profession has external goods: money, prestige, influence, status, institutional power. Those goods are not necessarily bad. But when they become the point of the profession, they corrupt the practice from within.

MacIntyre helps us see why this happens. Practices require institutions, and institutions require resources. But institutions also tempt us to exchange internal goods for external goods. The internal goods of law include judgment, fidelity, advocacy, order, mercy, and the disciplined use of power. The internal goods of medicine include healing, care, truth-telling, presence, and the wise treatment of embodied vulnerability. These goods can survive only if communities of practice name them, teach them, and protect them.

That is why professional formation cannot be outsourced to ethics modules, professionalism pledges, or compliance trainings. Those may have their place, but they cannot do the deeper work of formation. That work requires communities, exemplars, and time to practice.

Final Thoughts

West concludes his fourth and final episode on MacIntyre by naming the question MacIntyre across his work invites us to keep asking:

What sort of a world would we have to build for dependent, rational animals like us, who are shaped by traditions, to become wise enough to see what we’re doing, and moral enough to continue doing it together?

That question belongs in our classrooms, our hospitals, and our courtrooms. And as West emphasizes throughout his podcasts, it is not only an academic question but a practical challenge for all of us.

Here are Stephen West’s four episodes on MacIntyre:

• Episode 244: After Virtue: Why Moral Conversations Feel Unsatisfying (discussing After Virtue)

• Episode 245: The Rival Approaches of the Modern World (discussing Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry)

• Episode 246: The Myth of the Self-Made Person (discussing Dependent, Rational Animals)

• Episode 247: The Failure of the Modern University (discussing The Task of Philosophy and God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition)

Earlier this week, the New York Times podcast “The Daily” ran an episode titled “What Drives Political Violence in America.” The episode features Natalie Kitroeff’s interview with University of Chicago professor Robert Pape, an expert on political violence who has advised every White House from 2001 to 2024. I recommend the entire interview but want to highlight and elaborate on a few key points. The most troubling lesson from Pape’s analysis is not that America is on the brink of civil war, but that a growing number of Americans have begun to treat political violence as morally intelligible, socially admirable, or strategically necessary.

Endorsing Political Violence is No Longer Fringe

Pape’s central claim is that support for political violence in America is no longer confined to a few extremists or online cranks. To the contrary:

The most important fact about political violence in America today is this: Tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle see political violence as acceptable. And once you have tens of millions of Americans who see violence as acceptable, this changes everything about the risks of attack.

Most people who say extremist things will never commit political violence themselves. But Pape’s point is that broad approval makes it easier for the volatile few to act. It promises them admiration rather than shame, solidarity rather than isolation—think, for example, of the online valorization of Luigi Mangione after the targeted killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Pape rightly distinguishes our current moment from the risk of civil war. We do not have organized armies or clear territorial divisions. That distinction matters. The language of “civil war” can make the political danger sound both more dramatic and more abstract. The real danger is less about mass violence and more about a climate in which large numbers of ordinary citizens believe that force can be justified for political ends, thereby empowering a few people to act. Pape’s phrase is “violent populism.” Attacks on elected officials, political candidates, judges, journalists, and activists do not require mass participation to produce mass fear.

This Isn’t the First Time, But it May Be Unique

Pape’s analysis avoids a presentist fallacy. He points to earlier eras of violent populism, including the 1920s, when the second Ku Klux Klan grew into a mass national movement, and the 1960s, with assassinations, riots, and widespread social approval for some forms of political violence.

The historical comparisons should neither comfort nor panic us. We have been here before in the sense that political violence and sympathy for it are not alien to American life. But the repetition of a pattern does not make it benign.

Pape also identifies what may be distinctive about the present moment: support for political violence is rising on both partisan extremes at the same time. Earlier periods had a more dominant ideological direction. Today, right-wing violence intensifies left-wing fear and left-wing violence intensifies right-wing fear; each side narrates its own aggression as defensive and the other side’s aggression as proof that normal restraints no longer apply.

Our modes of communication worsen these dynamics, but Pape rightly warns against making modern technology the whole explanation. Americans managed to produce political violence before smartphones, cable news, and social media. The deeper problem is not technology alone; it is existential politics—politics experienced as rejection, humiliation, and loss.

Leadership Matters

Pape notes the outsized influence of political leaders who embrace or even encourage violence. President Trump’s rhetoric has repeatedly treated force as a form of political theater: protesters should be “roughed up,” opponents should have “the crap knocked out of them,” and demonstrators should be “punched in the face.” Some of these comments may be defended as hyperbole, but these and many other examples (insinuating the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed, encouraging law enforcement to have “one really violent day” to curb retail theft, commenting in response to the protests following George Floyd’s murder that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”) set an unmistakable tone. Over time, the purported jokes become part of the political atmosphere.

Pape presses his critique in both directions, noting not only Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric but also Beto O’Rourke’s encouragement that Democrats “throw that first punch” and Gavin Newsom’s claim that he would be “punching a bully back in the mouth.” It’s important to call out irresponsible language from political leaders whenever it occurs. But Trump’s language pushes beyond obvious metaphor more than his opponents. And the president’s words carry a different authority and reach. It is not partisan special pleading to say that the person entrusted with the executive power of the United States has a heightened responsibility to lower the temperature rather than raise it.

This is one reason that President Biden’s immediate condemnation after the 2024 assassination attempt against President Trump mattered. Pape notes that after Biden’s Oval Office address, support for political violence declined. We should be cautious about attributing causation too neatly, but the episode is still instructive. Leaders cannot solve every underlying grievance with a speech, but their words are not without effect.

There is (Still) Time to Do Something

Pape stresses that roughly three-quarters of Americans abhor political violence. He suggests joint statements from leaders of both parties condemning political violence on all sides. A more substantive change would be adopting a less apocalyptic view of political disagreement. That doesn’t mean downplaying the significance of the issues (Pape’s account emphasizes demographic change, growing economic inequality, and fear of political exclusion.) Some political conflicts are grave. Some policies harm vulnerable people. Some injustices demand urgent action. But a republic cannot survive if every election is the last election, every opponent is an existential enemy, and every institutional loss proves that politics itself has failed.

The fact that most Americans still reject political violence is no small consolation. But a silent majority is not the same thing as a governing culture. Restraint has to be taught, modeled, and reinforced. That work will not come only from our political leaders. It has to happen in churches, classrooms, neighborhoods, and social media posts. With tens of millions of our fellow citizens now willing to regard political violence as acceptable, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

This week’s episode of Cross-Examined, is all about America!

It is also, unfortunately, our last episode, as Evan has decided to end the podcast. I have really enjoyed the experiment, and I’m disappointed that we won’t continue. Thanks especially to our producer, Olivia Schroder, whose technical, creative, and people skills are all first-rate.

The picture at the top of this post is a screen shot from a fan cut of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA. I show this video—which has over 31 million views—every time I teach my course on Religion and the Constitution (Fall 2026 law students, get ready!). The video captures a number of elements of “civic religion” and “Christian nationalism.” But to me, its most haunting moment is the one I’ve captured above.

As I wrote in my 2024 book, Learning to Disagree:

This image suggests that the logic of the Judeo-Christians is doomed to one of two fundamental errors. On the one hand, “Faith in America” could mean that the story of this country is principally the story of Christians (and perhaps a few Judeos). In this account, America is a “Christian nation.” That was never fully true, but our changing religious demographics mean it is definitely not true today. On the other hand, “Faith in America” could mean that the story of this country is really about maintaining a religious-like belief in the goodness of “America” in which the object of worship is not God, but country.

I suggest to my class that neither of these narratives is particularly healthy or plausible. I don’t think of this nation as either the embodiment of my faith or the object of my worship. Honestly, I feel a healthy dose of skepticism about the nation, regardless of who happens to be in charge at any given moment.

On the other hand, if Lee Greenwood, the Marines, and praying children don’t give us a healthy version of patriotism, is there a better way to think of and celebrate our national identity? We are going to need more than the Olympics and natural disaster responses to sustain our collective American identity. But will we need faith? And if so, faith in what?

The question of what binds us together remains urgent and important: How do we find common ground with those with whom we disagree about the common good?

But just as important to me as a Christian—and to many Americans of all faiths and no faith—is the misplaced allegiance of some Christians in the political project of the United States of America. The story of Christianity does not hinge on the success or failure of a particular nation-state in the throes of late stage capitalism. It hinges on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

This is also one reason that some Christians whose hopes and anxieties are bound up with the success of the United States have such difficulty interpreting and applying the New Testament, a text written by and to members of a marginalized religious community who were seeking faithful witness rather than political dominance.

In fact, my hunch is that one could trace a direct theological and cultural line from “faith in America” to President Trump’s recent depiction of himself as a “doctor”:

The kind of sacrilegious devotion to a country and its leaders reflected in these images is not simply a misdirected instinct or a joke in poor taste. It is made possible by decades of malformation within some segments of American Christianity. And it will not be easily undone. This is part of what I had hoped to explore more in Cross-Examined, but you’ll at least get a taste of it in our final episode.

I want to extend my gratitude to those of you who had jumped into Cross-Examined. I’ve heard from a lot of you—Christians and atheists, Republicans and Democrats, students and retirees—that you’ve found it meaningful and that it enabled you to have new and better conversations with people who see the world differently than you do. That was my goal for this project, and why I agreed to try a podcast with a stranger in the first place. Stay tuned for something else down the road! (I don’t actually have anything, but it never hurts to say “stay tuned.”)

Earlier this week, I hosted a small gathering of scholars and practitioners to think together about disagreement, pedagogy, and measurement. The gathering grew out of a question that has been on my mind for some time: what can universities teach and measure when it comes to the capacities needed to sustain disagreement across difference?

Some of these questions overlap with important work being done on character and virtue. I suspect teaching disagreement is related to, but distinct from, character formation. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, I take virtues to be shaped within particular traditions, institutions, and practices over time. That makes me think that character work can be particularly difficult to describe and assess across traditions, because virtues like courage and humility do not mean the same thing across those traditions. The Stoics, the early Christians, and Nietzscheans are not describing the same kind of moral formation.

Disagreement seems different to me from character because it is more procedural than substantive. The goal is not principally to produce students who embody certain virtues, but students who can do certain things: listen carefully, articulate disagreement clearly, resist caricature, and remain engaged when conversation becomes difficult. That said, disagreement is not merely a skill. It is also a habit or disposition, which means it requires formation and not mere technique. Still, it may be less tradition-specific than character. For this reason, a genuinely pluralistic university lacking its own moral tradition may be better positioned to form students in the practices of disagreement than in any thick account of virtue.

To make this more concrete: I am more skeptical of Duke teaching character than Notre Dame teaching character. And I am more skeptical of WashU teaching character than West Point teaching character. Notre Dame and West Point have traditions and cultures that situate character formation in thicker ways than Duke and WashU do. They can answer questions like: what does it mean to be a Catholic student of character, or what does it mean to be an Army officer of character? Duke and WashU can certainly cultivate norms and aspirations, but they do not carry the same kind of institutional culture as West Point and Notre Dame. By contrast, I think all four institutions could teach and inculcate disagreement. They could create conditions in which students practice listening, interpreting, arguing, revising, and persisting across difference without requiring consensus on a comprehensive moral vision.

Another assumption of mine is that both character formation and the formation required for disagreement will take a long time. College and university teachers face institutional constraints that set the time frame for us—usually a semester. That’s better than a YouTube video or a weekend seminar, but it’s not ten years.

The pedagogy conversations during our gathering were among the most helpful to me. It is easy to talk in broad terms about “viewpoint diversity” or “civil dialogue.” It is much harder to build the kind of trust and credibility inside an actual university that would make those efforts more than a slogan. Several participants noted that administrators often pursue highly visible initiatives, while faculty buy-in is slower, more fragile, and harder to secure. Others emphasized that top-down efforts can easily backfire if they are not grounded in relationships and local knowledge. That struck me as right. Universities are not especially good at turning institutional aspirations into living practices, particularly among faculty. The latter depends on building relationships and culture, and those things take time.

Relatedly, a number of people stressed the value of low-stakes practice. Students need room to make clumsy arguments, to hear themselves say something imprecise, to be misunderstood, to revise, and to try again. One participant described the classroom as something like a language lab. Not because disagreement is mechanical, but because it often requires practice before it becomes a habit.

That point also helps clarify something I have tried to emphasize in my own teaching: dialogue is not the same thing as agreement, and it is not the same thing as a smooth or pleasant conversation. A classroom can be tense, awkward, and messy and still be doing good work. In fact, if students care about what they are saying, that messiness may be unavoidable. The goal is not to remove friction. It is to keep friction from hardening into contempt or collapsing into performance.

Our discussion about measurement and assessment also named some important limitations. Everyone wants measurable outcomes. We all want to know whether anything is working. But measuring growth in dispositions like humility, courage, or empathy is difficult, and sometimes our assessments tell us less than we want to imagine.

That does not mean we can’t measure anything. At our gathering, participants discussed sophisticated interviews, experience sampling, reflection exercises, behavioral indicators, and various survey instruments. Some of these approaches can capture important dimensions of what happens in our courses. Perhaps, rather than trying to demonstrate that a particular course “transformed” students, we can attempt to show that under certain conditions it helped some students make identifiable gains in how they listen, reflect, argue, or engage. That may be less exciting language for a grant report or institutional brochure. It might also be more believable.

I left our gathering with a few related takeaways:

• First, there are no shortcuts. If we want students to disagree better, we will need more than clever branding, one-off events, or vague appeals to civil discourse.

• Second, the best work in this area depends on durable cultures: trusted faculty, repeated practices, and intimate settings in which students can take risks without being reckless.

• Third, this work has to stay rooted in classrooms. The more abstract the rhetoric becomes, the more teaching is replaced by programs and events, the easier it is for universities to say a great deal without changing very much.

Disagreement is worth teaching. Not because it will fix our politics, and not because universities can solve problems that belong to families, neighborhoods, congregations, and other institutions. But students are going to inherit a world marked by real differences over issues that matter, and many of them have not been given good models for how to live in that world without withdrawing, posturing, or despising one another.

Thanks to the amazing group who joined this gathering, including my WashU colleague Taylor Carlson, my Legal Vocation Fellowship colleague Eden Sung, Mike Whitenton (Interfaith America), Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University), Amanda Lewis (Templeton Religion Trust), David Weerts (University of Minnesota), Sarah Igo (Vanderbilt University), Brad Burroughs (Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character), Brendan Case (Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, and Rachel Wahl (University of Virginia). And thanks to WashU’s Weidenbaum Center for generously funding our gathering and facilitating these intellectual and relational connections.

In other news, Episode 4 of Cross-Examined dropped yesterday. Evan and I explore the topic of Elite Colleges. You can listen (and subscribe) on your favorite podcast platform. We hope to release a new episode every two weeks.

Episode 3 of Cross-Examined is out this week. Evan and I tackle parenting and kids. You can listen (and subscribe!) on your favorite podcast platform. We hope to release a new episode every two weeks.

You can learn more about why I agreed to start a podcast with someone I barely knew in this earlier post.

In other news, I mentioned earlier this month an edited volume to which I contributed a chapter, “Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It.”

Last week, John K. Wilson reviewed the book rather negatively on Inside Higher Ed. Wilson focuses on other contributions, and I’ll let those authors speak for themselves, but I did want to respond briefly to two of his more general comments.

First, Wilson asserts that the book’s contributors “all seem united in thinking that viewpoint diversity exclusively means adding conservative voices to an exclusively left-wing campus ideology.” I’m not sure on what he’s basing his claim, but I think it’s clear that my chapter—and my broader scholarly record—suggests otherwise. It also seems like a strange charge to level against contributors like Eboo Patel, Danielle Allen, and Nadine Strossen.

Second, Wilson suggests that “the best way to expand viewpoint diversity is an approach largely overlooked by this book: extracurricular activities.” In context, he seems to referring to universities inviting outside speakers to campus. I’m all for having an interesting and engaging speaker series, but that’s not going to be the most effective response to a lack of viewpoint diversity. Speeches and debates are largely performative, sandwiched between classes and often incentivized by free food or extra credit. They can play a role, but they rarely do the work of deep formation or sustained intellectual engagement. That’s what happens in classrooms—in curricular rather than extracurricular activities.

Earlier this week, I was honored to present to a group of journalists at the Faith Angle Forum in Miami. Today’s newsletter shares the remarks I gave at that gathering.

Introduction

My goal in these opening comments is to set a broader context for pluralism and religious freedom in American life over the past twenty-five years. My principal claim is that constitutional protections are stronger than they were then, even as the social and epistemic conditions for pluralism have grown more fragile.

I want to reflect on three levels: descriptively, normatively, and a bit autobiographically. I spent the early 2000s not as an academic but as a government lawyer in Washington, D.C. I was also deeply engaged in Christian community. I worshipped and volunteered at what was then The Falls Church Episcopal, where I would occasionally run into Mike Gersen and other Bush era evangelicals. I was part of the demographic—and even some of the particular communities—that Colleen Carroll wrote about in her 2002 book, The New Faithful. At the time, I would have readily and publicly identified as an evangelical.

The early 2000s feel like a very long time ago.

So what has changed since then, and what does that change tell us about the moment we’re in now? Let me offer some tentative thoughts about three positive trends, three negative trends, and what it means today.

Three Positive Trends

First, civil liberties are (still) for losers. This has always been true, but the political instability of the past generation combined with the consolidation of executive power by both political parties has reminded a lot of Americans of their need for civil liberties when the other side gains power. You don’t need the First Amendment when you win the political process; you either write the laws you want or you write exemptions to protect your interests. It’s when you’ve lost that you most need protections for your rights to dissent, to speak freely, and to exercise your religion. Over the past few decades, everyone has experienced being a political loser at one time or another.

Second, doctrine around the free exercise of religion has gotten much better. The early 2000s were not particularly strong when it came to free exercise. Employment Division v. Smith, the peyote case, had been around for a decade. And the ensuing fight between Congress and the Supreme Court had left both constitutional and statutory free exercise protections fairly limited. Litigators had largely begun to rely on the free speech clause to protect religious liberty interests.

The intervening years have seen strengthened constitutional free exercise protections in cases like Fulton, Tandon, and most significantly, Hosanna Tabor. And litigants have also prevailed statutorily in cases like Hobby Lobby. Litigation advocacy groups like Becket and the Alliance Defending Freedom have done important work to meaningfully strengthen these protections.

I am less sure about developments related to the Establishment Clause. That area of the law seems to moving toward the Court’s history, text, tradition framework, which seems very good for white Protestants, and perhaps not as good for everyone else.

I am also still waiting for the modern Supreme Court to acknowledge the subject of my entire scholarly career: the First Amendment’s right of assembly. It appears I am playing the long game. But setting aside this important oversight by the Court, the state of religious liberty in this country is as strong as it’s ever been.

The third positive trend is not legal but social: for more Americans, diversity is now a lived reality. The past few decades have seen the growth of groups and movements that highlight our country’s diversity, including my friend Eboo Patel’s Interfaith America, where I serve as Senior Fellow. There are more mixed-race kids, more out gay kids, and in at least some parts of the country, more immigrant kids and more religious diversity. To put this more succinctly, much of GenZ experiences diversity differently than their grandparents. This is generally a positive trend, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to a better understanding of pluralism or deepening trust across differences.

Three Negative Trends

That’s the good news. But the social conditions that make pluralism possible are also worsening. Here are three related problems that build on one another.

First, trust in institutions and expertise continues to plummet, which means we have fewer shared authorities to mediate our disagreements. We’re seeing this across the board, not only with respect to government institutions, which have struggled with public trust since Watergate, but in institutions of higher education, journalism, and religion. Some of the lack of trust is well-deserved—we’ve seen decades of scandals and plenty of unhealthy institutions. But institutions are a paradox. Even when they fail the people within them, we depend on them to carry forward our shared endeavors. The communal focus of many religious institutions in particular—worship services, potlucks, small groups, and service projects—means that loss of religious institutional trust directly affects social trust.

Second, collapsing trust in institutions is intensified by what Bill Bishop called the Big Sort: we increasingly live, work, worship, and argue among people who already share our assumptions. Bishop published his analysis in 2009, but the evidence shows his thesis continues. During the pandemic, more than one of every 10 people moving to Texas was from California. And from 2004 to 2020, the number of super landslide counties—where a presidential candidate won at least 80% of the vote —jumped from 6% to 22%.

The Big Sort also continues online, and the algorithms play to our worst selves. I could pick any number of examples, but the one that comes to mind in the context of today’s discussion is the reaction to the Supreme Court’s 2020 emergency docket COVID case, Brooklyn Diocese v. Cuomo. Doctrinally, the case was relatively unimportant. But it was Amy Coney Barrett’s first decisive vote, and it involved a clash between progressive politicians and conservative religious institutions. Depending on one’s social media feeds, the decision was either a miracle from God or the end of democracy.

The third negative trend is that we are experiencing not only moral polarization but epistemic fracture. We are losing shared confidence not just in values, but in facts, categories, and standards of judgment. Factual claims become moral certainties. Legal conclusions become mere opinions. Moral beliefs become factual imperatives.

When we blur these categories in our personal and public disagreements, the consequences are not merely theoretical. Disagreements that should be about evidence turn into battles over identity. Claims that require careful legal analysis are flattened into conclusory statements. Moral judgments become weaponized as if they were proof of what happened.

This kind of category confusion corrodes democratic trust: people stop believing in any kind of shared public and assume bad faith from those who see a situation differently. Once we lose the ability to separate what we know, what we can prove, and what we value, we make it nearly impossible to reason together about anything that matters. Religious belief contributes to this epistemic problem, but it’s not just religious belief. The old Rawlsian hope of shared public reason to navigate our differences has unraveled as much in secular echo chambers as it has in religious ones.

This confusion is then amplified by a style of public discourse built on hyperbole, moral panic, and bad-faith interpretations. It manifests in characterizing one’s political opponents as not simply “wrong” but actually “evil.”

The point is as much pragmatic as it is normative: When you expend your rhetorical firepower on hyperbole and overgeneralizations, you won’t have anything left to confront the people who come much closer to actually embodying the labels you’ve been using.

Applications

If my diagnosis is correct—stronger legal protections, but weaker cultural conditions for pluralism—then here are three things you might consider as journalists covering our current moment.

First, watch the relationship between legal stability and social fragility. It is possible to tell a story in which religious liberty is stronger than it was in 1999 and yet pluralism is more brittle in everyday life. This might also mean that any individual religious liberty decision is less consequential than we might perceive it in the moment. That should not surprise us. Our deepest cultural conflicts are not usually about technical legal doctrines. They are more symbolically charged, and more likely to be narrated as existential struggles. Constitutional doctrine matters, but it is often boring and incremental.

Second, pay attention to emerging coalitions. In a moment of growing institutional distrust and political sorting, old alignments might explain less than they once did. That is true among evangelicals, among Catholics, across interfaith coalitions, and among people who are religiously orthodox in some areas and politically heterodox in others. Denominational affiliations within Protestantism matter far less than the political temperament of local congregations. GenZ Christians generally don’t care about Methodist history or Presbyterian polity, but they are looking for other Christians who share certain baseline commitments. This is also true on the political right. One of Trump’s truly astounding political accomplishments was bringing together Pentecostals like Paula White and Southern Baptists like Robert Jeffress. We’d seen hints of these coalitions in the Reagan era, but nothing like what Trump was able to do. The old labels still matter, but they do less explanatory work than they once did.

Third, highlight the epistemic environment in which religious and political difference is being interpreted. Social media and the collapse of trust in mediating institutions make it easier to caricature opponents, flatten legal disputes into moral panics, and conflate factual and moral claims. That confusion is becoming one of the defining pressures on pluralism. The danger is not only misinformation. It is the loss of the categories we need to reason together. So pay attention not only to outcomes, but to the quality of the public argument surrounding those outcomes: what counts as evidence, what gets framed as threat, and how quickly disagreement gets converted into bad-faith attribution. This will not be easy, because the same forces I’ve been describing—distrust, political sorting, and technological distortion—now shape not only what people believe, but what they think counts as evidence in the first place.

Final Thoughts

The dynamics I am describing are not just there in our institutions, politics, and media ecosystems. They also affect our communities and interpersonal relationships. So let me close a bit more personally by returning to my own story.

I last spoke at the Faith Angle Forum in May of 2015. It was one month before Donald Trump announced his first candidacy, and one month before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

By that time, I found myself somewhat—but not entirely—distanced from the evangelical culture I had experienced in the early 2000s. Part of the reason was the Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas. I had first been exposed to Hauerwas in law school, and then after four years of practicing law at the Pentagon, he became a key mentor and friend during my time in graduate school. Those of you who know anything about Hauerwas will spot a bit of tension between his approach and that of the post-9/11 Bush evangelicals.

The other significant change for me was a growing sense of my own racial identity, and the challenges of race within evangelicalism. In the early 2000s, most of my church exposure was to white evangelicalism. We would not have called it that back then, and even today, the category is far more nuanced than the caricature that sometimes occupies the public consciousness. But an evangelical Episcopalian congregation in Washington, D.C. in the early 2000s was . . . well, pretty white.

By 2015, after graduate school and few years of teaching law, I had more exposure to critical race theory . . . back then, and even today, the category is far more nuanced than the caricature that sometimes occupies the public consciousness. I also had more black friends and had more experiences with multiethnic ministry.

Along the way, I came to understand my own story better. My dad had been born at Manzanar, where my grandparents had been incarcerated, and he went on to spend thirty years as an army officer. Understanding the paradox of his life helped me better understand my own. It also helped me see that I wasn’t exactly a white evangelical. And I began to speak and write more about these tensions. In early 2016, I published a fairly benign opinion piece in the Washington Post titled “Do Black Lives Matter to Evangelicals?” That piece cost me some friendships, and in hindsight, probably hinted at things to come.

But back to the 2015 Faith Angle Forum. My assigned topic was “Religious Liberty and the American Culture Wars.” At the time, one of the biggest questions was whether religious adherents who maintained traditional views of marriage would have a place in our pluralistic society or would instead be viewed as the equivalent of racial bigots. Some progressives clearly hoped for the latter. As I said in my comments, 2015 was a good time to ask “whether we really think that Gordon College today is like Bob Jones in 1983, whether InterVarsity is like a neo-Nazi group, and whether Tim Keller is like the Grand Wizard of the Klan.”

In 2015, I worried that progressive elites would treat some traditional religious convictions as morally disqualifying from public life. I still believe that perspective poses a real danger to the possibility of pluralism. But the intervening years have revealed a different danger. Parts of the political Right, including segments of the Christian Right, have increasingly embraced a posture that is fundamentally incompatible with pluralism. To them, empathy has become a sin, and people like David French and Russell Moore are viewed as sellouts and heretics for their willingness to engage charitably across differences.

I do not mean all conservatives, all Trump voters, or all evangelicals. I mean a set of increasingly visible voices that fuse religious identity, political grievance, and national belonging in ways that make diversity and disagreement harder to sustain. And the negative trends that I highlighted earlier—decreasing trust in institutions, the Big Sort, and epistemic fracture—will make it even more difficult to counter these developments.

I’d like to end my remarks with the words of John Perkins, who died this past Friday. The civil rights leader—and evangelical Christian—lived a life that speaks to the stakes of our current moment. Raised in segregated Mississippi, Perkins founded Voice of Calvary Ministries in the 1960s and the Christian Community Development Association in 1989. As he grew older, his views became more complex. Here is what Perkins wrote in 2018, two years into the first Trump Administration:

As I come closer to the end of my journey, I am aware that community development can only take us so far – because this is a gospel issue. . . . The problem is that there is a gaping hole in our gospel. We have preached a gospel that leaves us believing that we can be reconciled to God but not reconciled to our Christian brothers and sisters who don’t look like us – brothers and sisters with whom we are, in fact, one blood. . . . We’re at a unique moment in our history. We’ve come through – and in many ways are in the midst of – great upheaval. The soul of our nation has been laid bare. We have only to look at the signs of the times to realize that the church may not have long to get this right. We may not have much time left to offer the world a glimpse of this unity that will point the eyes of the watching world to the power of our great God. Yes, there’s an urgency. Time is running out . . . for all of us.

Thank you for listening, and I look forward to the discussion to come.

This week marks the publication of a new volume edited by John Tomasi and Bernard Schweizer, “Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It.” The book includes pieces by Eboo Patel, Nadine Strossen, Tyler VanderWeele, and many others. I was honored to contribute a chapter based on my 2025 Pluralism Lecture at Duke University.

One of the volume’s standout chapters is Danielle Allen’s “How to Be a Confident Pluralist.” Reflecting on my 2016 book, Confident Pluralism, Allen suggests that the project “comes down at its core to a basic question of how we humans relate to one another across differences of viewpoints, beliefs, and identities.” Her concluding reflections capture well the connection between the personal and civic dimensions of pluralism:

The ethic of confident pluralism is deeply personal for me, with profound spiritual and psychological rewards. It enables me to move through the world always looking others in the eye, as equals. Yet this ethic is also civic. Democracy demands an ethic of confident pluralism and viewpoint diversity if a government that is of the people and also by and for the people is to thrive. Our educational institutions must cultivate in our students the habits of reflection, institution-building, compromise, engagement, and mutual respect that are rooted in the principle of viewpoint diversity and pluralism. This is equally important in K–12 institutions and in higher education. If we want a democracy capable of solving its problems, we must teach citizens not only how to argue for what they believe, but also how to debate in ways that strengthen rather than shred our bonds with one another.

As Allen emphasizes, confident pluralism is not mere tolerance or procedural coexistence. It is a civic and moral discipline, one that requires habits of patience, restraint, and engagement across deep difference. It begins with the recognition that disagreement is not a problem to be solved, but a permanent feature of democratic life.

Tomasi and Schweizer’s volume avoids treating viewpoint diversity as a slogan, a partisan weapon, or a thin managerial fix. Instead, it becomes a demanding intellectual and civic aspiration—one that matters for higher education, politics, and the arts alike. As importantly, the essays are not merely celebratory; they are practical, searching, and self-critical. At a time of polarization, ideological sorting, social media fragmentation, and institutional mistrust, this book offers not just a defense of disagreement, but an account of how disagreement can help us find common ground even in the absence of a shared common good.

In other news, Episode Two of my Cross-Examined podcast with Evan Mandery is now out. We have titled this episode “Faith Without Certainty.”

You can listen to it on your favorite podcast platform or learn more about the genesis of this project. We hope to release new episodes every two weeks.

The first episode of Cross-Examined is out today! You can read more about it here, subscribe through your favorite podcast platform here, or catch the audio on Youtube here. I’m looking forward to this adventure with Evan, and I hope you’ll join us and send lots of great feedback along the way.

It’s probably not strategic to recommend someone else’s podcast the day I launch my own, but regardless of your religious or political orientation, this interview with Ben Sasse is worth your time.

A few months ago, I agreed to start a podcast with someone I had just met—and with whom I disagree about some of life’s most important questions.

I first encountered Evan Mandery through his sharp and provocative book Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us. Not long after, I invited him to a conference I hosted on educating for citizenship. During a break, Evan pitched the idea: He is an atheist; I am a Christian. We’re both lawyers, both teachers, and both convinced that serious disagreement is unavoidable in a diverse democracy. We should start a podcast that models disagreement across hard issues.

The idea was simple but ambitious—two people with meaningful philosophical and religious differences, talking seriously about important issues while demonstrating the kind of disagreement we both think is missing in our society. But I was hesitant. I don’t listen to many podcasts. And I’m wary of turning serious disagreement into just another form of content.

Evan, it turns out, is very persuasive. The more we talked, the more I began to see the podcast not as performance, but as practice—an opportunity to try, in real time, the kind of engagement I’ve written about for years.

We’re calling it Cross-Examined. The title not only gestures at faith but also reflects our legal training. Cross-examination has many purposes, but one of them is testing ideas and clarifying claims. That’s the spirit we hope to bring to each episode. We don’t want to talk past each other, but neither do we want to steer away from the hardest differences, settling for a thin version of civility that avoids disagreement. A pluralistic society depends on something harder: the ability to stay in conversation when convictions actually collide.

We have a trailer, thanks to our amazing producer Olivia Schroder:

As we move forward, we will explore questions like:

• Can genuine friendship survive deep moral and religious disagreement?

• What place, if any, should faith have in public life?

• How do our deepest convictions shape the way we raise children?

• Are there limits to tolerance in a pluralistic society — and who decides?

These aren’t abstract questions for Evan and me; they’re issues that shape our teaching, writing, and public engagement. And they shape how we engage with others as husbands, fathers, colleagues, teachers, and neighbors.

There’s another unusual element to this project: Evan and I are not close friends or colleagues. To the contrary, we had never had a substantive conversation before he proposed this podcast. That means listeners won’t just hear our disagreements. They’ll also hear the slower, more human process of our getting to know one another—learning where trust can grow, where differences remain sharp, and how intellectual partnership develops across these differences.

Our first episode of Cross-Examined drops February 26th. We hope you’ll listen in as the experiment unfolds.

This will be a brief post, as I am juggling the start of the semester with a harder-than-expected recovery from arm surgery. But I want to share a few thoughts about the recent events in Minnesota.

Protest, Civil Disobedience, and the Limits of Force

People have a constitutional right to protest, and government officials have a responsibility to tolerate disruption and dissent. The First Amendment guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” As I noted in one of my first posts on Some Assembly Required:

The right of assembly allows people to form and gather in groups of their choosing and to express their values and beliefs even when—and perhaps especially when—those views challenge or upset government officials. It is one of our foundational civil liberties.

Protest is not the same as civil disobedience. When people engage in civil disobedience, they willfully and openly violate the law and risk consequences. But even when protest crosses into civil disobedience—for example, when protesters trespass or block roads—the consequences do not include unjustified force against them. These dynamics are far more morally and legally complicated than Andrew Walker suggests here:

Civil disobedience may warrant arrest and prosecution, but it does not justify abandonment of proportionality, process, or legal accountability. Civil disobedience anticipates state punishment; it does not waive protection from state violence.

Due Process as a Constraint on State Power

Whatever your views about the underlying immigration policy issues or the current administration, the lack of due process on the ground is stunning. Some facts are contested, and others will take time to assess. But certain baseline occurrences—warrantless entries and the use of force against individuals who were not imminent threats—are sufficiently documented to warrant serious concern. The shooting of Alex Pretti over the weekend is a particularly clear example. As Gabe Fleisher has noted, “despite the Trump administration’s heated rhetoric, no evidence has emerged so far to suggest that Pretti posed any major threat to the Border Patrol officer who killed him.”

Searches without adequate process and lethal force without adequate justification raise distinct legal questions. But both implicate the same foundational concern—state power exercised without procedural and substantive constraints. The issue is not simply excessive force; it is legitimacy. State authority in a democracy depends not only on its capacity to act, but on its visible adherence to lawful process and its ongoing support from the people. When force is exercised without clear procedural grounding, it does not restore order—it corrodes the trust and authority it claims in a democratic society.

Some people may respond that moments of disorder require rapid action, and that legal process can be sorted out later. That intuition is understandable, but it is also dangerous. Due process is not something we suspend until things calm down; it is what constrains state power when emotions, fear, and political pressure are at their peak.

Institutional Legitimacy and the Rule of Law

Last April, I joined a letter written by some of my WashU Law colleagues noting an erosion of norms related to due process and the rule of law. I see continued evidence for these concerns not only in the examples discussed above but also in Friday’s letter from Judge Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, in a matter related to the protests. As Judge Schiltz notes, the Trump Administration is claiming exigent national security concerns for its unprecedented actions, and “the government has also argued that I must accept this as true because they said it, and they are the government.”

The danger here is not limited to Minnesota, immigration enforcement, or any single administration. When due process becomes optional—when force precedes justification rather than the other way around—we weaken a structure meant to protect all of us. In a diverse democracy, due process and the rule of law are not abstractions reserved for ideal circumstances; they are the conditions that make disagreement possible.