The political suggestions offered by Ryan Andrew Newson’s wonderful Radical Friendship made me think of an engagement taken up recently in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reason, and Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2016). There MacIntyre writes regarding Bernard Williams:

What his account of deliberation does preclude is this: that in the end I have to arrive at the right decision not just for me, here, now, but for anyone so situated. The objectivity that dependence on others can achieve is indeed objectivity, a rescuing of the agent from imprisonment within her or his subjectivity. I am not of course maintaining that we are all equally dependent on others for the kind of self-knowledge that we so often need in making crucial decisions. I am asserting that for all of us in much of our practical deliberation, we need to have a justified confidence in the judgments of others on whom we stand in close relationships, if we are to have a justified confidence in our own first-person judgments. Nor is it the case that it is only our understanding of ourselves that may be and often needs to be transformed through our interactions with such others. What we learn from them may include how to think about the objects of our desires in new and more adequate ways, so that on the one hand our desires are changed and on the other we envisage the alternatives between which we have to choose somewhat differently. And I am not maintaining—far from it—that the influence of others is always for the good. The qualities of mind and character of those on whom we come to rely matter enormously and someone whose family or friends or coworkers are unreflective or in love with money or power or celebrity may have to isolate and insulate her or himself from those others, if she is to deliberate well and to make good choices. Yet even with these necessary qualifications, a strong thesis emerges from these examples of situations of choice. It is that whether an agent’s deliberations and choices are or are not defective in various ways depends in key part on the nature of that agent’s social relationships and that an agent’s deliberations and choices may be most her or his own when that agent’s first-person standpoint is open to and informed by the third-person observations, arguments, and judgments of others. So our imagined agent, confronted by her choice between alternative careers, needs to consider what her social relationships are and have been, something that would not have been suggested to her by Williams’s misleading claim that “practical thought is radically first personal.” Indeed, she will now have to think in terms that will put her even further at odds with Williams. For if the strong thesis that I have proposed is true, then an agent whose motivational set—to use Williams’s term—does not allow that agent to learn in appropriate ways from others will be defective as an agent. For she will be apt to be motivated by desires for objects that she has only bad reasons or insufficiently good reasons to desire. (162–63)

MacIntyre is here talking about friends, one’s deep need for friends. MacIntyre had just then distinguished friends from family and colleagues, the former too close in on one’s desires and the latter too far off. Friends, like family and unlike colleagues, share enough in common that desires can be commonly held. Conversely, friends, like colleagues and unlike family, can intervene on disordered desire through what MacIntyre technically calls “the semantics of evaluative sentences,” ways of speaking that can check those desires. More colorfully, friends call us on our bullshit. The simultaneity of both our intimacy with friends and our separateness from them permits them keen insight into our lives and proves a necessary hedge against our regular tendency toward self-deception. The problem, then, with Bernard Williams is that his brand of moral expressivism, as sophisticated and otherwise alluring as it is, so prioritizes the self that friends are cut out of the picture, thence precluding the best prospects for the moral life.

Now compare this to the text of Williams that MacIntyre is engaging, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, where Williams writes about the Aristotelianism that comes to sit at the heart of MacIntyre’s account of friendship,

Aristotle’s theory means that when the agent reflects, even from the outside, on all his needs and capacities, he will find no conflict with his ethical dispositions. Here we meet again the many modern doubts that weaken this account. Our present understanding gives us no reason to expect that ethical dispositions can be fully harmonized with other cultural and personal aspirations that have as good a claim to represent human development. Even if we leave the door open to a psychology that might go some way in the Aristotelian direction, it is hard to believe that an account of human nature—if it is not already an ethical theory itself—will adequately determine one kind of ethical life as against others. Aristotle saw a certain kind of ethical, cultural, and indeed political life as a harmonious culmination of human potentialities, recoverable from an absolute understanding of nature. We have no reason to believe in that. Once we lose the belief, however, a potential gap opens between the agent’s perspective and the outside view. We understand—and, most important, the agent can come to understand—that the agent’s perspective is only one of many that are equally compatible with human nature, all open to various conflicts within themselves and with other cultural aims. (Routledge, 1993, 52)

It is curious that MacIntyre thinks he is in Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity engaging Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy on just this point. But his hard turn to friendship as a check against the self-interested self makes it seem that he has not yet taken Williams’s critique of Aristotle seriously. For it is Williams’s belief that the harmonious self that Aristotle thinks so important is a fantasy. It is this fantastical self that MacIntyre thinks salutary in its role as friend. But if we have reason to doubt that the self can play this role for itself, then we have reason to doubt it can do so for others. In other words, the very reason that on MacIntyre’s account we need friends is the reason we can’t trust them. We do not necessarily become more ethically astute in relationship to our friends’ projects than we do in relationship to our own projects. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not exactly saying that we can no more trust our friends than we can trust ourselves, but it gets close to saying that. This leaves MacIntyre’s account of friendship question-begging as to the ameliorative role his engagement with Williams gives it.

I don’t know whether to believe MacIntyre or Williams on this. I think there are ways of reading Aristotle that make him less concerned with self-possession than MacIntyre lets on. Martha Nussbaum would be a case in point. But more to the issue, I don’t know that friends are more trustworthy than selves. (My saying that does not mean I would easily prescribe self-trust; I am saying that selves and friends are both trustworthy and untrustworthy.) Do we somehow become better in our moral judgments when they relate to others than when we relate to ourselves? Radical Friendship’s deployment of friendship for the good of politics makes me hope so. What could be more important? If friendship can help us be better citizens, more competently able to adjudicate complex phenomena like elections where the choices are what they were in 2016, all the better. But in order to do that, one enormously complex phenomenon, the friendship between one self and another self, would have to be able to positively inform another enormously complex phenomenon, something like a general election. I want to believe Radical Friendship and its MacIntyreian / radical democratic / baptist Aristotelianism that the complexities of one can answer for the complexities of the other. Radical Friendship offers us just a couple examples where they do, but the surprising rarity of examples (really just two are offered, or maybe one and a half, and at the end of the book no less) makes me wonder if the same Aristotelian problematic debated between MacIntyre and Williams obtains here as well. The paucity of examples is important because it can be interpreted as indicating that what is suggested in Radical Friendship is either not real or occurs only apocalyptically, and one cannot fashion a politics around the unreal or the apocalyptic.

Put the other way around, one wonders whether Newson’s proposal laid on top of most friendships can sufficiently capture what is going on in those friendships. What Radical Friendship does give us is an extremely attractive and beautifully lucid account of friendship and the political life, one of the best examples of this genre of theological ethics I have come across, one I would like to make required reading for every community of which I am a part. But I am left wondering if it sufficiently captures the fully orbed reality that is friendship. I am in agreement with Professor Newson that American political discourse is anything but fully orbed, and we have paid and continue to pay the price for its flatness. Can it in its current diminished state receive the good gift of friendships, the most fully orbed thing one can imagine?

Earlier this autumn, I was in a lunch conversation with a small group of folks where I work. As we munched on pizza and reflected on a recent presentation at a community forum, one of the students said something that continues to give me pause because of its haunting truth: he described himself as representative of a kind of Christian who encounters Anabaptism in a book and then does not quite know what to do with the inevitable disappointment that sets in when, after encountering Anabaptism in the flesh, said person finds it to be more complex, less radical, and heavily ethnocentric compared to what it appears to be in print.

Reading Ryan Andrew Newson’s book Radical Friendship: The Politics of Communal Discernment brought this conversation to mind because the communal discernment he is calling for takes place in enfleshed communities, dancing with the shadows cast by romanticized notions of Anabaptism. As I read, I kept wondering, “Has Newson actually participated in the kind of process he wants to see in the church? And if he has, how often has the process borne fruit that tastes good?” These are not rhetorical but genuine questions; I am very curious about Newson’s firsthand experiences with discernment because I am also tempted to look to this practice as a last, great hope for Christian congregations and denominations mired in unproductive, enemy-image-creating conflict. These questions also contour my primary points of feedback for Newson and his approach to communal discernment at this stage of his work. Assuming this is not the last time he will work with the topics and themes in Radical Friendship, in this essay I offer suggestions for what Newson might put in a second volume on this topic rather than a hollow critique about what should have been included in this book.

Before I continue, let me locate myself in the present discussion. This is not a mere recitation of a litany of social location. Rather, I do this to create a kind of transparent container for my comments—a clear, yet subtly tinted glass, if you like—so my concerns and critiques are more easily apprehended. I am a confessing Mennonite-Anabaptist Christian, having been born and raised in this tradition and then accepting believer’s baptism as a teenager. I have spent most of my life living in what we colloquially refer to as “Mennonite Meccas”—towns or cities where there are an ungodly number of Mennonites attached to institutions and organizations connected to Mennonite denominations, ethnic culture, and families of sometimes dynastic-like proportions. I have also been educated through a Mennonite system from ninth grade through seminary, with parents whose careers have been linked to this same educational system, putting me in close proximity to both John Howard Yoder and the aliveness of Mennonite Anabaptism. More particularly, I am from the “Goshen School” of Mennonite Studies, but from the J. Lawerence Burkholder rather than Yoderian side of the aisle. If you visit my faculty profile page on the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary website, you will see that I am a Black-white biracial woman who cares a lot about peace theology. Because of the mystical, alchemical fires of social location, I work with a different set of literature than Anabaptist scholars like Newson, and where our libraries overlap, I have a different interpretation of the texts. At the same time, I am very interested in political theology and discernment, so my comments here reflect both that keen interest and the different, but not unrelated, reasons why I think we (Anabaptist in particular and Christians in general) do well to theologically reconstruct discernment and make it a meaningful, dynamic process of healing and renewal among all kind of Christians in all kinds of communities.

I will proceed by highlighting the big ideas in Newson’s book that caught my attention, adding my critical appraisal of them. To begin, I affirm Newson’s basic definition of communal discernment as “the practice performed by Christians whereby one gathers with one’s fellow disciples and attempts to figure out what God wants an individual or congregation to do in a particular circumstance” (xviii–xix). Such a process, he argues, will help Christians participate in and develop radical democratic engagement. We need this kind of vision in part because the United States of America needs different types of sociopolitically involved Christians who register in our national consciousness at similar levels. Indeed, in our present moment and speaking for myself, we are in a situation where the most visible and vocal types of Christians do not represent the kinds of Christian communities I know and/or participate in.

Newson’s overall diagnosis of our current societal state of affairs leading to his prescription for communal discernment relies on Sheldon Wolin’s depiction and description of the Western political landscape as one populated by the politically incompetent evidenced by the decline of “civil society” and the increase of “average citizens ill-equipped to lead lives of flourishing” because they are “subject to the whims of various forces” (5). Referring to communal discernment as a “competence-building counter-practice for radial democratic engagement” (145), the substance of the kind of communal discernment Newson yearns for draws primarily on the theological perspectives of James McClendon, John Howard Yoder, and Stanley Hauerwas and works in at least three ways (Newson calls these patterns “counter-practices” of communal discernment):

1. maintaining a stance of “patient receptivity” which counters political liberalism’s obsession with speed and efficiency (146ff.)
2. being rooted in a community where one works for “structural change through local attention” fostering competence and appropriate awareness of our limitations rather than incompetence and overconfidence bred by trying to change “the whole of reality” (151ff.)
3. living out the virtues of presence and courage by practicing “confrontation” which involves speaking to others when we perceive them to be in error thereby avoiding quietism when faced with injustice and cultivating relationships with Christians across the sociopolitical spectrum (153ff.)

What is not clear to me, thus raising a question of authorial intent, is if Newson shares Wolin’s internal critique of political liberalism or if Wolin’s analysis is convenient because the two scholars share similar discontent with the evolving telos of political liberalism. I characterize Wolin’s critique of political liberalism as internal because his constructions (i.e., fugitive democracy, managed democracy, inverted totalitarianism, etc.) all grow from his pilgrimage from liberalism to democracy (see his preface to the 2004 expanded edition of Politics and Vision). My reading of Wolin locates his primary concern and interest with raising our collective awareness around the ways post-World War II politics in the United States and throughout Western Europe combine both governmental powers (control, punishment, surveillance, etc.) and make liberal-democratic changes that open society at the same time (legislation and policy designed to curb discrimination). In short, Wolin argues we need radical democratic practices because liberalism’s version of and commitment to democracy has eroded.

As I read the literature, radical democrats working in a democratic republic like the United States, want to retrieve (small l) liberal (small r) republican values threatened by the bureaucratic and plutocratic turn of (neo)liberalism (i.e., liberal democratic republicanism’s non-monarchical, non-meritocratic character). Thus, they find a beauty and pragmatism in the politics of the small, local, bioregional, particular. That this strategic and aesthetic location dovetails with Yoder’s “messianic community” is, in my opinion, coincidental not predictable.1 Newson seems to be reading Wolin with Hauerwasian hermeneutics, thus he appears to follow a Yoderian line that church folk need not develop a theory of the state, only relate to the state on the basis of its existence, and thus my question. Phrasing my question as a question, I ask: Where is Radical Friendship located in political theory’s conversation about liberal, republican democracy versus radical democracy? And how does that conversation interface ecclesiology?

Newson’s book and perspective are, broadly speaking, Anabaptist (47ff.). While he does not claim to be speaking for all Anabaptists, he writes, “My focus is on a significant aspect of the ongoing Anabaptist argument that I think should be fostered” (emphasis his, 48). I am glad for his desire to contribute to such conversations because it needs advocates who can provide well-grounded, thoughtful accounts about and for communal discernment. Furthermore, Anabaptism is a living tradition with human beings actively practicing what they would deem Anabaptist discernment. For this reason I urge Newson to add to his bibliography Mennonite writings on this topic that have appeared in recent years. Three volumes fitting well within the scope of Radical Friendship are Sara Wenger Shenk’s Anabaptist Ways of Knowing: A Conversation about Tradition-Based Critical Education, Sally Weaver Glick’s In Tune with God: The Art of Congregational Discernment, and Ervin Stutzman’s Discerning God’s Will Together: Biblical Interpretation in the Free Church Tradition. While I know these three authors personally, I am also aware of their work because of my own project on the topic of communal discernment.2

While we both advocate for discernment from a political theological framework, Newson advocates for discernment because of its formational power for preparing Christians to be radical democrats, and I advocate for communal discernment as a shalom-making practice of nonviolence that requires training and skills.3 I take this approach because not only have many communities and congregations undertaken “discernment” resulting in distortions of the process ranging from spiritual and emotional abuse to good old-fashioned autocratic decisions made by tyrannical leadership with plenty of examples of quasi-meritocratic process in between. In other words, I believe that to actually work well (and be compatible with radical democracy), communal discernment has to become a way of life for members of a community. Given my interest in both the theological rationale for and actual steps in discernment processes, I confess to disappointment that Newson’s book did not mention with any depth discernment process design.

In my work, I outline four suggested skills and preconditions for participating in discernment because if such processes/practices are to be radically democratic, we absolutely must create venues to enable us to find our places and voices in discernment processes. These skills and preconditions involve (a) clarity about the process steps (I often recommend Water in the Desert Ministries’ model for spiritual discernment because they offer models for groups and individuals), (b) identifying people in the community doing discernment whose words, ideas, opinions, etc., carry more weight and influence than others because such people have a vibrant connection to God and/or because the group has afforded them authority on other bases (the Society of Friends uses the terminology of “weighty Friends” for the former), (c) the habitus of compassionate, nonviolent communication pioneered by Marshall Rosenberg, and (d) a particular form of circle process called “The Circle Way” developed by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea.4 I am adamant about identifying skills and preconditions because without them, we tend to find ourselves at the whim and mercy of group politics, and we all know what Reinhold Niebuhr’s legacy asks us to remember about groups.

This brings me to my questions about Newson’s view of the political and politics. My father taught political science for forty-one years, and as a graduate student I realized how much formative impact his teaching and scholarship had on my theological outlook. One example: he often remarked that politics is everywhere, especially and perhaps most insidiously in the church precisely because we think such things have no place in there. Over time, I have seen firsthand what he was talking about: while some Christians consider politics and theology to be antithetical to one another, I contend theology is political and politics are theological. How we allocate resources, what we believe about power, the way power is exercised in communities and society communicate our beliefs about one another, the entirety of creation, and how these things meet in God’s intention for wholeness and justice in the cosmos. When I encounter political theology, I notice that sometimes the discourse functions as a kind of liberation theology for straight white cis-gender men of Western European descent. As theologians in this demographic wrestle with things like social location, context, privilege, and postmodern epistemological labor pains, political theology liberates them from deep conditioning about what theology is and needs to be; Peter Rollins is a clear example. At other times, political theology includes apolitical theology of the Hauerwas/Yoder type, eschewing the call to be relevant yet wanting to be relevant all the same.

I feel heavy-hearted when I see these patterns in political theology because those who follow them are—to use Newson’s terms—unaware of the friends they could have made and learned from if they had realized they were living in echo chambers. And unfortunately, reading Radical Friendship has left me with this heavy feeling. Rather than engaging in apologetics to defend and Christianize Aristotle’s notion of friendship (which is highly exclusivist precisely because an inclusivist paradigm is so fraught and unpredictable), why not look beyond the familiar? Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel’s Rediscovering Friendship offers a helpful account of friendship’s theological, ethical, and spiritual power as also profoundly political. Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker carefully documents how Baker’s political praxis is a clear example of radical democracy, noting Baker’s political orientation put her on the margins of the Civil Rights Movement, ideologically speaking. Marian Franz’s decades of work in Washington, DC, lobbying for a federal peace tax fund, chronicled in A Persistent Voice: Marian Franz and Conscientious Objection to Military Taxation, offers an example of what becomes possible because of liberalism’s influence on our political culture.5 I could go on, but my point is simply this: when a political theology’s orientation, analysis, and commitments are so heavily shaped by one related set of voices, in this case Hauerwas, McClendon, and Yoder, I find I grow impatient, trying to determine what type of intervention might lead to a radical overhaul to the conversation.

The story of the real St. Nicholas, the Bishop of Myra, as opposed to the cookie-loving reindeer-taskmaster, has become well-known, its antics making for good drama and revelry on the side of those who consider themselves orthodox Christians. Disturbed during the Council of Nicaea by Arius’s defense of a non-divine Christ, St. Nicholas crossed the floor of the council and slapped the soon-to-be rejected Arius across the face, an anecdote that we make sound as hilariously quirky as our overly political uncle arguing on Thanksgiving about the role of big oil in politics. Neither the council nor even St. Nicholas found the slap terribly benign, St. Nicholas repenting of the act while stripped of his bishop’s robes by the council in prison. The legend says that later that night, the robes were returned to St. Nicholas by the Theotokos herself on account of his contrition. Regardless, both the council and St. Nicholas were right in their assessment of his actions: in communal reflection, no matter what the disagreement, all sides must play their cards and offer their cases, which St. Nicholas threatened to disallow through his overly zealous and, yes, sinful, slap-happy ways. His sainthood perhaps partially rests on his self-recognition of this fact.

In general, though, the great apostolic councils of the church potentially confirm many of the senses in which R. A. Newson, in his Radical Friendship, discusses the emergence and structure of the kinds of deliberative communities that become necessary for fixing, even grounding, the contemporary social order in which we live, itself naught but a series of complex, interwoven practices of which many good ones have been intentionally shoved aside by liberalism. These councils represent groups of deliberative bishops, universal in scope, but often localized in position, sentiment and agreement, facing down questions with one another at the heart of the Christian faith—is Christ really or just a little divine, and how can we formulate that? (56–71).1 Is the essence of the Trinity another person, or does the generic term “person” form an essence?

And yet, at these councils, we find a dedication by the members of the constituencies comprising them, or at least by a large number of them, to a term that seems at least to take a temporary backseat in Newson’s book. I speak of a robust sense of the truth and, more importantly, a proper orientation to it. That statement is strong, and it is no doubt already open to great scrutiny. After all, what else could the product of the deliberative community, in consult with the Spirit, be? How else does truth emerge but in and through communities of discernment? It is a point that I will not soon abnegate and in which I find hearty agreement with Newson.

Still, a non-intellectualist and improperly defined grasp of the truth, will yield not a radical democracy in any particularly good sense; it will yield a radical pseudo-democracy, one given over to the terror and tyranny of the one who can slap the hardest and loudest, and it will likely continue to acquiesce to the liberal order so long as that order appeases its basic desires (23).2 I suspect that Newson will at least be sympathetic to this fear given his opening lines on President Trump, who seems quite frankly (like most any politician of the day—yes, I share the suspicion toward all politics that Newson aptly describes) to lack the same capacity of St. Nicholas to repent of his ways (9). Such persons will slap away, many of them in the name of “truth,” and they will do so until no one can slap back, precisely because all have lost both consciousness and a sense for what it means to exist within, be dedicated to, and find peace in the truth as properly understood. It is to this danger of democratic untruth that I hope to speak, drawing some conflict with, but I hope ultimately adding to the good work that Newson has already achieved, here.

Bullshit, Oratory, Sophistry, and Tyranny

We find some of our most preeminent senses of how democracy of any kind functions without a proper notion of truth in the works of Plato. Socrates, who is, indeed, always Plato’s mouthpiece, is not a fan of the institution, his general disposition toward it being summed up in a term redescribed by Harry G. Frankfurt in its namesake essay, “On Bullshit,” as a direct manifestation of bullshit. Let us explore this dark logic by moving from Frankfurt into Plato.

Our fine eyes and ears are not necessarily used to seeing the term “bullshit” just described written across the page within academic settings, and yet the onomatopoeic sense and visceral nature of the term does an excellent job of compelling us to leave our dogmatic slumber of bullshitting ourselves, which is indeed a common part of all of our lives. What does the term mean?

At its base, to bullshit simply means to speak in such a way that one’s statements may or may not be true, but one is unconcerned about the demands of truth either way.3 The bullshitter only considers the image that the speech produces in the listener concerning the speaker while he or she is speaking. If this concept seems to have some sort of familiarity, it should. We are confronted by bullshitting politicians (and that is not merely Trump, I’m sorry to say), marketers, students, professors, and, alas, even religious leaders on a nigh daily basis. Being engaged in the production of bullshit is a rather common endeavor concerning which none of us are immune but concerning which some are especially good. Hence do we have the perhaps unfair image of the “used car salesman” in the broader American set of images, who is the bullshitter par excellence.

Still, to help with this conception of bullshitting, a clarifying concept emerges from which we can better distinguish bullshitting: lying, which we oftentimes confuse for bullshitting, and truth-telling. I will deal more robustly with truth-telling at a later point. For now, let’s say that truth-telling is knowing a reality connected to a pertinent situation and speaking this truth communally. The truth-teller, indeed, cuts down the cherry tree and tells his parents about it. On the other hand, the liar is one who has at least a sense of the truth, if not knowing at least one truth completely. Rather than speak the truth the liar perniciously speaks in such a ways so that he or she does not conveys its opposite, or at least somehow calculatively redirects away from the truth.4 In other words, the liar distorts what he or she knows, drawing any interlocutors into a counter-narrative and falsity, likely for some sort of personal gain or protection while retaining the truth for him or herself. So what?

Bullshitting is neither truth-telling nor lying. It’s wholly unique in its relationship to the truth, even if we may be inclined at first to say a liar and a bullshtter are the same. But the liar at least knows the truth, deceiving with regard to it, and in this small way preserves a sense of the truth, but the bullshitter completely covers over the truth by way of a total disregard for it. What the bullshitter says may or may not be true, but what matters to the bullshitter is the image of looking like the bullshitter knows what he or she is saying without regard for the truth or falsity. The bullshitter offers whatever pleases the constituents’ ears, making the bullshitter a most dangerous person to encounter.5

Melding Plato and Frankfurt’s thoughts, we see that bullshitting takes place through two means in Platonic dialogues. In his The Gorgias, Plato constructs a famous set of analogies describing the relationship of oratory and sophistry, which I want to claim are species to the genus of bullshitting. Thus, like bullshitting, oratory and sophistry are modes of disingenuous speaking, each able to pander to a crowd.6 Oratory does so by pretending to know how to fix a particular problem, even if the orator has no knowledge of the actual issue at hand. Gorgias, one of Socrates’s interlocutors in The Gorgias, brags that he, unlike a doctor, can get a patient to take her medicine, even when the medicine—say, cauterization—is painful.7 Socrates believes this practice to be shameful because, rather than dedication itself to a knowledge of the actual good, it has a knack for convincing without any knowledge attached. So, he calls this form of discussion spiritual pastry-baking, which can pretend to offer nutrition, as a sort of croissant for the soul, where there is no nutrition to offer.8

On the other hand, sophistry pretends to know what the good life is and how to legislate it.9 The sophist will teach you for a hefty sum of money that, well, “your opinion is, like, your opinion, man!”—opinion being defined as “preference” rather than “reasoned idea on its way to truth.” Obviously, ancient Greek sophists did not speak like the The Big Lebowski’s Dude, but the colloquialism brings a cultural image to the contradictory truth that most sophists bought into: that there is no truth. (It’s an inconsistency that Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle heartily seize upon.) Socrates calls this mode of bullshitting spiritual cosmetics.10 In this context, cosmetics means the application of some external apparatus to the body, a girdle for instance, which in its application to the body uses anything but the proper methods of exercise and proper nutrition to try and reform one’s body image and look better without being healthier. Rather than legislating the difficult work of proper nutrition and exercise for the body and virtue for the soul, the cosmetics of sophistry offers you reasons for believing that, in the end, you’re just fine as you are with maybe a clever tweak here or there.

With all these terms defined, we come to the crux of this section. At least according to Plato democracies are always in the wrong, irredeemable. (I disagree for reasons to be revealed momentarily.) And they are in the wrong because of three sets of bullshitters to which Plato believes democracy, due to its emphasis on public opinion, inherently falls stray.

First, comes the tyrant. The tyrant is an orator, who, as a political opportunist, is able to discern the irrational wills of certain constituencies.11 This orator speaks to these persons in order to prop themselves up as leaders. As the horrendously evil political term is used prior to elections, these orators know how to “stoke the base” by being able to “read the market,” i.e., feed into the demands of the people who seek to elect them based on their pleasing words.

This process is, second, bolstered by way of certain sophists found in institutions such as the media, the academy, and even religious institutions. While many such persons fall into the above-developed sense of sophistry (my truth is my truth; yours is yours), the movement is a product of the instrumentalization of truth. Truth is simply a term to be manipulated, defined first and foremost by a political agenda (shown in forms of critical theory) or a sentiment (demonstrated in the emotivist outcomes of scientism), which seem to hold that all proclamations of truth are mere expressions of a will-to-power. Because sophists want their agenda to win, they must instrumentalize and use the semblance of truth to back their preferred agenda and, thus, offer seeming rationales for the tyrant they find most useful.

Third, and to top it off, there stands a tyranny of the people themselves. The people, who hold a certain amount of power in their capacity to mob together, accept the tyrant as their leader so long as this tyrant speaks the right and pleasing words, stokes their base, excites them by speaking to singular, predefined and acceptable issues, such as, on the one hand, “illegals” taking jobs and, on the other hand, on-demand, consumer-driven abortions. Dually, the people also filter these instrumentalized truths of the sophists, and develop them into rationales for their belief systems, adding the image of self-interested reason to the realities of rage, lust, and uninhibited appetite.12

I daresay that this situation fairly well defines our own, which the Trump-era has in many ways brought to its logical conclusion. It has illuminated processes in full that, in truth, far predated our current predicament. It is, more importantly, for these reasons that Plato, and likely Socrates, rejected the notion of democracy as well, and why we should at least be skeptical for any call to democracy without the right conditions in place, even and maybe especially those of a religious community. For it is not difficult to see the manner in which a charismatic leader of a small religious community can become a tyrant, bolstered and hated by certain sophists within the congregation, and obeyed by the people so long as those people receive their bread (not unfortunately in its Eucharistic form) and coffee. Many of us have experienced precisely this situation, and perhaps it ought to give some pause with regard to what Newson proposes.

Democracy Revisited

Yet, amidst these evil potentialities, I, with Newson, believe in democracy—even the radical, and perhaps non-liberal democracy for which Newson advocates. Unlike Plato, who advocates for either the tyranny of the philosopher king (Republic) or the Laws (Laws), democracy yet has an unmatched potential along with Newson to serve for the good rather than the ill of our world, however unlikely I think it is for that to happen. The main issue pertains to the conditions that must be in place, and the issue that is missing references not merely adherence to the Spirit, who is indeed important and even synonymous with what I’ll propose, but that of the philosophical life, which refuses to instrumentalize any truth therein gained for merely selfish purposes.

I have thus far harumphed about truth, insinuating that a dedication to a non-instrumentalized version of it as the key to any democratic undertaking. Now I will put finger to keyboard to illuminate the meaning. I am advocating for a notion of truth that has, in many ways, fallen out of fashion in the modern world, a certain form of realism, albeit of the critical variety (à la Bernard Lonergan) that rejects at least the conclusions of Kant while nonetheless seeing the truth of some of his ideas. It’s a critical realism that advocates that the world that we come to really know comes to us through our linguistic, cultural, traditional, and interpretive lenses, which themselves are a part of the real that we are trying to talk about such that we can talk about these structures truly.

Simply put: truth, in its primary sense, is naught but the ability to conceptualize the world as it actually is. It is the proper intellection of our world such that we can formulate concepts about it with one another adequately enough while using linguistic expression to help articulate and communicate truth. That is, truth is defined as something like the correspondence between world and idea, a notion of truth that I’m at least partially loathe using since the modern world is so bound to the empiricist ideas that the “world” is merely a set of empirical things “out there” to be collided with rather than known. I reject this empiricism as wholly contradictory.

That said, I know all the critiques of this concept of truth, some of which I will immediately address. Here are a few, followed by a baseline to any response, which could be cultivated more precisely in light of the realities of each critique.

The relativist argues that there are no truths, and that truths are only ever cultural-linguistic expressions of things as related to us. This point can be affirmed in whole only by ignoring the fact that the statement expresses an absolute truth-claim about the role of culture and language.

The empiricist argues that the sole form of truth worth paying attention to is that form which can be empirically verified or falsifiable, tested (or able to be tested) and retested for material consistency. However helpful the sciences are, this notion of empirical verification, when applied to itself, falls short as empirical verification as a truth-construct can never be empirically verified. It belies a conceptual verification at the heart of philosophy and theology.

The rhetorician merely claims that the term truth functions in a certain way culturally, or that any refutation of the above ideas are mere rhetorical, and not real, refutations. But what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and the notion of rhetoric is then devalued to the point of being relativistic, which has already been refuted.

So, critical theorists, operating along similar cultural-linguistic lines, rightly add the element of power, proclaiming the truth a linguistic construct helpful for the promulgation of a will-to-power and only a will-to-power. It can certainly be that. All truth is politically based. Again, either this reconstruction is true, or it is itself a function of a will-to-power, which means there is no need to listen but to continue to press what is best for myself.

Finally, the Heideggerian wants to ignore the notion of truth as correctness and reformulate it as the event of the emergence of metaphor in language. I take this less as an insight and more as a phenomenological observation that coheres well with truth as correspondence. After all, one either observes this phenomenon correctly, allowing us to take it seriously, or not.

Forgive the caricatures above, but they must do for now as I end my brief cavalcade of critiques and counters with the observation that in each and every one of these cases, the same question can be asked, which all forms of realist philosophers have been asking since Aristotle: do you mean what you say? Because if you mean your critique, you think there is something real in what you are saying and conceiving, believing that one’s words and concepts are corresponding to a way that things actually are, even if non-empirical. And if these words and questions are merely a set of rhetorical tricks, then your inquiry into them ought to yield a distinct set of ideas to which the critic could intellectually and willfully assent, which actually describe and organize well a worldview. In other words, truths.

I do not bring this point up to somehow suggest that it is easy to find the way to truth. I happily concede that all of these above critics offer ample and profound insight into the rejection of such a view. To seek and receive truth requires patience, love of the truth over self, and, frankly, community, which is my whole point in writing this. I rather bring this point up to pose truth as a goal, the pursuit of which ought to define the human life, if not especially the Christian life. And one that, if we are to take democracy seriously, we must have as our baseline.

To return to Socrates and Plato, philosophy is a craft, dedicated to the tool of dialectics which seeks to rid one’s soul of foolishness, be it in the form of wrong opinion but especially in thinking one is wiser than one actually is. Philosophy is, in fact, directly compared to physical medicine in The Gorgias, which is a regenerative craft dedicated to ridding the body of disease.13 Foolishness, overabundant belief in our wisdom, alongside a belief that we cannot but offer selfish interpretations of the truth, are the soul’s diseases, making philosophy a medicine for the soul that must rid us of these errant views and place us on a right track with regard to it.

Another way to state the same is to say that a philosopher is a person who, whether speaking rightly or wrongly in any particular case, cares in general for truth, wants to get things right, clarified, known, and thus be rid of false views. The person, in fact, has staked his or her identity not on any one judgment, and certainly not in the pretense of knowing the full truth in itself; this person has staked an identity on the orientation to the truth of everything about everything, which he or she will never receive.14 The philosopher recognizes that one is partially within the truth while simultaneously being partially outside of it, and that one ought to desire to become more fully a part of the truth. The philosopher also recognizes tools for seeking truth are, of course, intelligence and honest self-assessment, but that the primary tool is dialectics, or reasoned dialogue, in and through what we might rightly call, with Newson, a discerning community: a cohort of similarly oriented persons who, partially in the truth and partially outside of it, seek not to win debates but to be illumined, brought into a self-transcending truth through one another’s insights. The philosopher, in other words, will always give up any particular view for a truer view through dialectic discernment in a truth-seeking community.

It is this philosophical love for the truth that is at the heart of where I seek clarification from Newson, which I see at the heart of any functional democracy, one not merely given over to tyranny on the three fronts above defined. In other words, Newson rightfully focuses on phronesis, contextual claims to truth, and provisional application of these truths by a discerning community, all of which I have a nigh absolute sympathy toward. Unless, however, the discerning community is a community of philosophers, even in a theological context—unless a community of discerning individuals has had a philosophical and intellectual conversion, placing the truth before winning, and predicating their identities on a love for gaining truth over sounding intelligent or right, the community will be bound up with the vicissitudes of democratic tyranny. This condition—intellectual conversion, placing the value of truth before one’s desires—is the sine qua non of a functional democracy, even in its most radical varieties.

Not Solely Scripture but also Philosophy

I’m well aware that the critiques and suggestions that I’ve offered are of a philosophical rather than theological variety, at least on a first read. My concerns, however, are actually theological in that the reasoning I’ve used is co-opted, taken up, and incarnated. Truth, whatever its immediate source, always finds its ultimate source in Christ, the Logos of this world, and the one through whom all is made—at least this forms an inherent part of my belief system. Christ is the unity of scripture and reason bound together in faith—defined as the reorientation to the really real—as two sides of the same coin. It is for this reason that I offer the example of the great councils not as a counterexample to Newson’s Anabaptist development of a discerning community, for which, other than perhaps the well-read Newson, there may be no immediate concern to jump into the thought of, say, Plato by those who feel themselves otherwise entirely scripturally bound; but these great councils do, at least, form a necessary counterweight (49–56). For the councils, dedicated to a truth emergent from both scripture and reason, give a fuller picture of what the discerning community needs to be: converted to a dedication to the truth, the Logos, the Christ, to whom both scripture and reason point. As said, the proof is in the pudding with these councils, for they show us that even a saint cannot advocate for an oratorical tyranny, dismissing the proper procedures out of anger, without consequences. Truth must have the center stage, and all who orient themselves to such must eventually acquiesce to its loving power.

Sandy Baskets and the Ambiguities of Judgment

In Scetis a brother was once found guilty. They assembled the brothers, and sent a message to Moses telling him to come. But he would not come. Then the presbyter sent again saying, “Come, for the gathering of monks is waiting for you.” Moses got up and went. He took with him an old basket, which he filled with sand and carried on his back. They went to meet him and said, “What does this mean, abba?” He said, “My sins run out behind me and I do not see them and I have come here today to judge another.” They listened to him and said no more to the brother who had sinned but forgave him.1

Pointing toward the sand leaking surreptitiously behind him, Moses protests his brothers’ deliberative gathering. The sayings of the desert fathers and mothers are replete with such critiques of judgment. Yet, as Ryan Andrew Newson convincingly demonstrates, life with others demands decisions about action. How do Christians—burdened with their own sandy baskets—determine faithful forms of engagement with those both within and without their confessing communities? In his critical retrieval of Anabaptist practices of communal discernment, Newson offers a hopeful resource for Christians and their neighbors who face the perplexity of judgment and action. In what follows, I listen for the ways Abba Moses illumines and troubles Newson’s proposal by considering the moral ambiguities of judgment, the temptation and wisdom of procedures, and divine deliberative action.

Before returning to Moses, however, let me recount Newson’s argument in brief. Newson explains that communal discernment is a congregation’s effort “to figure out what God wants an individual or a congregation to do in a particular circumstance” (xviii–xix). Through “patient receptivity” toward the Spirit in scripture and the neighbor, the community studies, prays, and deliberates together, waiting for consensus about the contextually situated good (61, 146). What is discerned, however, always remains provisional, open to amendment, and “without pretensions to certainty” (68). As Newson shows, retrieving this practice offers a mode of resisting liberalism’s undermining of citizens’ capacities for political engagement. Communal discernment trains Christians in the skills of radical democracy and displays a mode of moral reasoning that undercuts proceduralism.

So what then of Abba Moses? Why does he decline to participate in his community’s process of discernment? By all appearances, the gathered brothers are readying to ban the guilty monk from their midst. (This pattern and debates concerning its appropriateness are evident throughout the Sayings of the Fathers.) When called to participate, Moses declines, effectively loosing himself from the community rather than the guilty brother (64). Yet his brothers persist in appealing to him—demonstrating the deferral of decision and openness to correction that Newson exhorts—and Moses’s arrival pronounces judgment upon their own practices of judgment. The monks receive this word and amend their readiness to judge their brother.

Placing this story alongside Radical Friendship illuminates what I appreciate most about its treatment of communal discernment: Newson refuses to let this practice be a certain solution to what he calls political incompetence. Rather, it offers only a fragile possibility for cultivating political agency. In referencing the work of Traci West, Newson explains that, like all practices, communal discernment is susceptible to sudden moral reversals and can occasion harm rather than aid.

In other words, Moses here anticipates that the very process designed for the healing of a monk and the community will intensify damage. We might say that he took a guess (informed by long familiarity) that his brothers’ eagerness to judge did not proceed from a patient love that desired their fellow monk’s good. While it seems that he was right (as suggested by his brothers’ humble responsiveness), he could have been wrong. Only God’s inscrutable verdict decides.

While not explicitly developed by Newson, an Augustinian approach to such characteristic malformation of practices (as means of injury, then flourishing, and then back again) clarifies this dynamic. In an exhortation to correct neighbors connected by “the necessities of life,” Augustine observes how the same external action can proceed from virtue or vice. Refraining from correction, for example, may be due to a lack of willingness to expend energy, the fear of causing offence, or the desire to protect one’s own advancement. These disordered forms of self-love contrast with a proper love which waits for a more fitting time, desires to prevent sin from worsening, or delays to avoids harm.2 However, the obscurity of these internal dispositions destabilizes confident moral conclusions based on observations of a person’s actions (even one’s own). Thus, practices of judgment are rendered morally ambiguous, awaiting the disclosure of God’s own (presently hidden) pronouncement.

And yet, despite the steep risk of error and the very real harm that may follow, the conditions of life together demand of judgment. While the desert aphorism may at first appear to exhort the cessation of all judgment, a second look suggests that flat dismissal cannot be its meaning. Moses comes with his sandy basket at the persistent bequest of his brothers, and he indicts himself only. Foregrounding the uncertainty of his pronouncements about others in light of his sin, Moses reluctantly judges through his sandy trail.

Newson also offers a nuanced critique of judgment, drawing a distinction between being judgmental and making judgments. The former evaluates the self over others in pride, usurping God’s prerogative, while the latter responds to Jesus’ exhortation, “Judge for yourselves,” through proper discernment (102). The necessity of arriving at such decisions becomes plain when I consider my own congregation and its deliberations, occurring admittedly in vestry meetings which I do not attend. But I hear reports on Sunday mornings, and I think gratefully of those who assemble monthly to do the difficult work of listening and discerning. Should we install a security camera? Should we welcome homeless neighbors to sleep on our property? Should we repair the hundred-year-old building? Should we call the police when people act violently? These questions range from the mundane to the weighty, and in the shared labor of attending to their contours, we are (in the best cases) knit together.

But as the story of Moses shows us, and as Newson recounts, even the best expressions of communal discernment still are vulnerable to human fragility and disorder. Such processes need voices from outside to call for restraint, especially in regard to the weakest members. Newson elegantly captures this dynamic by a chastened theological anthropology overlaid by a Foucauldian attention to the operations of power. Together, this underwrites his emphasis on the contingent quality of even the best efforts of the gathered, listening community and, thus, the necessity of building in modes of revision.

Yet this same anthropology (woven through with circulations of power) casts doubt on the possibilities for sustaining such a practice. Newson is right to note that the common inability to imagine the healthy functioning of this practice is due to its neglect (106). Newson himself names only a handful of examples (including, curiously enough, individuals), such as Mississippi Mission and Ella Baker. And the most prominent case—namely, concerning John Howard Yoder—points only to failure and obstruction.

Newson identifies Yoder as “an (ironic) exemplification of the potential pitfalls of ignoring the practice—or better, of the continued presence of power in its employment, which requires the attention by all involved” (91). Yet it remains unclear to me how Yoder exemplifies the dangers of ignoring the practice. Rather, Yoder shows the real possibility for harm in deploying the practice. He displayed the abuse of power that he theorized to combat: in other words, knowledge of ethical criteria is no guarantee. I applaud Newson’s efforts to extricate manipulations of the practice from its potential value. Yet it is precisely cases like Yoder that make the relative fairness of liberal procedures so attractive: those with little power are less exposed to the vagaries of the group and its most persuasive parties.

Thus, it seems fitting to offer a brief defense of procedures. As Newson notes, these creatures of bureaucratic rationality seduce by their facade of certainty and impartiality. Deference to them eases individual responsibility and ensures a degree of impersonal distance. Yet procedures do not fall from the sky: they originate in someone’s (or some committee’s) practical deliberation. They are the result, more often than not, of the very discernment that Newson wants to commend.

More pointedly, procedures often rectify harm. This is how we have Offices for Institutional Equity and professional codes of ethics. Of course, it is when such moral rules and their institutional associates become the only (or even the primary) guide for judgment that we find the deep impoverishment of ethical deliberation. As idols, then, procedures must be rejected. But as the product of the practical wisdom of foremothers and forefathers, they might be received as handrails for judgment, always requiring ongoing revision. Even the practices of communal discernment as Newson proposes will themselves over time ossify among particular people in particular places, and thus Newson insists that God must be trusted over procedural certainty (43).

It is on this note—of trust in God over procedure—that I would like to conclude. Newson explains that God is the central actor in communal discernment. The community waits to know “the dynamic will of God” (2), “what God wants” (xviii), “what God requires” (xix), and “how God would have [a congregation] move in some particular circumstance” (47). Any pronouncement on this matter always stands before the question: “How do you know that the Spirit of God has so decided?” (57–58). While Newson provides deft accountings of human deliberation, the operation of God’s own pronouncements (and their accessibility) would benefit from further development. We know from Newson’s descriptions that God is present to the gathered community by God’s Spirit, in scripture, and in neighbors present and absent. But can any more be said?

I’d like to suggest that an explicit development of a Barthian account of divine command might add further density to Newson’s theological framework. In reading the book, I could not tell whether or not this was already implicitly in place, perhaps as part of a general inheritance from postliberal theology. Of course, if this line is developed as I think it should be, it would in the end result in further questions. How does one hold together the human creature who is always a beginner, confronted by the command ever anew, with the one who learns virtue, who gets better at hearing God and neighbor over time? Does Newson’s critique of the idol of certainty extend even to the learning of such skills for political competence? Only a thicker account of divine action—in directing and upholding the human creature and her wobbly moral judgments—can say.

In the meanwhile, Moses continues to drag an old basket of sand behind him.3

In Radical Friendship, Ryan Newson argues for the urgency of practicing friendship in a world that is fragmented, and becoming frighteningly more so every day. The argument is set within the backdrop of Trump’s rise to the presidency of the United States—an event that left most of my political theory colleagues shell-shocked and dumbfounded. Newson suggests that the event unveiled something that had previously been recognized only by some: we have, whichever side you might find yourself on, become morally incompetent to discern together what is good. Theological resources and responses—some more helpful than others—have failed to point us to something concrete, bodied, and substantive that we can do here and now. In the absence of our ability to navigate our waters, we find ourselves endlessly chasing stories of Russian conspiracies, White House chaos, and other . . . let’s just call them “covfefes.”

Newson’s claim is simple: learn to practice communal discernment the way the old Anabaptists—or “baptists,” as James Wm. McClendon would like it—did it at Schleitheim. The point is not the Schleitheim document as much as it is the kind of working together that it took to produce it, but one significant conviction did emerge. Together, the early (Ana)baptist community discerned something radically countercultural in a time of conflict: that loyalty to Christ was incompatible with taking up the sword. With this example in mind, Newson argues that communal discernment is a “powerful” practice (McClendon’s term) in that it does something. It impacts the shape and texture of the world: it slows time down in a world hooked on speed, it connects to that which is local in a world unmoored and unhinged, it confronts the structures of injustice in a world that no longer knows how to tell the truth from smoke and mirror propaganda (fake news). Communal discernment, in sum, unmasks and engages the powers and principalities of our age by bearing witness to the peaceful Reign of God in a world tempted yet again by violent and coercive demagoguery1

Newson argues that we begin to live towards a different kind of world, a world characterized by communal discernment, a “gathered” world—imagined and named by followers of Christ as the coming kingdom or reign of God—by cultivating friendships that blur and destabilize the boundaries between insider and outsider, church and world, disciple and enemy. This is why the language of ekklesia is better than the language of polis—an ekklesia has a more amorphous shape and more permeable boundaries between insiders and outsiders than a polis and its citizens, so it better names the shape of the gathered world. Communal discernment within the ekklesia offers an alternative to the current political options. It is, he says, “a third choice between liberalism and authoritarianism: a competence won through friendship.” (Note to the reader: Liberalism = Enlightenment, authoritarianism = Carl Schmitt.)

I summarized those claims because they deserve to be said succinctly and to be heard clearly with all of their force. What comes next in this response essay comes from a fellow traveler down the alternative road. I too want to find my way between Liberalism and Authoritarianism, and I wonder what that road might look like. Specifically, I find myself becoming curious about the links between the three concepts of communal discernment, friendship, and moral competence—what exactly are they, how exactly do they relate, and how do they relate to other possible ways of framing our current crisis and our alternatives?

One place to begin the line of questioning is the sense that I get from Newson that if I cultivate friendships, particularly if I cultivate friendships with those with whom I disagree, then I will also and at the same time acquire the capacity for communal discernment and moral competence. I am not convinced that is true, and I want to explore some potential complications I see arising.

What is it exactly that cultivating friendships with others gives us? One possibility here is that cultivating friendships with those who hold different points of view puts us in a position to be able to recognize and acknowledge difference. An argument can be made for acquiring the empathic capacity to take on the perspective of the other as if it were one’s own. Friendships give us the ability to stand proxy. Alasdair MacIntyre could be a guide here, especially in his discussion of disability and communal deliberation.2 MacIntyre argues that political structures that aim at the common good must make it possible for the abled and the disabled to have a voice in communal deliberation. The only way to ensure that the disabled have a voice is if some are able to stand for them during deliberation. All of us, at certain times in our lives, experience disability to an unpredictable degree. Consequently, our interest in how the needs of the disabled are voiced and met is not a special interest as such but a common and shared interest grounded in a shared humanity.

This line of reasoning, appealing to a shared interest grounded in the abled/disabled human condition of vulnerability, seems subtly different from reasoning that attends to the friend/enemy distinction. Perhaps I am bumping up against a slight difference between philosophical and theological lines of reasoning; nevertheless, a question arises: how might we relate these two lines of reasoning? To me, attending to disability has the distinct advantage of bringing the human body into full view from the beginning, and I worry about the tendency in some theological reasoning to let the body (conveniently?) disappear. The litmus test for MacIntyre, of course, is the ability to speak on behalf of someone else’s point of view and needs during deliberation. Perhaps the notion of friendship could be made more concrete with this in mind so as to make the connection between friendship and moral competence clearer in the context of communal discernment. I would, at any rate, be interested in hearing Newson talk that possibility out.

I want to pursue my point about the tendency of the body, particularly the gendered body, to disappear from theological discussions. From Newson’s treatment of the example of Schleitheim, I have a good sense of the concreteness of communal discernment, but I worry about exceptions and counterexamples. What of a single prophetic voice standing against the overwhelming (and from all appearances moral) majority of the community? In the grips of unconscious psychological dynamics, communities might be tempted to scapegoat the voice or voices that insert disturbances and instability with respect to the shared convictions of the group. This was how the (Ana)baptists were (at least initially and perhaps still) seen and treated. But no community can protect itself from those psychological dynamics—even Mennonites, once the persecuted and excluded, are now having to face up to their own exclusions of the LGTBQ community. This is broader than Mennonites, of course, because it relates to latent tendencies in human psychology. The LGTBQ community has suffered and is suffering tremendously for speaking up. Entire families, churches, and denominations are in the midst of being torn in two. One might be permitted to hope that friendships across convictional differences would turn the communal discernment from its agonistic tone to something more eirenic, and that an “Acts 15 / Jerusalem Council” decision would be forthcoming, but that hope has so far been largely deferred.

Moreover, I am curious about the book’s side-stepping a more sustained discussion of John Howard Yoder’s treatment of the Rule of Paul.3 On the surface, it seems like an ideal text for discussing communal discernment—except that it happens to have been written by John Howard Yoder and that the facts of his years abuse of multiple women are now unavoidable. I confess that I feel deeply ambivalent about Yoder, and I understand the side-step for the purpose of not being diverted from the central claims of the book. The way to support a path around Yoder would be to say that you do not need Yoder to make the claims that you are making. Fair enough, but I am still not sure that in this case you get to choose: the Yoder discussion would touch the central claims and defining terms of the book—would it not?—and if so then the path around Yoder is not really open.

I do not know yet how to talk about Yoder; and I have not yet seriously begun the work of sifting through his ideas to be able to tell for myself how many of them are impacted by his abuse of women. For me, the answers will likely be somewhere between “the biographical is separate from the theological, so I can keep it all” and “everything is so entangled that Yoder’s writings have been irredeemably poisoned, and so it must all go.” The problem is that I do not even know how to proceed to do that work, and I suspect that Newson doesn’t either. So it seems to me that the clarity and moral competence that Newson is calling for is one which neither he nor I have ourselves—well, at least, I don’t.

I want to pause here for a moment and take note of the fact that once we opened the discussion to the body, the sense of the (moral competency) crisis has shifted. Initially, I mentioned the voice of the disabled, after which the discussion turned to concerns of the LGTBQ community and its struggle to gain legitimacy in the eyes of a resistant majority, and now I have landed in the midst of issues relating to sexual abuse. Notice the felt intensification: abled/disabled, majority/minority, abuser/abused. What are we to think now of the notions of friendship, communal discernment, and moral competence?

To take a specific example: what are we to do with those whom we have admired and held to speak authoritatively when we come to discover that their actions have been sexually abusive? This is incidentally a crisis that all of America faces. Here is a list of names: Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, Louis C. K., Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose, Roy Moore, and of course Donald Trump. If we want to include folk from other parts of the world, I could mention Tariq Ramadan and a host of others. These names are just the tip of the iceberg as the #MeToo posts testify.

These men are not really enemies—they are monsters4 Once that language lands, it becomes clear that the depth of the contemporary moral breakdown, which, I agree, is now apparent for us all to see, requires that we open up the affective and psychological register for discussion. We need to look inside and talk about shadows; we need the language of the psyche as well as the language of powers and principalities. Until we name what is going on inside psychologically, I am not sure that we will have the skills to navigate between the Scylla of Liberalism and the Charybdis of Authoritarianism—friendships notwithstanding.

Here is a suggestion: we do not know how to act or to think (i.e., moral incompetence) in part because we are not attuned to how we feel (psychologically unaware). Somewhere in the mix of the feelings that we have towards John Howard Yoder (and Roy Moore and Al Franken), I suspect, is disgust. Disgust is a boundary maintenance psychology.5 It seeks to purify by throwing up and throwing out. It starts with food, but as the anthropologist Mary Douglas helps us to see clearly, notions of purity are also inextricably interwoven with normative communal integrity—the shared body, the body politic—which is to say that issues of disgust on the psychological register and issues of morality on the normative register cannot be separated.6

Reflecting on this connection between psychology and morality, Richard Beck identifies two opposing motivations concerning the boundary between inside and outside: “Disgust erects boundaries while love dismantles boundaries.”7 Love is a suspension of disgust, it embraces instead of excludes.8 Beck argues that we cannot ultimately eliminate disgust (we cannot exclude exclusion), but what we can do is to regulate it in a bodied way. What I am suggesting, and this is what I want to propose to Newson, is that the alternative path between liberalism and authoritarianism needs to be deepened psychologically through a “politics of love” that is sensitive to the concrete, bodied dynamics that I have noted: abled/disabled, majority/minority, abuser/abused. Without that deepening, I worry that the connections among the three terms of friendship, moral competence, and communal discernment begin to float freely off the ground of this world.

I will leave that for Newson to hammer out. I will say, however, that I do not think Aristotle’s categories of friendship (utility, pleasure, and virtue) are particularly helpful here. Instead, I find myself much more drawn to, for example, Jean Vanier’s concepts of “meeting” and being “present-with” in his exploration of becoming human, which have the advantage of being grounded in full acknowledgment of our bodied—visible and invisible—suffering.9 They are not necessarily in competition with Aristotelian categories of friendship, but they carry a more humanly rich tone—they are more sonorous—and call me back to myself in a way that I find healing. And perhaps that is what we really need: the healing that comes from being human together, gathered by the Truly Human One, the Christ, who is Jesus of Nazareth.