Negotiating Disagreement, with John Inazu

Conversing with Mark Labberton

How should we approach disagreements when our deepest convictions and commitments are challenged or questioned? A healthy society is built around the ability to navigate these kinds of disagreements with responsibility and respect, but in our increasingly polarized society, it’s becoming harder and harder to cultivate the habits, skills, and virtues that can keep us united amid our vehement disagreements.

In this episode Mark welcomes legal scholar and law professor John Inazu to discuss how to approach disagreement with wisdom, care, and a commitment to the well-being of the other. John is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He speaks and writes frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, and religious freedom. His latest book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect.

Together Mark and John discuss the role of fear management when approaching difficult conversations; how to appreciate the complexity and diversity of perspectives in others; the role of empathy in communication; how to learn to disagree constructively in different life contexts from work to home to politics; how authority, power dynamics, and social roles factor in productive disagreements; the light and dark sides of civility; and how to navigate and negotiate our disagreements with compassion and love.

About John Inazu

John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment courses. He writes and speaks frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, religious freedom, and other issues. John has written three books—including Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024) and Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, 2012)—and has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and CNN. He is also the founder of the Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and is a senior fellow with Interfaith America.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (https://www.jinazu.com/learning-to-disagree)
• John Inazu’s background as a legal scholar and expert on first amendment rights, including the freedom to assemble peaceably, or “the right to peaceful assembly”
• How to learn from lawyers about how to disagree
• How does fear factor into communicating through disagreement?
• What neuroscience has taught as about fear
• “I can understand why you feel that…”
• Well-practiced habits
• Be prepared to engage differently
• Learning how to practice communication outside of a toxic social media or online context
• Empathy and the complexity of others’ views
• Canadian psychological research on empathy
• Avoiding abstraction in order to cultivate empathy
• David Brooks’s book, How to Know a Person
• How to understand fundamental versus surface-level differences
• Heated political issues and the social roles we inhabit
• Power dynamics, authority, and responsibility
• Power dynamics in the classroom
• How to approach disagreement in political protests on college campuses, e.g., Columbia University
• “Part of that responsibility is recognizing that people are hurting in very deep ways. … We’re not talking about abstractions or debating some historical event, we’re talking about real felt emotions.”
• “I'm aware that the capacity for interpersonal interaction has fallen off and it becomes more and more a school, or an environment, or a culture in which disagreement is not allowed.”
• Civility as a virtue or a vice?
• Purely cognitive rationality vs complex, emotional passions
• Fannie Lou Hamer and playing by a different set of social norms and rules
• Polarization and political tensions in partisan America
• “Totalizing positions” and the shrinking possibility of genuine communications
• Shirley Mullen’s book, Claiming the Courageous Middle
• How to uphold convictions without surrendering any ultimate truth claims
• How John Inazu has been shaped, formed, and influenced
• Curiosity and patience
• Close relationships that do formative work
• The Antidote for our cultural moment: “A lot of very small and very personal efforts where individual lives change postures … and contribute to social change with storytelling and exemplars and costly practices.”
• Small incremental steps: Jesus’s metaphor that the Kingdom of God is like yeast
• What would happen if American Christians started listening to the global church?
• What is the role of the imagination in learning to disagree?

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.