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Who will introduce our next lecturer? Good morning. Baby, it's cold outside. How are we doing?

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Warm in here, huh? That's right. We need the cold weather to get rid of the mosquitoes. God has a reason for everything.

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We just don't always know what it is. At least I don't. It's my privilege to introduce to you again our second lecture in the Westervelt series, Marcia Riggs, the Dr. Marcia Riggs.

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I loved her lecture yesterday. She was talking about imagination, about particularity, about embodiment, about honoring diversity. It's a wonderful lecture. I've had the chance since the day before yesterday to get to know Marcia.

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She and I have eaten 3 meals together. Nothing like eating meals together to help you get to know a person. And she and I have talked about, as you might imagine, all kinds of things. So I wanted to clue you in, if you haven't picked up on this yet, to the fact that Dr.

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Riggs actually practices what she preaches. She is a person who not only talks about embodiment, particularity, and imagination, but lives it. And one of the things I noticed in our lunch yesterday is that when she talked about her teaching, she leaned over the table in the restaurant that we were in, looked me in the eye, and began to invite me into thinking differently about teaching, differently about how to think about students. And she began to talk with great love and joy about her students as particular human beings and how, I'll give you an example, she only has classes that are three hours long.

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Three hours. Yeah, at first I had that reaction too. The reason why is it gives you time to be together and not just watch each other. Remember the lecture yesterday?

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Not just watch each other, but see each other, really see each other. And then she kind of dropped in the middle of lunch that she sort of has this little enterprise on the side, and I checked it out because everything has a website. So I invite you to check out her little enterprise on the side. Again, evidence that what she's talking about isn't just for the academy, and it's not just for the church, but it's also for the world.

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Her organization is called stillwaters.inc. So check it out for yourselves. But it's a place in which she is developing practices and opportunities for people to recognize their embodiment, to honor particularities, and to imagine what the world might look like if we truly joined hands as brothers and sisters of Christ and brothers and sisters who are fellow creatures on this earth. Dr.

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Riggs, we look forward to hearing what you have to bring to us this morning, and thank you for being here. Thank you, Dr. Rigby. I'm going to go through this probably a little faster than I might, but we have some visuals, so that should help you.

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So let's just get at it. The lecture is called Dreaming as Religious Ethical Mediation. And this is something I've been working on for a while and hope to see finally come out in the book. But it's something that actually was a gift through my dissertation.

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I know that may sound weird. But my dissertation was about retrieving the ethical insights and the social reform activities of the black women's club movement of the 19th century. And out of that, there was a notion that came to me called mediating ethic. And it interfaces with H.

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Richard Niebuhr's ethic of responsibility. However, I felt like the ethic embodied through the women's work and words, because there were a lot of very good writers, pushed the ethics of responsibility, or the ethics of the fitting, in terms of how we talk about the self as a socio-historic being. So rather than still kind of be stuck with this responsible self who understood themselves as a rational, autonomous agent, I found the black women saying that socio-historic self is truly one that understands not only their being, but their ethic from the perspective of the socio-historical.

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So now from the black club women, And I was reminded that we now must ask the ethical question, who am I to be and what am I required to do as socio-historic selves? Asking the ethical question as socio-historic selves means that we now have a moral anthropology that no longer holds rationality are the ability to reason as the earmark of what makes us human, and therefore capable of discerning what the ethical requires us to be and do.

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But the moral anthropology that asks the ethical question from the ground of sociohistoric selves holds that it is relationality. our need and our ability to relate to one another as embodied beings that is the earmark of what makes us human and thus capable of discerning the ethical. This moral anthropology of sociohistoric relationality at the heart of a constructive ethical theory and practice that I'm developing that's called religious ethical mediation. Now the visual of this, I just want you to look at it and I'll take you through it somewhat.

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Okay. It says first something about the context. That our context is God's creation and it's the omnipresence of God's justice. But there's also the omnipresence of violence.

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And that omnipresence of violence creates energies of conflict. And these energies of conflict are alive and well within our context where there are two what I call sort of synchrononymous cultures, a culture of deception and a culture of moral courage, which we need to somehow mediate. And religious ethical mediation will be the practice I talk about for doing that. But what's even more important, or equally important, is that living in that context of the omnipresence of God's justice and the omnipresence of violence, there is the Spirit.

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The Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, whichever way you would like to name that. But that Spirit is equally an energy. And therefore, it's an energy that as even the energies of conflict, you know, get churned up, more active, the energy of the spirit gets even more active, more alive. That is, if we're practicing R-E-M.

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And so it is the energy of the spirit that is larger than the omnipresence of violence and the energies of conflict. And it is that which into which we are tapping when we're practicing religious ethical mediation. So that energy, an interesting word that one of our speakers at our colloquial January seminary talked about was God hugging the world.

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Well, the Spirit's kind of hugging us in this context. And if we are able to practice religious ethical mediation, that space where the cultures of deception and moral courage encounter one another, then the ethical emerges. It's a creative response out of our relational activity. So hold that in mind.

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This then means that the liberation ethics I spoke of, my womanist interpretation of it, says that cross-cultural encounter, the encounter of our lives in the culture of deception, the culture of moral courage, constitutes that which is ethical. It means that being ethical, we're always acknowledging relationship as the heart of the way in which we uncover the ethical. As socio-historic selves, then, we are embodied beings. We are and do out of our physical, our psychological, our mental, and spiritual particularities.

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As socio-historic selves, we know that as the African proverb asserts, I am because we are. The individual self is a complex self, ever evolving in relation to biology, family, communities, societies, histories, ecosystems, ever evolving in relationship to cultures into which the self is born, And into which the self ongoingly participates, both consciously and unconsciously, or in more... ethical categories, both intentionally or complicitly.

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Consequently, our social groups and our cultural identities are then constitutive of who I am, such that when I encounter you, I encounter that complex self, and vice versa. And it is this encounter of I, we, that defines the ethical question that we're seeking to discern. The experience of cross-cultural encounter then means that ethics is cross-cultural encounter. It's not just a description of the way we want to be.

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It is what ethics is. So we discern rightness, wrongness, ideals, duties, values, that which is fitting and liberating only as we encounter one another. This is the case because it is not until we have some particular others with whom to engage that we can most fully ask, who am I to be? Who are we to be?

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What am I required to do? What are we required to do? These ethical questions are focused and moral meaning is constructed in the experience of our encounters. Theologically, this ethics is driven by an interpretation of the Imago Dei.

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This interpretation stresses that the image of God in each of us must not be relegated to something essentially human or to a way of relating to one another that is contingent upon our ability to transcend or ignore our embodied differences. This interpretation says that we, in all of our socio-historic embodied differences, incarnate the Imago Dei. We have been created by God in God's image, and that image begins to come into full focus only when we encounter one another as we are seeking relationship. However, because we name and know ourselves through socially constructed lenses, we frequently see one another out of focus.

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When we see out of focus, we attribute meaning to the other in effect that annihilates our sociohistoric embodied differences, and then we're often led to label one another. label in ways that judge, that dismiss, that objectify, and ultimately that silence. So when we do not see one another, when we do not have these encounters, we do harm. The harm we do is sometimes psychological, sometimes spiritual, other times physical.

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frequently oppressive, manipulative, coercive, or exploitative. In other words, the harm we do in any of these forms is always violence. So that's why that omnipresence of violence is there. But in Christological theological terms, the grounding for mitigating the violence that can accompany cross-cultural encounter, because we're living more in the culture of deception than the culture of moral courage, means that instead we affirm that the reconciliation that God effects through Christ is re-creation.

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And I play with 2 Corinthians 5, 11 through 21. it, basically. We become ambassadors for Christ and have the ministry of reconciliation. Okay.

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God creates us. God reconciles us. Because in that text, we become new creation as well as are called to the ministry of reconciliation. So creation and reconciliation meet in Christ.

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We are therefore socio-historic embodied selves who are Imago Dei, who are Imago Christi. Reconciled and recreated in the image of Christ, the image of God, we are then called to a ministry of reconciliation. Likewise, in a pneumatological or a Pentecostal perspective, we are called to this ministry of reconciliation by the Holy Spirit, that Spirit that's hugging us always. And Diana Eck gives us a wonderful description of the way I'd like for us to think about this Holy Spirit in her book, Encountering God.

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And that reads, The freedom made so clear in the winged flight of the Holy Spirit forces Christians to think about the mystery and power of the spiritual life among people of every faith, Buddhist and Muslim, Hindu and Jewish. When we use the term Holy Spirit, we mean the active creative, energetic, mysterious presence of the one we call God. The Spirit does not read the fine print of the prayer book or the creed.

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The Spirit, though she gave birth to the church, is not the possession of the church, let alone any of its early church fathers or its modern theologians. The Pentecost experience reminds us that the Holy Spirit is above all a gift, a fullness, an outpouring. We cannot grasp it. We can only be attentive to it, awake to it, and attest to its presence.

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So this ministry of reconciliation, driven by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, becomes thus a practice of ethical mediation whereby we live as moral beings and sustain moral community by sustaining relationships as socio-historic selves who are willing to live into the tensions into the energies of the conflicts of one another's differences. Religious ethical mediation is the praxis of ethics as cross-cultural encounter, the praxis of a theology of reconciliation. Reconciliation as practice is thus to be understood primarily as a process.

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a process of mediating tensions rather than a process of getting to some end that we will call reconciliation. R.E.M. is concerned with the cross-cultural encounters of living with others, and therefore the religious is understood as that which gives any of us our lives ultimate meaning from that which we from which our and their morality derive that telekian sense of religion as ultimate meaning.

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It is about the ethical, that those virtues, values, and visions for life that describe and describe we and they, who we and they are and what we and they do as individuals, communities, institutions, and society. It's about mediation, though, as a process of living into the tensions of conflict from a transformative orientation to conflict. REM is a practice of ethical mediation whereby people or faith are formed for and live together doing the ministry of reconciliation.

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The church then must be characterized not as a place, but as a space. A space of cross-cultural encounter. And I choose to use the term space rather than place because when the church is a place, that's where the understanding of orthodoxy is one that says we can't question it. When the church is a place, that is where the tradition is fixated upon as rigidly authoritative.

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When the church is a place, that is where there is no need for the meaning of the scripture in the canon to be derived through a dialogical interpretive process. So we got to be in the church as a space, not a place. And when we are in this space that is simultaneously a space of the omnipresence of God's justice and a space of the omnipresence of violence, a space of synchrononymous cultures of deception and moral courage, a space filled with energies of conflict that can be directed for creative and generative purposes rather than violence, When the church is a space, we are embraced.

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We are hugged by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God. So R.E.M., practice in the church, looks like this. It's about enabling persons or communities to recognize and embrace the dignity of one another. because of what each holds to be religious, to be of ultimate concern.

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It's about generating space, mediation as process, wherein individuals and groups can live into the tensions between them and communicate in such a way that creative moral encounter and response can emerge so that the ethical can emerge. It's about sustaining dialogue, Mediationist process again that engenders both self-criticism and mutual criticism, because those involved in such do so from committed. but not absolutist ethical postures.

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As practice, it's about opening the space intentionally for the Holy Spirit to work as the creative power for moral growth and change. As a practice, the church, as a practice in the church as a space, it's about attending to the fears that fuel conflict and therefore inhibit empathetic cross-cultural encounter. It's about nurturing empathy as a virtue and practice of individuals and communities. It's about living in the culture of moral courage.

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So I want to talk about this empathy, virtue, and value. Intercultural communications theorist, Milton J. Bennett, sets up this conversation by talking about empathy, the difference between empathy and sympathy.

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And he talks about that in terms of overcoming the golden rule. And so the primary differences I set out here are that empathy, which is the left side, is the assumption of difference. And sympathy starts from the assumption of similarity. Empathy holds that there are multiple realities, that reality is discoverable, variable, created.

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Sympathy thinks of single reality, that there is one way that things really are, and we need to discover that one way, that single reality. Empathy is the imaginative intellectual and emotional participation in another's experience, that is how we might imagine the thoughts and the feelings of other people from their own perspective. Whereas sympathy says that we can imaginatively place ourselves in another's position. That is, we assume that you can simply put yourself in another place.

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And so you're constantly translating other people's experiences by saying, it's like such and such, as opposed to empathy, which stops you from it's like and instead puts you in a posture of seeing and listening to how the other is actually having the experience and seeking to be empathetic with that experience. I'm going to use a clip from to talk about empathy and justice, because I think it's obviously the biggest piece, this justice piece, and this religious ethical mediation.

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So in this clip, you're going to see empathy as virtue and social value. I've got to come down and do this, because I'm not that sophisticated in my use of PowerPoint. So I just want you to listen up to the clip. And then I'll talk about it.

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Unpack it a little bit. We're going to lose this case, Carley. There are no more points of law to argue here. I want to cop a plea.

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Maybe Buckley will cop us a second-degree murderer, and we mean she's just life in prison. I can't do no life in prison. You got to get me off. Now, if it's you...

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No, it's not me. We're not the same, Carl Lee. The jury has to identify with the defendant. They see you, they see a yard worker, they see me, they see an attorney.

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I live in town, you live on the hill. When you white and non-black. CJ, you think just like them. That's why I picked you.

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one of them, don't you see? Oh, you think you ain't because you eating clothes and you out there trying to get me off on TV talking about black and white. But the fact is, you just like all the rest of them. When you look at me, you don't see a man.

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You see a black man. Karlie, I am your friend. We ain't no friends, Jake. We're on different sides of the line.

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I ain't never seen you in my part of town. I bet you don't even know where I live. Our daughters, Jake, they ain't never going to play together. What are you talking about?

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America is a war, and you on the other side. man ever gonna get a fair trial with the enemy on the bench in the jewelry box? My life in white hands. You, Jake, that's how.

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You my secret weapon, 'cause you one of the bad guys. You don't mean to be, but you are. It's how you was raised. Negro, Black, African-American, no matter how you see me,

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You see me as different. You see me like that jury sees me. You are them. Now throw out your points of law, Jake.

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If you was only a jury, what would it take to convince you to set me free? That's how you save my ass. That's how you save us both. Is Carly Haley insane?

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It's a notion so outrageous, the only witness the defense could produce to support it was a convicted felon. No, Carly Haley is not insane. This is a man who is a confessed murderer. This is a man who admitted on this stand

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to carrying out the sentences that he believed the alleged rapist of his daughter deserved. He's taken justice out of your hands. And put it in his own. With those hands, he took the lives of two young men.

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We feel terrible about what happened to his daughter. But feeling terrible, knowing something is wrong, does not give any of us a right to kill. Ladies and gentlemen, your duty is clear.

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All in this courtroom know the truth. All in this state know the truth. Now you need only find the courage to speak the words, Carl Lee Haley is guilty. Guilty.

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Guilty. State risks, Your Honor. I had a great summation, all worked out, for some sharp lawyer. But I'm not going to read it.

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I'm here to apologize. I am young and I am inexperienced. But you cannot hold Carl Lee Haley responsible for my shortcomings. But you see, in all this legal maneuvering, something has gotten lost.

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And that something is the truth. Now, it is incumbent upon us lawyers not to just talk about the truth, but to actually seek it, to find it, to live it. My teacher taught me that. Let's take Dr.

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Bass, for example. Obviously, I would have never knowingly put a convicted felon on the stand. I hope you can't believe that. But what is the truth?

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That he's a disgraced liar? What if I told you that the woman he was accused of raping was 17, he was 23, that she later became his wife, bore his child, and is still married to the man today? Does that make his testimony more or less true? What is it in us that seeks the truth?

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Is it our minds? Or is it our hearts? I set out to prove a black man could receive a fair trial in the South, that we are all equal in the eyes of the law. That's not the truth.

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Because the eyes of the law are human eyes. Yours and mine, and until we can see each other as equals, Justice is never going to be even-handed. It will remain nothing more than a reflection of our own prejudices.

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So until that day, we have a duty under God to seek the truth. Not with our eyes and not with our minds where fear and hate turn commonality into prejudice, but with our hearts. Well, we don't know better. I want to tell you a story.

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I'm going to ask you all to close your eyes while I tell you this story. I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to yourselves. Go ahead, close your eyes, please.

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This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her.

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They drive her into a nearby field. And they tie her up. And they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on.

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First one, then the other. Raping her. Shattering everything innocent and pure, vicious thrust, in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they're done, after they've killed their tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to bear children,

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to have life beyond her own. They decided to use it for target practice. So they start throwing full beer cans at her. They're throwing so hard that she tears the flesh all the way to her bones.

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And they urinate on her. Now comes the hanging. They have a rope. They tie a noose.

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Imagine the noose coiling tied around her neck. And sudden blinding dirt. She's pulled into the air and her feet and legs go kicking if they don't find the ground. The hanging branch

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isn't strong enough. It snaps and she falls back to the earth. And they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck, drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge, pitch her over the edge. She drops some 30 feet down to the creek bottom below.

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Can you see her? raped, beaten, broken body, soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood. left to die. Can you see it?

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I want you to picture a little girl. Now imagine she's white. This clip is from the movie adaptation of John Grisham's novel, A Time to Kill. Set in small town Mississippi, the movie is about the murder trial of Carlee Haley, the African-American man, who kills the two white men who raped his young daughter.

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From the beginning of the trial, the impaneled jury and all-white jury is certain that they will find Carl Lee Haley guilty. Yet after the defense attorney, Jake, makes the closing argument you just heard, Carl Lee is acquitted. What transpires prior to Jake making that closing argument is the scene you see in the jail, the conversation between Jake and Carl Lee, in which the cross-cultural encounter is finally happening.

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Jake comes to the jail cell to tell Carl Lee as his attorney, Jake as his attorney, to tell him that he has no more points of law to argue and that Carl Lee should take a deal. Carl Lee tells Jake that he will not take a deal. He has a family who he will not abandon. And he confronts Jake with his complicity, with

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systemic racism with the culture of deception as a barrier to truly comprehending Carl Lee's situation. In fact, Carl Lee reminds Jake that they are not the same, that Jake is like members of the all-white jury, that he sees Carl Lee as they do because of the way he was raised. Consequently, Carl Lee poses a question and makes a final assertion to Jake, If you were on that jury, what would it take to convince you to set me free? That's how you'll save us both.

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It's a complicated argument. It's a complicated cross-culture encounter. But when Jake stands before the jury after that conversation with Carl Lee, he finally, Jake that is, finally accepts himself in his socio-historic particularity as a white Southern male. And from this position of self-acceptance, he actually

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can become now empathetic in the sense of the intellectual and emotional participation in Carl Lee's experience. So it is from this posture of empathy that Jake then invites the all-white jury, not yet ready to be empathetic, to become sympathetic. That is to place themselves in Carl Lee's position as if it were their own. Imagine the young girl as white.

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Empathy is practiced by Jake as a virtue and becomes then a social good. As the law is transvalued from an arbitrator of a single truth into a means for adjudicating competing truths. The nurture of empathy as a social good is critical for living authentically as people of faith, amidst our own internal pluralism, as well as in the multi-confessional, multi-religious, multicultural world.

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REM is, I think, a vocation for people of faith in the 21st century. Indeed, our churches are spaces of the synchrononymous cultures of deception and moral courage. And the primary values of a culture of deception are repression and silence. And the culture of deception is driven by two complex interrelated fears.

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And these fears are in the space of the church. The first is the fear concerned with loss. Loss of power, status, and or privilege. And the second is the fear concerned with devaluation.

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fear of being dismissed, objectified, and or misperceived. The primary values then of the culture of deception must be mediated so that we can begin to embrace, to nurture the primary virtues of a culture of moral courage, and those are empathy and non-violence. When we participate intentionally in this culture, our being and doing, this culture of moral courage, our being and doing will find expression through responsive moral agency, whereby we are always seeking and finding relationship with others that supports the surviving and the thriving of one another. and all creation as the context of God's justice.

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The earmarks of the church that's practicing art. First, we guide one another in allowing our interpretations to stand. And we engage as equals with alternative, not antagonistic, interpretations. Everyone seeks to be courageous rather than judgmental.

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We aren't afraid to stretch the boundaries of the community, seeking out missing voices even in the persons of others and or in unfamiliar texts and other sources of knowledge and information, thereby expanding our canon, our sources of authority. We seek to create an atmosphere where conflict is respected as a catalyst for moral growth and change, as a basis for coming to new understanding. We uncover differences in a non-violent space that invites self-criticism and mutual criticism. We mediate rather than seek to resolve the tensions created by self-criticism and mutual criticism.

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We encourage a willingness to regard all moral discourse as a process, an ongoing process of living along what I call 3 agencies of ethical life. The continuum or axis of ethical life that is from complicity to accountability to responsibility, which is always interfacing with the movement from confession to forgiveness to reconciliation, which is always interfacing with the movement from justice, which is corrective, compensatory, and distributive and redistributive.

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We in the 21st century church are to remain committed to our particular confessions and professions. but without being absolutist about them. As we people of faith encounter the internal pluralism of the churches, as well as the interreligious diversity of our society and the world, we must either listen and learn from the diversity of voices, or we will not survive. Or to use Carly's phrase, that's how we'll save us both.

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Importantly, I think if we are that church that remains committed to our particular confessions or professions without being absolutist about them, we can take on this particular kind of understanding of empathy. As a move from incomprehension to empathy, you have to discover the key to which your ear is already tuned and practice listening in the range you now find too hard to hear. And it might sound like this.

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Praise your Mother, Holy Mother. It must be our calling, our vocation, as the 21st century church to nurture a quest for beloved community, as a quest for interdependency, as a quest for healing, as a quest for just peace. We must live as dreamers who are religious ethical mediators, who are expecting the encounter with the diversity of voices to be an opportunity for creative ethical response to emerge. for a response that will interpose and communicate between our differences.

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We must expect the encounter to sound like that arrangement of amazing grace. So the 21st century church on the quest for beloved community will be on a quest that involves seeing, visual and verbal dialogue, embracing, affirming, and respecting differences, and dreaming a leap of faith, living into the tensions of our cross-culture encounters for the sake of openness to the new thing that God is doing in the churches and in the world. Now is the time.

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to open our hearts. Now is the time for living as religious ethical mediators. Now is the time for dreaming. Thank you.

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Dr. Riggs, thank you from all of us for helping us to see and imagine, and thank you also for challenging us to dream and embrace. You have given us a lot to think about in the coming days in our community life here. Again, we're in your debt.

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Thank you. I've been asked to remind everyone not to leave unless and until you fill out and turn in your evaluations. Our third Curry lecture, given by Dr. Tyson, will begin at 11:15.

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You're free for a few minutes until that lecture begins. Thank you.