{"id":4988,"date":"2020-11-03T01:50:24","date_gmt":"2020-11-03T01:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/?p=4988"},"modified":"2020-11-03T01:50:24","modified_gmt":"2020-11-03T01:50:24","slug":"review-the-company-of-strangers-christians-and-the-renewal-of-americas-public-life-by-parker-j-palmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/review-the-company-of-strangers-christians-and-the-renewal-of-americas-public-life-by-parker-j-palmer\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America\u2019s Public Life, by Parker J. Palmer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n

[1]\u00a0Parker Palmer is familiar to educators as a beacon of hope and courage.\u00a0 His 1998\u00a0Courage to Teach<\/em>\u00a0articulated the dignity and even nobility of the profession to young instructors like me.\u00a0 His 2000\u00a0Let Your Life Speak<\/em>\u00a0fearlessly recounted his own struggles to sustain a sense of meaning in his life.\u00a0 Yet his 1981\u00a0The Company of Strangers<\/em>\u00a0might be his most relevant book for the pandemic we are living through.<\/p>\n

[2] For the past thirty years, public intellectuals have chastised us for retreating from the public square of civic engagement into private retreats of our own making.\u00a0 As our national politics has soured into partisan gridlock, many of us\u2014I include myself\u2014have narrowed our horizons, striving for professional advancement, cultivating friendships, nurturing family enclaves.\u00a0\u00a0 We sought to gain control of the narratives of our lives by reducing them to dimensions that we indeed control, by carving out zones of psychic comfort.\u00a0 All with a sense of guilt, of course, that we were letting the world take care of itself.<\/p>\n

[3] Now comes the pandemic.\u00a0 We must shelter in place and nowhere else.\u00a0\u00a0 Our refuges have become prisons which we dare leave at the risk of our lives.\u00a0 Mobility has all but ceased.\u00a0 We must carefully meter our exposure to strangers\u2014of necessity, to preserve our cocoons of safety.\u00a0 Three months ago, adventurous would-be homeowners were flirting with tiny houses as the ultimate expression of private worlds; now we are stuck in tiny worlds, starved for social contact.\u00a0 What could\u00a0The Company of Strangers<\/em>\u2014from another galaxy even if only thirty years ago–say to that?<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0With luck, new vaccines and testing within a year will bring us out of our shelters, blinking, and back into the social world.\u00a0 By that point, our isolated existences likely will have dulled our social skills and even our appetites for connecting with strangers.\u00a0 We may have to learn to be \u201cpublic\u201d all over again, much as I had to teach myself how to walk after being immobilized a few days by a knee operation.\u00a0 Here Parker Palmer offers a bracing tonic.\u00a0 \u201cThe word \u2018public\u2019 as I understand it contains a vision of our oneness, our unity, our interdependence upon one another.\u00a0 Despite the fact that we are strangers to one another\u2014and will stay strangers for the most part\u2014we occupy a common space, share common resources, have common opportunities, and must somehow learn to live together.\u201d(22)<\/p>\n

[5] He writes explicitly for Christians seeking to renew public life.\u00a0 Christian churches are tempted to turn inward, to offer their members a barrier against the world, but that is a misuse of their \u201cgreatest power of all: the power to infuse life with meaning.\u201d(33)\u00a0 What they should do instead is to help their members develop a \u201cfresh and vital sense of the public and its life\u201d and anchor it in their spiritual life (36-37).\u00a0 To this end, he devotes three chapters to explaining what public life involves.\u00a0 To my eyes, blinkered by an insulated retirement consumed with personal projects, these chapters explain with brilliant clarity why it is important to get outside my comfortable bubble.<\/p>\n

[6] Public life takes place in public spaces: streets and neighborhoods; in voluntary associations; in forums and hearings\u2014in all the venues where strangers encounter each other.\u00a0 Palmer offers striking claims about the latent power of public life.\u00a0 Strangers meet on common ground, where fear of the stranger is dealt with, where conflict occurs and we learn how to address it, where \u201clife is given color, texture, drama and a festive air,\u201d where people are drawn out of themselves and \u201cmutual responsibility becomes evident, and mutual aid becomes possible,\u201d where \u201copinions become audible and accountable\u201d, where visions are expressed and fulfilled, or frustrated, where people accumulate power through banding together around common interests.(45-51)<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0Then he plunges into the religious significance of encountering the stranger.\u00a0 \u201cDeeper still, the public life is an arena of spiritual experience, a setting in which God speaks to us and forms our hearts with words we cannot hear in the private realm.(63)\u00a0 We need strangers as spiritual guides, for they open us to dimensions of truth we otherwise would miss, and bring novelty that staves off boredom.\u00a0\u00a0 I am reminded here of a story told by the Chicago theologian Langdon Gilkey, who during World War II was forcibly sheltered in a concentration camp in northern China.\u00a0 The hundreds of inmates were not so terribly treated. But deprived of contact with the outside world, their social energies faded.\u00a0 By the time the camp was liberated, Gilkey told me, the inmates had lost their momentum for living.\u00a0 It was the fresh air of new human contact that revived them.<\/p>\n

[8]\u00a0For Palmer, we need public life not simply to turn our altruism towards the stranger, but to sustain our own private worlds.\u00a0 Public life is therapeutic in that it \u201cdraws us out of (our) self-obsession into the lives of others.\u201d (87)\u00a0 And it sustains our politics.\u00a0 Authoritarian regimes seek to imprison their citizens in private enclaves because voluntary associations and other public involvements provide the means to resist.\u00a0 All this makes me eager to get out of social isolation!<\/p>\n

[9]\u00a0The text was of particular use to me as I was working with a consulting group\u00a0to\u00a0draft\u00a0an ELCA \u201csocial message\u201d on government and civic engagement.\u00a0\u00a0 I subscribe wholeheartedly to the American experiment in self-governance, but was struggling to see how that might be connected to the two-kingdoms thinking that is the traditional anchor of Lutheran political theology.\u00a0 Palmer\u2019s vigorous endorsement of the \u2018public\u2019 and the \u2018stranger\u2019 allowed me to think about the particular way we citizens can see fellow residents of this democracy as neighbors.\u00a0 Strangers will remain strangers while becoming neighbors; we don\u2019t have to pull them into our private worlds to respect them as fellow travelers on the same path of democratic engagement.\u00a0 We can keep our social distance yet acknowledge and celebrate the basic equality of all residents that is so important to sustaining self-governance.<\/p>\n

[10]\u00a0Palmer offers wise words to those of us who are at risk of losing not only our skills but our appetite for public life\u2014particularly to those of us committed to our congregations as voluntary associations of neighbors encountering strangers.\u00a0\u00a0I have not done justice here to the skillful way that Palmer ties public life to Christian faith.<\/p>\n

[11] This is a good book for congregations seeking rebirth after months of empty sanctuaries.\u00a0 Jesus looms large as the stranger who enriches our lives by meeting us in public encounters with strangers.\u00a0 Quiet, even mystical, reflection also looms large\u2014no surprise, given Palmer\u2019s Quaker faith.\u00a0 He devotes several chapters in the second half of\u00a0The Company of Strangers<\/em>\u00a0to the role of the congregation.\u00a0 There is ample grist here for adult forums.\u00a0 His writing is consistently lucid and accessible, and so rich that I\u2019d recommend biting off no more than a chapter at a time.<\/p>\n

[12] Indeed, after thirty years,\u00a0The Company of Strangers<\/em>\u00a0has the feel of a budding classic, a text not only relatively timeless, but one that can be opened to any page for thoughtful insight.\u00a0 Consider it a fine crutch for relearning the Christian art of engaging the public world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[1]\u00a0Parker Palmer is familiar to educators as a beacon of hope and courage.\u00a0 His 1998\u00a0Courage to Teach\u00a0articulated the dignity and even nobility of the profession to young instructors like me.\u00a0 His 2000\u00a0Let Your Life Speak\u00a0fearlessly recounted his own struggles to sustain a sense of meaning in his life.\u00a0 Yet his 1981\u00a0The Company of Strangers\u00a0might be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-government-civil","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReview: The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of America\u2019s Public Life, by Parker J. 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