A Discussion on Discourse | Menlo Midweek | Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Phil EuBank, Mark Morinishi

hey everybody my name is Mark and welcome to this week's meno midweek podcast and have you ever found yourself in a situation where you're like how did I get here this is awesome well today's episode is one of those moments for me we get to sit down with Dr Condell sarice who has been a longtime member of meno Church served as Secretary of State is a current director at the Hoover institution at Stanford and is also a teaching professor at Stanford as well and she's just an all-around amazing woman the reason why we have Dr cona rice on is because we are launching into a series called smear campaign where as we're gearing up as a church and as a community towards another election cycle and election season we're discussing how fighting dirty is dividing our relationships and damaging our witness and one of the questions that we're wrestling with during this series is when to discussing our ideas become so ugly I notice this a lot in some of the online spaces that I'm in where it feels as if if someone does not agree with someone else or if they share an opposing view they're no longer human but maybe evil or wrong or on the other team and as we look back on Jesus's life we see that often times he would hang out and he would be in community with people that were very opposed to what he was doing yet he taught in model to see everyone with a lens of kindness and compassion and so as we're going throughout this series we'd always love to extend an opportunity for you to send in your questions for us to answer on the meno midweek podcast to 65 60042 so we hope to hear from you soon and now let's go ahead and jump into today's conversation with Dr conola Rice well welcome everybody to the meno midweek podcast my name is Mark my name is Phil and we have Dr conal Lisa rice with us today amazing that's our studio audience going crazy until Dr r talks starts talking people are not going to believe us I know they should believe you I'm sitting right here with you so funny and Dr Rice has told me to call her CI uh I'm going to see if I'm brave enough to do that at any point you can work up to it Anton by the way who is on our staff and uh kind of makes the the Legacy service at men Park is his baby he does call you Ki but he's like I only call heri when she's not around like I couldn't do that when she was there so just take that information do what well well my my view is that secretary rice was a long time ago and Dr Rice was my father so yeah that's good that's helpful that's great awesome well I'm curious how did you find yourself at meno when was that painted picture of maybe your first day if you remember coming onto our campus I remember it very well so I moved out to California in 1981 uh to join the Stanford faculty I was on a one-year fellowship and then joined the Stanford faculty sure and um I had kind of fallen off from going to church because I was always on some some time zone and but I'm a Minister's daughter Presbyterian Minister's daughter and uh so I was actually in the Lucky Supermarket one Sunday morning okay and this man came up to me a black man came up to me and uh never forget it's the spice ises of the Lucky Supermarket and he said uh do you play the piano and I said uh yes I play the piano and he said our little church right down here which is the oldest black church in paloalto called Jerusalem Baptist needs uh to play the piano would you come and play for us okay so I thought okay and so I started playing but then the whole time I'm thinking the long arm of the Lord reaching into the Lucky Supermarket to find me again and so uh after about 6 months I thought well I really love the Presbyterian tradition and I started looking around at churches and I came to menow on an Easter Sunday for the first time and uh it was a really quite dramatic thing that happened uh the first service was overflow so I went into the fellowship hall to wait for the second service and a man had a heart attack and this young couple and I helped and got help for him and so forth but he passed and I remember Walt Gerber who I was hearing speak for the first time talk about the extraordinary circumstance of this happening on an Easter Sunday and the resurrection and somehow it almost felt as if I was just being told that I'd found the right place and uh not too long after that um I started going to the membership classes and I think I joined in 83 wow amazing and you've been here ever since I've been here ever since well I actually had a couple detour had a couple detours I was in Washington DC and when I was in Washington I did a transfer of uh by transfer of letter to a national Presbyterian okay and so I was a member there for the time that I was in uh government and then came back here amazing wow that is so like the how you said that the Lord reached you where you were and you're bold enough to take a step even if it's you know six months away from that that's still really amazing and the perseverance to stay here for 40 years just about and stay dedicated to the church that's right it's a wonderful church and uh you know I think it's it's always had the best traditions for me of the Presbyterian church and that means that uh we use uh our hearts but we also use our minds course and uh yet it's uh been uh updated for this generation I have a lot of students who come to mow oh sure I I love traditional music they love the bands it's you're reaching everybody so it's great it's a good mix both great so you've seen your fair share of sermon series and stuff and so Phil wanted to just have a nice easy sermon series not controversial at all so he decided to land on politics right right especially coming out of the series a couple a couple series ago which was about gender and sex and human identity so thanks Phil no big deal no big deal I My Philosophy is we can either join the conversations of culture or Surrender our voice in them and uh I think the church has been surrendering its voice in them a little too long and I and I think that a little bit this conversation around this series I think when the church is silent people just assume that we have one of the two polarized postures and and I think when you're meno and like our heart is so much like nuance and kindness and how do we carry the compassion and the clarity uh and conviction of Jesus at the same time if we don't model that for people how like they're just all they have is to be shaped into culture so yeah I love how you said that we're trying to lead in this conversation and that's something I'd love to ask you about is in the seats that you've sat in whether that's in government or even academically how do you describe how people are talking to today what is discourse like and maybe what intersection does the church play in leading how we should be talking with each other well discourse is not something right now that we should be proud of uh the the nature of it because it's still I think too much uh we're each in our own corners and uh therefore if you're in your own corner and you're only listening to people who think like you do pretty soon you start to think who everybody who's thinking differently must be stupid or venal and um I see too much of uh judgment rather than a willingness to talk things through uh on college campuses I hear things like well that was harmful language to me or I hear um I'm offended um I and I I say to my students all the time you know you actually don't have a constitutional right not to be offended so uh if you're offended why don't you turn to the person next to you why don't you say you know that was offensive then let's talk about why that was and because you're eventually going to make a mistake can offend somebody and it's really the to be graceful or to give Grace to someone else is to say I know that I make mistakes you just let's talk about that so we don't have enough uh willingness to talk across differences we don't have enough willingness to give the other person the benefit of the doubt and um I often repeat to my students that uh there's this thing called the Golden Rule so if you'll just treat others as you would like to be treated we'll all have a much better environment wow yeah how do you think we got to a place where we're now looking at other people and saying if you don't agree with me you must be like inherently evil or you're on the other team and I that's just the worst possible thing you could be what do you think led us to hear I really think the lack of uh of fora for civil conversation is part of it because if you think now about how people are getting their news how they're getting their information ineds and weting in ways that allow us only information from a source where everybody would agree with us about what that information is what it means and so these little Echo chambers that we find ourselves in and and unfortunately I'm I'm not against social media I'm not against uh the use of the internet I believe in the Technologies but it has caused us to uh or it has allowed us to decide I'm only going to listen to podcasts with which I agree I'm only going to uh look at bloggers with whom I agree I'm only going to listen to cable news channels with which I agree and what that does is to reinforce your own high opinion of your opinion and to therefore shut out others who might challenge you and so I think the way we get our information has contributed to it but we also don't have that many places where we encounter people who are different or who think differently uh we all go to our tribes instead yeah and I wonder too how much of that has to do with the fact that we want to blame social media and I mean I think social media probably deserves some of the blame because the algorithm is doing some of this carving but I would argue some of what you've described those platforms have become incentivized to be very monolithic because that's where funding sources come from the people that are tuning in are tuning in for a confirmation bias and so I feel like even 5 10 years ago I could have said I mean I've done series like this before I I could have said hey you should go uh listen to this news source you should go watch this channel you should read this paper and even some of those that just a handful of years ago I would have said they're trying to communicate a wider ideological spectrum and let you make the decision and I feel like even some of those ones that used to be more neutral or used to try to show you multiple perspectives even even those ones have sort of run off the ideological cliff in some cases I completely agree what used to be news analysis has now become commentary or opinion totally and if you look at certain newspapers the the every headline is actually an editorial and so even the headline is leading you to think a particular way about what's about to be written and journalist uh will some of them admit that it's uh you're not going to get published uh the story is not going going to get uh noticed unless there's uh controversy and by controversy we don't mean competing ideas we mean the most extreme idea is going to get presented so just about everything that we're doing um is exacerbating human beings natural tendency to want to only listen to their own see I don't blame social media or journalist for uh for this circumstance but it exacerbates uh a very bad characteristic that human beings can have which is to only want to talk to people who are like them and so forcing ourselves to get out of our comfort zone forcing ourselves to talk to people who are different uh we don't even uh very much talk across uh classes anymore now class is something I never used to use in relationship to America because you weren't trapped in the circumstances of your birth increasingly as uh we all we go to the we some of us go to the same schools and don't go to schools with people whose income is less uh we don't go to the same churches we don't live in the same neighborhoods and so you also don't encounter people whose circumstances are different and that can make you harden your own sense that you're you're doing it all right and they must be doing something wrong absolutely wow yeah being in your community in the context of everyone who's in that media is so important for sure and you've sat in in seats before where you've had to have conversations with people across the aisle from you and I'm just wondering how did you navigate some of the challenges of working with people of opposing views how did and how can that be modeled in some of the discourse that we have today well there are two kinds of opposing views that I had to deal with uh those uh with which we were all in a democratic framework so maybe people who disagreed in Congress or people who disagreed even within the administration and you're sort of starting from the same place at least uh and so you can put your differences on the table and sometimes it'll get a little heated but mostly you're trying to get to an answer and that's kind of understood uh that seems to be harder these days in Washington than I think it even was when I was there I would go and and uh talk to my Democratic uh counter Democratic uh Congress people who I had to to work with and we could have a reasonable conversation with a Republican Administration sure now uh the harder ones actually are when you're talking to an adversary interesting so remember I would have to walk into the room with the Russian foreign minister yeah now I have to try to find something that will get us to a common place uh so that we can come to some solution and I found that the most important thing you can do is listen Okay we tend to transmit particularly Americans we have this tendency to just start talking and just start telling what we think and whether it was an adversary like the Russians or an an ally like the Germans or a friend like the Indians um I would walk into the room and very often they would say well what does KY think in a in a meeting and I learned to just back off because the United States brings a lot of weight into that room and you can easily color the conversation by speaking first so I never spoke first I would back off and say well what do you think or let's hear from the Colombian foreign minister or let's hear from the Afghan foreign minister and that way I had a chance to listen and if you listen very carefully you can start to hear what I called interest overlap now what does that mean that means the places that I didn't know we might actually find a place to agree until I've listened to you wow how interesting and just the the the openness at takes as someone that probably is walking in with an idea of where this conversation wants to lead to the willingness to say maybe but let's also give other people a voice as well as present a posture that makes it comfortable for others around to share there that's incredible yeah well you learned that um if you are constantly uh telling people what you think M you are a not hearing what they think and uh you're probably turning them off in the process and so um I don't think in society our society we listen enough um I see this with my students uh sometimes before I finished the question they're raising their hands and I'm thinking you didn't even know what I was going to ask so how do you already have your answer formulated so we need to be better listeners can I ask a question about that so when I think back to college and grad school yeah there were the students that would raise their hand hope hopefully I was not regularly guilty of this although I'm sure I was okay uh they would raise their hand to ask a question but they weren't really asking a question they were like making a statement in question form yeah and every Professor had a different way of relating to that okay how do you relate to that when I I know that it's a rhetorical question right or that it's subed I'll just try to unpack it I'll and I'll try to get them off balance a little bit and I'll say well is what you're really asking and then maybe I'll ask really a question because I I try to really challenge my students in the classroom I mean it goes back to what we were talking about of being too comfortable in a setting in which you're just hearing what you want to hear and so my my job in that circumstance is to make that person feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that they've tried something that's probably not going to work in my classroom well I'm sure that there are people that would you know deconstruct any number of different phrases that we could say but I think some of it that you've already highlighted it is sort of conflating um psychological or intellectual safety with safety safety and they will make those exactly the same thing and you know I want to be sensitive to people that are triggered because of past experiences trauma abuse but I also think that some of what you do in the classroom it feels like that testing sort of surrendering some measure of intellectual safety is a prerequisite to learning and so if we don't do that what are we actually doing doing together a college or a learning experience or listening to a sermon should actually not make you comfortable it should make you feel challenged uh you should have to process uh however you might do that it might be talking with somebody it might be praying about it but you have should have to process why am I uncomfortable with this because uh there's something going on that's making you uh uncomfortable with that circumstance and if you just Retreat from it which is uh what can happen if you are always saying particularly to students well I want you to feel safe and I don't mean physically safe and again I want to to underscore you something you said there are some circumstances that people have gone through in terms of abuse or the like in which you do want them to feel that it's a safe place but you don't really need to be safe from a a micro uh aggression because somebody uh used the wrong uh you know the wrong pronoun or the wrong that that we don't need to make you safe from and there's a little too much of that on uh college campuses um a little too much of I want the students to be feel safe and happy no no no College is actually a really really challenging time mhm because you're going from 18 years old or 17 years old to adulthood and that's a hard transition but I say to my students it's only going to get harder when you leave this place so let's prepare you some yeah for uh the fact that it's it's going to get harder it's so challenging and so formative and I feel like Phil just asked that question to justify some responses he's going to give to our feedback forms that we get and emails that feel yet so that was really what he was asking when he was asking that but I do think some of what you said you know early on about like what are overlapping interests when you're listening to someone I think the flip side of that you know how do I put myself in a posture as a as a listener and a learner even with someone with whom I disagree I think that's incredible I also think when negative feedback comes my way and and I I mean you've gotten plenty of negative feedback uh I I I have I bet a posture you would relate to but then maybe a question that could follow it which is if I'm looking for overlapping interest when I'm listening to someone I'm looking for even if it's the grains of sand of their feedback like they may be coming at me in something that feels completely illogical something that's wildly inappropriate and I think that when I'm in my healthiest spot I'm still going even if I don't like it even if I don't like the way they're saying it what can I learn from it but the resistance that my I I'll just say my own flesh want wants to put to that uh is like internalizing feeling hurt maybe feeling betrayed by someone that's coming at me in a way that feels completely inappropriate you have experienced I mean Mark and I were talking about this before today uh you have probably done things that we don't even know about like in the world that have prevented massive crises so thanks for doing that um but also you know people have uh thrown rhetorical bombs your way and still do and I I'm sure I mean you you walk with tremendous Poise and Grace in the way you handle it how do you not take it personally but also still personally develop based on really awful feedback that you're more subject to certainly than we are well you're certainly going to take it personally so the first thing is to admit that you've taken it personally but then the question is how are you going to respond and I've gotten better at this as I've gotten older so I'm very quick my tongue is very quick and I can say something quite cutting very quickly so just an example when I became Provost of Stanford I was 38 years old I'd never been a department chair and there were a lot of people who thought that uh they should have been Provost and I knew this and so I felt this need to to show my authority and so I was in a budget meeting and the associate dean of medicine came in he did his budget presentation and uh I said I didn't understand that and he said well you just don't understand Medical Center budgeting and I said you know I speak three languages this isn't in any of them would you like to start over now a senior Professor friend of mine said to me said you know that was really effective he said it actually wasn't very smart because you just embarrassed him in front of everybody and pretty soon you're going to be isolated nobody will ever feel that they can speak up because and he deserved it no doubt but I thought to myself you know I would never have done that in a class when when I teach in a class after a three-hour seminar I have a massive headache and it's because I've been like a conductor the all time the whole time Joey says something that is completely offline kind of ridiculous not very smart but if you say you know Joey that was really stupid you shut down the whole class so you have to find some way to make Joey's comment matter for what we're talking about and so I've become better at disciplining my own tongue counting to 10 and then responding in what I hope is a fruitful or beneficial way rather than just a kind of knee-jerk I'm going to show you how dumb that comment was and I I think i' it's not that I don't take it personally but it's that I try to have a slower Burn yeah about how I'm going to respond do you do you like write those witty retorts in a Notes app on your phone or anything I I go away and think I wish I had said but I don't really I would won that AR exactly definitely can you discuss the role that faith has played in your journey so far I mean it's it's amazing my faith is uh so integral to who I am that it's almost hard to describe it outside to uh to have some person me describe it because it's so integral to who I am and it's important to understand that I was literally born into the back of the church I mean my my parents uh were married uh my father was already the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church and when I was born we lived in the back of the church for 3 years till I was 3 years old and so um I I never went through that period of uh questioning existence of God um and I mean the whole thing you know Holy Spirit uh the the father son Holy Ghost I believed it all what I have had to work on in my faith because it's been very very much a part of me and then you can start to take it for granted so people like me who can be somewhat unquestioning uh are actually not unquestion in they are just not uh not contending with their faith working with their faith challenging their faith uh growing in their faith uh wal Gerber gave a sermon here once um on the prodical son but he did it from the perspective of the older son I've heard people talk about this and this was one of the great sermons I've ever heard it was uh the the prodical son who had taken for Grant granted that he was going to be the favored son he he had done everything right how could the Father even believe that he should uh bring back this brother who had how dare he and he was offended because he had been the righteous one and I thought about it and people like me can very easily be the Elder son and not understand that part of our faith is uh about the acceptance of people who have fallen and then realizing that in some way we all fall yeah and so I really tried to take that to heart and to say you have to keep growing in your faith you can't just take these things for granted and reading more and um and using lent especially as a period when I say um I used to give up something you know I tried giving up salt once that didn't work so well I a tough one aough one okay I I gave up meat but uh and only ate fish and my mercury levels went up and so the giving up something wasn't working so I thought okay I'm going to instead uh engage in something that I don't ordinarily do and so uh I tend to read more broadly religious books during that period of time I always go back and and uh reread Mere Christianity which is my absolute favorite um and so um I think working at my faith is my challenge yeah not having faith I've never lost faith but working at my faith is my challenge reminds me of the text from Paul right that we should work out our faith with fear and trembling making sure we're in the faith it's not about you know make sure you're saved but I think it especially like the Western American version of Christianity it can it can become very much like are you in or are you out and once you're in it's like you have your your uh insurance card if you get pulled over you're good to go I've been a member since Triple A and I and I think uh one of the beautiful things about kind of the Presbyterian and reformed culture is this idea of yeah like we're we're all still works in progress we're all we we're finite beings exploring and discovering more about an infinite God and so that muscle of continuing to learn I think um humility as a byproduct of that is the way it's supposed to go and I think it's it's heartbreaking when that sort of intellectual Faith at times can produce if we're not careful a level of arrogance and pride U but I think that's a a beautiful depiction of how to maintain humility in the middle humility and and I and I know that there's a level of faith that I have not yet reached and I have a picture in my mind of my grandmother my mother's mother who was exactly that person that I wish I could be M her faith was so complete and I think she knew the Lord so well in ways that I don't know if I'll ever achieve and um I just keep saying let me let me one day have Maddie Ray's connection uh to Jesus in the way that she and and it's not that she talked about it all the time or any it was just in her bearing and in her and I spent a lot of time with her because I stayed at her house while my parents would teach school during the day until I was a until I was old enough to go to school and she taught piano list and she was the one that taught me to play the piano wow aing that's amazing well as we're wrapping up here um is there anything else that you'd like to share I mean you've shared so many practical things and wisdom already on how we can continue to try to live out and model as a church how to be civil in discourse how to engage people that may not agree with us is there anything else or any key takeaways that you'd like someone to take away from the podcast well I like to think of um our journey in kind of concentric circles uh there's the journey to deepen your own faith then there is the ability to uh be a part of a Community of Faith uh one of the things that I think got us all through 911 and its aftermath was it was a really a team that was very faithful and uh God loving and God-fearing and so finding that Community is very important and then taking it beyond that Community out to a world that is desperate for this story desperate for uh this you look at people and you look at uh everything from suicide rates to divorce rates to unhappiness and you think um this world needs uh this message and needs our Lord and um you know we we're all we don't like the word uh very often as Presbyterians of evangelizing sure cuz that sounds like something I don't know that those people used to do and it wasn't very sophisticated and it's not a good idea but um I think there are ways to model your faith um I remember hearing once that uh you know it was the Christians who thought about uh hospitals and thought about orphanages and thought about because if you were a child of God then you shouldn't be in circumstances like uh those that were so common in the ancient world so first you model your behavior but then it's not a bad thing to share the story and uh today I was in a class and one of my students as actually asked about my faith really wow in a class of probably 30 students wow and uh so I talked about it and I think that not being afraid to do that in this very secular world is an important part of what we're here to do that's amazing yeah okay incredible Phil anything else I mean thank you so much this is such a fun treat for us this could never go outside of this table and I'd be like well this was the best Mar of my week so uh really just tremendous respect for you and the work you've done the work you continue to do the way you invest in the Next Generation and uh to be a part of our community is uh really humbling for us really appreciate that and who knows maybe one day you'll be willing to come back have another one of these conversations love to do it that thank you thank you appreciate it well if you need any prayer or encouragement this week anyone or just want to say thank you to Dr cona rice we'd love to hear from you you can text our team at 650 60042 have a wonderful week and we'll see everybody soon bye