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We're an attender spiritual moment as a country.

Widenery, widely feeling our need for re-grounding and healing, both alone and together,

but calls for social repair and unity are also meeting an understandable weariness.

The last years have been bruising all around.

So, of course, I left at an invitation to be in a forward-looking conversation

with two religious thinkers and spiritual leaders from very different places on our Christian and cultural spectrum.

Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of the U.S., together with Russell Moore,

the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, essentially the chief ethicist of the Southern Baptist Convention.

I drew them out to speak in their vocabularies of faith, understanding this as an exercise in public theology.

How might convictions about God and the universe, about love, and a question like, who is my neighbor?

How might these be offerings from the vast human enterprise that is theology in service to our common life at a turning point like this?

As much as what these two say, and they differ on much, they model in their presence and their friendship to each other some of the way forward.

I think that we have put more weight upon these political identities than they can bear.

We have sort of a vacuum in American life, particularly, of meaning and of connection.

What I believe ultimately is answered in the gospel.

And so, some of these questions have become ultimate in ways that aren't just about, let's talk about what we disagree about,

and how do we go from here, but who's stupid and evil and who's not?

And that really just completely cuts off the conversation. Are there stupid people and evil people? Yes.

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