Frances Kissling — What Is Good in the Position of the Other

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Sociology, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Krista Tippett, Arts, Culture, On Being, Society, Society & Culture, Science, Social Sciences

4.7 • 10.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From abortion activist to bridge person. Questions to break out of intractable polarization. Wisdom beyond the news cycle. “What is it in your own position that gives you trouble? What is it in the position of the other that you are attracted to?” The focus of our national fight over abortion may change, but this hasn’t changed for decades: We collapse this most intimate and complex of human dilemmas to two sides. We’ve been looking yet again for wisdom away from the turbulent news cycle and keep returning to this conversation Krista had with Frances Kissling. She is a “bridge person” in the abortion debate: a long-time pro-choice activist who has sought to come into relationship with her political opposites. Now she’s controversial on both sides, but speaks from a place that many of us would like to map out between the poles. She has experienced something more powerful, as she tells it, than defining common ground — and this has lessons for other issues in our common life and our struggles with people with whom we disagree the most. Frances Kissling is president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy. She was the president of Catholics for Choice from 1982 until 2007. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for on-being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.
0:07.0	Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives.
0:13.0	A powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world.
0:19.0	Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.
0:22.0	The focus of our national fight over abortion may change, but this hasn't changed for decades.
0:29.0	We collapse this most intimate and complex of human dilemmas to two sides.
0:34.0	I have been looking yet again for wisdom away from the turbulent news cycle, and I keep returning to a conversation I had in 2011 with Francis Kisling,
0:44.0	who is a bridge person in the abortion debate.
0:47.0	She's controversial on both sides, but speaking from a place that many of us would like to map out between the polls.
0:55.0	She has sought to come into relationship with her political opposites.
0:59.0	She has experienced something more powerful as she tells it, than defining common ground.
1:05.0	And this has lessons for other issues in our common life and all our struggles with people with whom we disagree the most.
1:12.0	The need to approach others with enthusiasm for difference is absolutely critical to any change.
1:23.0	I'm the toughest of fighters, and I love a good fight, and I love to win.
1:28.0	But I think what I have learned is that you have got to approach differences with this notion that there is good in the other.
1:39.0	And that if we can't figure out how to do that, and if there isn't the crack in the middle where there are some people on both sides who absolutely refuse to see the other as evil.
1:51.0	This is going to continue.
1:53.0	I'm Chris DeTippet, and this is on being.
1:58.0	Francis Kisling is president of the Center for Health, Ethics, and Social Policy, but she's perhaps best known as the president of Catholics for Choice,
2:08.0	opposed she held from 1982 to 2007.
2:12.0	She was raised by her Polish American mother, who came from a coal mining town in Pennsylvania.
2:18.0	While a very young woman, Francis Kisling spent a short time in a convent.
	...

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