An Excellent Conversation

Some months ago, I rode to the airport with Uber, as I have done many times before and since. I noticed before the car arrived that the driver had high ratings for “excellent conversation.” Sure enough, it was not long before he started raising topics for discussion. He was driving for Uber on his day off from his main job to help pay tuition for his information technology degree. He was, in his own estimation, well read, and mentioned video lectures on ethics by a Harvard professor that he had been following. He was smart, articulate, thoughtful, and spoke fast, jabbing ideas and questions into every conversational gap. I suppose by some measures it was excellent conversation.

Yet what stuck with me after the ride was the nagging feeling that it had not really been a conversation at all. Once he found out that I worked in teacher education, he started peppering me with domain-appropriate queries. Was my university as conservative as he had heard? What can we do about so many teachers being disaffected these days? What did I think about LGBTQ themes appearing in school curriculum? What happens if parents don’t like something the teacher taught? Who should get to adjudicate? What can we do about young people growing up with internet information they can’t trust? What about deep fake videos? They were intelligent, informed questions. He asked them in ways that offered me the perfect temptation to focus on offering my own opinions while revealing little about his: “You are a professor, what do you think about…?” I did my best to articulate responses that might open further conversation, but amid the relentless barrage I quickly became cornered into attempting short answers to complex questions, missing chances to ask more about what was prompting the questions themselves.

The pace (exacerbated by the brevity of the ride) was part of the problem. No topic was allowed more than two minutes to unfold. Each response was instantly met, sometimes before I had said much at all, with a fresh question, a fresh conundrum. It felt at times as if he were checking down the options on some mental list of hard questions to ask about education. The automatic response to any reply was “but what about…?” and a shift to a new complication. There was an evident intelligence behind the questions, but it seemed one that was most content to range across the surface of a spattered array of issues rather than learn or share something significant about any one of them. To my immediate regret, I felt myself being drawn into the rhythm, interrupting in turn to get the chance to perhaps qualify a thought just a little or complete a brief explanation before the next question mowed it down. By the end I did not feel listened to. I am not sure he did either. I wish I had found a better strategy for slowing us down. I am not at all sure it was an excellent conversation.

I report this not to criticize my driver. I am not sure how much deep dialogue to expect on a ride to the airport, though it does occasionally happen. Yet this conversation, allegedly excellent, stuck with me as a peculiar combination of intelligent and unsatisfying, one that kept me thinking about other kinds of idea exchanges as I waited for my flight.

In some ways, the conversation felt distressingly similar to certain kinds of academic communication. We are highly trained to home in on the problems in verbally expressed ideas, to raise our own brisk objections and complications as a way of publicly performing intelligence, and to use others’ utterances as springboards for our own questions and worries.

As a journal editor, I get to see many papers of widely varying quality, including quite a few of those that do not get published. Their weaknesses are, of course, diverse. Yet one that seems to recur with noticeable frequency is the use of sources mostly for display. Sources become verbal fragments that allow the paper’s author to make their own point, indicate why others are wrong, or just gesture in passing at dissenting positions before then ignoring them. Conversely, sources do not appear as complex prior ideas that might require direct, patient, and careful engagement. Some of the values of the academy, such as surveying literature, grounding assertions in sources, and engaging in critical discourse are realized to one degree or another in such writing. Others, such as careful exposition of others’ ideas and constructive extension of past work are bypassed.

Once seated on my flight, I turned to a writing task on which I hoped to make progress while enjoying my email-free oasis in the sky. It was an invited book chapter about practices of hope in education.¹ After some time floundering around the question of how one might even begin surveying literature on “hope,” some initial reading had led me to the settled sense that the core of what I wanted to do was take a few paragraphs in one short, past essay, appreciatively detail their relevance, and extend them a few steps past where that essay ended. The essay was by Nicholas Wolterstorff, so if I extended his thoughts at all I would have done remarkably well, for his work is better than mine. Wolterstorff’s essay in turn drew much of its impetus from meditation on a single paragraph from Aquinas.² I hoped to perhaps add one more turn to the conversation. Yet as I set about turning that hope into a piece of writing, I also got to listen to my mental menagerie at work.

One voice in the back of my mind kept circling back to the worry that this approach might signal a lack of prowess. (My own education, for all its merits, has left me with a sometimes-debilitating feeling that I should not start writing until I have read everything in the library.) I should, this voice whispered, speed-quote an impressive swathe of literature to make it clear that I knew things. I should, another voice hinted, start from some incisive criticism of all past writing on the topic and unveil the thing that has been missed by everyone, offering the word that decisively displaces the last one. I should offer some deeply original angle, a bold way forward. As the paragraphs emerged, it seemed a shame that I had little hope of saying much that was at all new about hope.

I don’t mean to belittle the value or, in its place, the necessity of a thorough literature review or the clear demarcation of a fresh contribution. But in this instance, I gradually found my way to being content with functioning as part of the communion of saints, honoring some thoughtful work already done and seeing if I could perhaps turn it this way and that and carefully extend it a little. Perhaps I could join a conversation in a way that visibly modeled careful listening and thoughtful suggestion rather than a quick-fire series of “but what about…” moves and a hint that the whole world has it wrong.

I wonder how often the academy’s standard operating system keeps us from favoring this kind of dialogue, nudging us more toward the quick parade of sources. I enjoy reading work that engages constructively with existing Christian scholarship, instead of using past work mostly as a useful source of supporting quotations to bolster authority, line up opponents, or cue what the author already wanted to say. I have in mind here not just use of the classics (we are often quite good at extended dialogue with Augustine or Luther or Theresa), but current work, careful exchanges with those who took recent turns in the conversation. In some of the areas of scholarship on which I focus, and some of the papers that cross my desk, it can feel as if each new foray is its own island with perfunctory gestures toward some other landmarks on the horizon. Might scholarship that dialogically extends the work of others better reflect the nature of Christian community?

I suspect that at least it might come closer to being an excellent conversation.

1. David I. Smith, “’Arduous and difficult to obtain’: Teaching as a hopeful educational practice” in Habits of hope: Educational practices for a weary world, eds. Todd C. Ream, Jerry Pattengale, & C. Devers (InterVarsity Press, 2024), 112-32.
2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The peculiar hope of the educator” in Foundations of Education: A Christian Vision, ed. Matthew Etherington (Wipf & Stock, 2014).