John Rose

John Rose joined Morehead-Cain in fall 2024 as the faculty director for Dialogue and Discourse. (Photo by Leon Godwin)

Dr. John Rose joined the Morehead-Cain community this fall as faculty director for Dialogue and Discourse. The initiative is designed to enhance scholars’ ability to listen, discuss, and engage in contemporary issues.

Rose speaks with Catalyze co-host Stella Smolowitz ’26 about his approach to facilitating “charity-centric” dialogue with college students, the connection for him between theology and civic leadership, and advice for navigating political conversations ahead of the November election.

Rose came to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from Duke University, where he was the associate director of the Civil Discourse Project and an instructor in the Kenan Institute for Ethics. At Duke, he also taught courses in happiness and human flourishing, Christian ethics, conservatism, and political polarization. His research focuses on virtue ethics and Christian theology.

In addition to his work with Morehead-Cain, Rose will serve as professor of the practice at the School of Civic Life and Leadership at Carolina.

Listen to the episode.

Music credits

The episode’s intro song is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.

How to listen

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Episode transcription

(Stella)

John, thank you so much for joining us today. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the first Dialogue and Discourse dinner with Abdullah Antepli about finding a way forward in the Israel and Gaza conflict. What do you think the importance of breaking bread, per se, is in building trust? Is that part of your thinking and approach to the program?

(John)

Yes, but whenever you’re having hard conversations, the trick is to humanize the other side. And there’s nothing more human than sitting down at a table and breaking bread. It reminds us of our shared humanity. And then, frankly, there’s just something relaxing about it. It reminds you that there are things beyond politics, like the family life or friendships. It makes it easier to talk.

(Stella)

Yeah, that’s great. And I feel like you have a lot of experience with that because, at Duke, you taught two classes, Political Polarization, and Conservatism. What was your teaching approach in those classes? And maybe what did your students teach you that you weren’t expecting?

(John)

Oh, I’ve never gotten that second question. To the first, in both of those classes—and by the way, the polarization class is the one I’ve taught much more frequently—I asked the students to discuss controversial things and to consider all sides of those issues. My approach, I would describe as a virtue ethics approach. I foreground the intellectual virtues, such as intellectual humility and charity and curiosity and even-handedness, as a way of enabling us to have hard conversations. If we focus on those, we all become better listeners, better conversation partners, and can make possible conversations that might otherwise be impossible or nearly impossible because they resort to name-calling or accusations of ulterior motives or simply a sense on the part of some parties that it’s offensive to even have the conversation. The approach is to use virtues, to get students comfortable, and to get students to trust one another. I think trust and virtue are very much linked. I think when you show charity and goodwill towards the other person, when you interpret their remarks in what seemed to you the most reasonable possible way, put the best spin on them, you’re likely to build trust with them. They’re more likely to make themselves vulnerable. And when they make themselves vulnerable, you’re more likely to make yourself vulnerable. And the fact that the other person has shown that they won’t use their sword, then you’re more likely to put your sword away. That’s the approach to the classes. They have been, I’m pleased to say, successful. And not because I’m some sort of student whisperer. It’s because there’s a great desire on the part of students today, not just at Duke, but all over, because I meet with students at various schools who want to have these conversations. So while there are fears and anxieties on the part of students when having these conversations, concerns about social or professional penalty for saying the wrong thing or having the wrong opinion or for having the right opinion, but it coming out the wrong way, there is at the same time, I’ve observed, a yet deeper desire to have these conversations, given in the right environment. They really do want to be real with each other and have the excitement of having a real conversation on these complicated, morally contentious issues and not knowing where the conversation is going to go.

(Stella)

Right. And what do you feel like your students taught you in those classes?

(John)

Oh, right, that question. I dodged it. First, they taught me that they’re capable. I mean, when I started teaching the class, I wasn’t sure if it would work. And every semester, without fail, by the end of the semester, my students are doing it. They’re doing it at a level that I think would surprise a lot of the external critics of higher education who say, “Oh, these students, they’re too fragile, they’re too intolerant towards other views, or they’re simply too scared to ever have these conversations.” It’s not true. It’s not true. They can do it. They can do it very, very well. So they’ve taught me. They’ve given me hope, actually, for the future of our country. They’ve given me hope that some of these more negative dimensions of polarization are fixable to some degree because there’s clearly a desire on the part of the young people to do it.

(Stella)

So I’ve heard that that is your mission in coming to Carolina and really starting these classes as a faculty member at Carolina. But what initially drew you to Carolina and the Morehead-Cain Program?

(John)

I’ve always been intrigued and attracted to Carolina’s public mission. Duke is a wonderful university. It’s a private university that educates, relatively speaking, many fewer students than UNC. While it draws students from North Carolina, it does not to the extent that UNC does. UNC exists to serve the state of North Carolina in a way that isn’t as true for Duke. These things are different. They have different missions, and it’s good that we have all these different kinds of universities. But when I consider the work that I do, namely civil discourse, creating better citizens, there is something about it that fits very well with a public institution. And I’ve always, as I said, looked down the road and thought how cool it is that you think this way about education. And I’ve always secretly desired to be a part of it.

(Stella)

We’ll tell all the Duke fans that.

(John)

Edit that out. Duke’s wonderful, too.

(Stella)

Right. And going back to your own education and looking back at it, you have a big emphasis in theology and in Christian theology. It seems like faith is an important value in your life. How does that interweave with your love of civic leadership and teaching these political discourse courses? Are there similarities between theology and civic leadership that you find particularly striking?

(John)

It’s weird that I did a Ph.D. in theology, and I teach classes about politics. I acknowledge that that’s strange, and I would not have expected that I would be doing that after my graduate work. However, there is a thread. I mentioned earlier that I’m particularly interested in virtues as a way to think about morality, about why we should live as we live. The virtue of charity, I think, is preeminent. From a Christian theological standpoint, I believe it is the most important virtue because Aquinas said that charity is the most important virtue because it is the form, the mother, and the root of all the other virtues when you start to think about it. In my classes, I always assign Martin Luther King Jr’s sermon on loving your enemies, in which he explains why and how we must love our enemies. By loving them, it doesn’t necessarily mean you just have this feeling towards them. It’s a desire, the will, to will the good of the other. When you think about love that way, you can begin to understand what it might mean to love your political enemies. This is a proposal I put before my students. I don’t require them to believe anything. I say, “Consider this. Consider this as a way for us to overcome negative effect of polarization, in which we have not just dislike, but contempt for the other side.” Contempt is the emotion that says, “You’re beneath me. I wish you weren’t here. I wish you didn’t exist. The country would be better if you were just gone. You are not a worthy conversation partner.” That particular feeling, I think, is poisonous for our politics, and there’s a lot of it to go around. I think love or charity is the counter emotion, counter virtue, to that. My interest in theology led me to become interested in charity, and my interest in charity led me to become interested in intellectual virtues. Then, like many people around 2016, I looked around the country and said, “We’re really coming apart here.” Huge problems with polarization that have only gotten worse. I said, “I want to teach a class that addresses this problem, see if I can’t get students to talk more freely.” I drew on my understanding of charity as a way to empower students to have these conversations. It’s a really charity-centric approach to civil discourse, you might say.

Sometimes people, when they talk about civil discourse, they say, “Well, let’s just be more rational.” I’m pro-rationality. I’m not anti-rationality, but I think on its own, it’s actually insufficient. When you consider what our problems are, they’re problems of contempt. You need something equally powerful that is in the realm of the normative. I think we need to be normative in the way we think about this. The other way of saying that is if we’re to overcome negative polarization, we don’t just need to become more rational, we actually need to become better people.

(Stella)

Interesting. I think that’s a really good thought, especially during this election season, that needs to be spread. I’m wondering if you see an association or any correlation between students who are religious and students in your classes who are religious and their approach to civic discourse and maybe students that are agnostic or atheist in their approach, if there’s a difference in those.

(John)

Religion is a tricky thing on college campuses today. I think often at elite schools, it gets swept under the rug a little bit. There are several reasons. I think sometimes it has the perception of being anti-intellectual, anti-science, maybe intolerant. Some students automatically associate it with a certain form of politics that perhaps they don’t like. For that reason, it can make it hard to bring up religion in the classroom, and it can make it hard for religious students to out themselves, sometimes even to their roommates. Their own roommates don’t know they’re religious. So you can imagine how hard it is for them to bring it up in class and say, “I think this because of my religious tradition.” But I try to get students comfortable enough to stop self-censoring about that, too, not just about your politics, but about your religion. When they do, I think it’s really helpful for the other students because they’re a little bit unfamiliar with the religiosity that is actually quite typical of our country once you get off these campuses. It’s certainly true of the world when you go to the Global South. I think these conversations around political topics, whenever you’re doing civil discourse, are much richer when there are actually voices in the room who are religious and will say they’re religious and explain their reasoning, and they do think different. One thing I’ll say about that is when you get into some of these really contentious political issues, if you can get beneath the platitudes on all the sides and dig, dig, dig, why did we come to different conclusions about this? Keep asking why, keep interrogating premises, and then figure out the assumptions behind the premises, and so forth. Oftentimes, you will come back to differences regarding religion. Why does somebody think that is a life and that’s not a life? Oftentimes, there are religious reasons or whatever. And I think what everyone thinks about this is really helpful to achieve that level of clarification. I mean, I forget who once said it, but real disagreement is an achievement. Often what passes for disagreement is really just confusion. You haven’t dug deep enough to figure out what the real root is. If you can get to the real root of it, you’ve actually made a little bit of progress, even if you haven’t persuaded anybody.

(Stella)

I love that. I love asking why. And I think that’s especially prevalent in our election season right now. And as a faculty mentor of Dialogue and Discourse, that will be a huge emphasis on maybe what you’re teaching and fostering those conversations. I’m wondering, as we’re getting to the end here, what will be your approach to discourse in those Dialogue and Discourse conversations? Even students or scholars who aren’t able to participate this semester, what would be your biggest tips in approaching conversations with others who have different political opinions. I think that is something that’s super prevalent right now, no matter what circle you’re in, who you’re surrounding yourself by, and how do you really do what Martin Luther King talked about, about loving your enemies. What are your biggest tips?

(John)

King says, “To change somebody’s mind, you must first love them, and they must know that you love them.” That’s a really radical way of thinking. We don’t think that way. We think, “Change their mind, embarrass them, humiliate them, cast them out, shame them to the point where they finally say, ‘Oh, fine, I agree with you.’” King says, “That won’t work because you have to change somebody’s heart. To change somebody’s heart, you have to show that you love them.” We show them, we love them, among other ways, by the way that we talk to them, our body language, our tone. When you’re conversing with somebody, you should always be trying to bring them towards your view, if you think you’re right, without embarrassing them. People who study high conflict will tell you that humiliation is a common precondition. To truly humiliate somebody, you’ll make them an enemy forever. Also, assume goodwill. I think so often, conversation gets shut down because people accuse the other of some kind of “ism” that they don’t claim to have. They’re afraid to have the deeper conversation about why do you think I’m guilty of this “ism” and I don’t? And I think one good rule of thumb to keep in mind is, are you talking in such a way that it keeps the conversation going and people are more honest, or is it shutting it down? If it’s shutting it down, it’s not working. Now, you might say, “Well, sometimes people have bad will,” and that’s true. But when it comes to having controversial conversations, it profits you nothing to insist that somebody’s a bad will when they don’t claim to be. So for the sake of keeping conversation alive, I recommend to students, give people the benefit of the doubt. Remain curious. Instead of when somebody says something you really don’t like, instead of saying, “How could you possibly believe that?” Instead say, “Tell me more about why you believe that?” See the difference? It’s the big difference. It’s a huge difference. It shows an amount of respect. I’m really curious about what you think, and it’s keeping open a line of communication.

(Stella)

Awesome. Well, John, thank you so much for joining us today. I know all of the students are super excited about Dialogue and Discourse, and maybe we’ll do a post-interview after the program and hear what your success looks like. I hope that students really do learn a lot in your program.

(John)

Thank you. Thanks for having me.