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John Witte, Jr. – Table Talks on the Weightier Matters of Law and Religion
156 Plays11 months ago
Today’s guest is John Witte, Jr. — Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor of Religion, and Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. A specialist in Legal History, Human Rights, Religious Freedom, Marriage and Family Law, and Law and Religion, he has published more than 300 articles, 19 journal symposia, and 45 books. As the latest addition to this large body of work, Witte’s new book —Table Talks—is a collection of short reflections on what he calls “the weightier matters of law and religion.” It was published Open Access through Brill Academic Press earlier this year and is intended for both law students and the broader public.
In this conversation, we talk with John about the inspiration for the book, his advice for students, and the role of academics in public discourse, among other topics.
- Table Talks (Open Access): https://brill.com/display/title/64126
- John Witte, Jr. faculty page: https://law.emory.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/witte-profile.html
- John Witte, Jr. website: https://www.johnwittejr.com/
- CSLR Website: https://cslr.law.emory.edu/
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Transcript
Introduction to the Interactions Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Interactions Podcast, brought to you by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Now in its 40th year, our center explores the interactions of law and religion through research and scholarship, teaching and training, and public programs. This season of the podcast explores recent scholarship in law and religion from members of the center community.
00:00:22
Speaker
This podcast is produced by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and in collaboration with CanopyForum.org.
John Whitty Jr. on 'Table Talks'
00:00:30
Speaker
Today's guest is John Whitty, Jr., Robert W. Woodruff, Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor of Religion, and Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. A specialist in legal history, human rights, religious freedom, marriage and family law, and law and religion, he has published more than 300 articles,
00:00:50
Speaker
19 journal symposia and 45 books. As the latest addition to this large body of work, Woody's new book, Table Talks, is a collection of short reflections on what he calls, quote, the weightier matters of law and religion. It was published open access through Brill Academic Press earlier this year and is intended for both law students and the broader public.
Inspiration Behind 'Table Talks'
00:01:11
Speaker
In this conversation, we talk with John about the inspiration for the book, his advice for students, and the role of academics in public discourse, among other topics. Thank you for listening to the Interactions Podcast. My name is Whitney Barth, the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and the Charlotte McDaniel Scholar.
00:01:31
Speaker
My name is John Bernah, a sociologist and director of digital scholarship at the center. Today we're joined by John Whitty Jr., Robert W. Woodruff, professor of law, McDonald distinguished professor, and faculty director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.
Purpose of 'Table Talks'
00:01:48
Speaker
John, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So your latest book, Table Talks, is a bit of a departure from the rest of your books. Can you tell us about the inspiration to write this book
00:01:59
Speaker
Part of it is to be a teacher, which I love being, and I try to do that through my academic work, but this was an attempt to take small, avuncular reflections that I've done over the years and to put them together in one book and to realize that there is a whole new audience out there, especially through Open Access, that
00:02:18
Speaker
historically have not reached. And so the idea was to gather a few of the nuggets that are at least collections of things that I've done and put them in one place. And I come to this as a legal historian and historian of law and religion in the West and table talks are a conventional genre. We've been doing this for 500 years since the printing press.
00:02:37
Speaker
And it's an interesting way of providing connective tissue between big books, between big ideas, and especially as the genealogy of the work of law and religion and generally merges, having one person's take on what's going on between the big books and what's going on between classes I think is helpful. And as historically table talks have played that role, I was hoping that this would be useful to people looking at the developmental law and religion field too.
Advice for Law Students
00:03:07
Speaker
And so this book is made up of four parts. The first is the talk to law students. The second talks on public issues. The third talks from the pulpits and the fourth words of remembrance. And so starting with this first part, your talks to students range from practical advice like always take a day off on the weekend.
00:03:23
Speaker
to more profound meditations on the vocation of the lawyer and the importance of emancipation and freedom in human life. And so this is quite a range. And as a law professor, why was this practice important for you to start with and to continue with your law students? So it was inspired in part by models I had when I was a law student. Archibald Cox was one of my favorite professors and he always had these five minute, seven minute reflections on life and law.
00:03:52
Speaker
when I was taking him for introductory classes, especially in the first year. And I found that very, very helpful in this action-packed and highly stressful time of one's life, which is deeply formative to have a few avuncular reflections that allow a student to realize that outside the law,
00:04:12
Speaker
and as part of their budding life as legal professionals, they have to remember all the other fundamental things, the basic habits that keep them healthy, the basic relationships that have sustained them, the basic aspirations that brought them to a legal profession in the first place, and then having them recognize that they are stepping onto a lofty platform as a budding lawyer, and they're going to have to answer very deep questions, fundamental questions of life in society that their clients and that their cases are going to put to them.
00:04:42
Speaker
and giving students a few of the resources to be able to reflect on that beyond the doctrinal and procedural expertise that they cultivate in the classroom seemed important to me. And it was also a way of settling students down, I found, for them to, in this really hotbed of nine months of immersion into law, to realize that the life they had before and the life they'll have after law school is there, and it's there in
00:05:10
Speaker
an increasingly old man who's talking to them and giving them the kind of reflections that when I started, their siblings would give them and then their parents would give them and now their grandparents would give them. And I found students responded to that as much as they responded to any of the formal instruction each day.
00:05:27
Speaker
Is there a specific talk that you included in the book that was particularly memorable for students or that they bring up in future conversations with you? The one that oftentimes caught their derisive attention when I offered it and then ongoing edification as they got into their careers was to take a day off in the weekend.
00:05:53
Speaker
Call it soft Sabbatarianism if you want, but I always told the students on the last day of the week when we gather together, it is really important for you to take one day off on the weekend for the first 12 weeks of the semester. Take a day off away from the law away from your legal studies and go to the things that you love.
00:06:11
Speaker
Go back to your art studio or a music studio and do something that you love. Hang out with your friends. Go to the gym. Go to a play. Go dancing. Go do something. Go to a community that feeds you. Spend time on those primary relationships that have been part of your life before. And learn to give yourself that oasis once a week of time for things outside the law. And learn those habits now.
00:06:34
Speaker
Because if you don't learn them now, you're never going to learn them once you get out and step out into the big legal practice that's demanding 2,500 billable hours for you. So learn those habits now for your sake, for your loved one's sake, for your health, for your happiness in the law. Students oftentimes, I mean, almost every year when I offered that the first time or two, they'd say, are you crazy? And almost every time, 25 years later, that class would have one or two or three representatives that would come to me.
00:07:04
Speaker
Be leaguered, dressed to the nines, sitting in my office and saying, Professor Whitty, I don't remember anything you taught me about criminal law or constitutional law or whatever it was in the first year. But I remember you always had this Dutch uncle talk and you always told us to take a day off in the weekend, which I reminded them of having told them in more detail what I was doing the first time. And they said, I thought that was crazy when you offered it. I worked seven days a week. I was top of my class. I had a wonderful, rich career.
00:07:32
Speaker
But I'm miserable. I'm miserable. I have, you know, I make seven figures. I've dressed the denines. I have three houses. I have fabulous cars. I have more money in the bank I know what to do with and I'm absolutely miserable. I'm my third spouse. I don't have any contact with my kids. My parents have died and I wasn't around to see them.
00:07:52
Speaker
And I don't know what to do with myself and maybe it's because I didn't take a day off on the weekend. And I said, well, baby, but that's retrospective. Now, let's talk about what you can do going forward almost inevitably. It has them thinking about, well, building primary relationships in their life again, doing something productive that's outside the law and doing exactly what that little one
00:08:15
Speaker
a week snippet of work and time was supposed to be about. So it's interesting. So that's the one that sticks to me and it's the one I always repeat every year. I hope every of them and I put a few of them in the book.
00:08:31
Speaker
But by the way, that's also a good recruiting device for seminary, because many times I send them to seminary, which they gleefully go to, or they chair a foundation, or they go do something interesting. It's interesting to see them yearning for purpose outside of law, even though law provides its own inherent and deep and rich purpose.
00:08:55
Speaker
In thinking about these talks and these issues that you cover in these talks, have there been any issue where your thinking has evolved as a result of your interactions with students over the years?
Mentorship Journey
00:09:05
Speaker
I think my role has played just as I've aged, as I indicated kind of facetiously in passing. I was their brother initially and then I became their dad and then I became their granddad. And you play a very different kind of role in each of those vocations in life. I've found with my kids and grandkids and I now find with my students too.
00:09:25
Speaker
students change when you're their peer you're basically you play basketball with them you hang out with them and the whole job is to try to distinguish yourself in a way that allows them to appreciate the authority that somebody has over them even if they're really their chronological and social peer and it was important for me then to
00:09:45
Speaker
encourage students to recognize that you're walking into a deeply structured legal profession that has a number of basic rules of etiquette and responsibility and
00:10:00
Speaker
expectation that you have to have and if you're sitting in front of a 28 year old judge, you don't snap towels with that judge. You treat the judge with your honor and if you're dealing with a managing partner who's senior, you have to deal with them responsibly even if they're not on their game anymore.
00:10:16
Speaker
And part of it was that. When I became 45 or so, I found that my role became very much helping them transition into professional adulthood and kind of watching them, coaching them, helping them deal with inevitable life crises that came on that they often would come to me and sit and we would talk at length about.
00:10:40
Speaker
relationships that have gone bust or addictions they might have or real conflicts they had about their profession and their choice to go into the law. And now as I've gotten older, I think my responsibility is to try to
00:10:54
Speaker
I offer each of those things. I try to now kind of tell them more about the majesty of the legal tradition that they're entering, the kind of role they're playing as an important cog in a cosmic wheel that's been at it for a long time in dealing with the fundamentals.
00:11:12
Speaker
And maybe if you get grayer and bolder, you're able to say those things a little bit more responsibly as well as with a little bit more credibility of the students. And so I found that being more important as I've gotten older. So you'll see some in the books a few narratives about, you know, emancipation narratives. You'll see a few things about, you know, kind of core responsibilities that you're going to have to
00:11:38
Speaker
the bench and the bar and to the professional together. And it's hard to say that when you're a 28 year old or 26 year old whenever I was when I started teaching. Easier to say when you're in your 60s.
00:11:51
Speaker
So I think the content is probably the same, but I think the posturing and the object of what you're doing just changed a bit. Interesting. John, you tell one particularly fascinating story of your 1995 visit with
Encounter with Russian Orthodox Leader
00:12:07
Speaker
Patriarch Alexey II, the religious leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Could you tell our listeners a bit about this encounter and what you took away from it?
00:12:17
Speaker
Yeah, that was a very meaningful and deep encounter for me. I titled it Freedom of Silence. The context was post-Glasnost Russia. The Soviet Union was no more. Gorbachev's peristorical and glasnost ideas had taken the form of accepting many of the Western paradigms of liberty and equality and fraternity.
00:12:39
Speaker
The Russian Constitution was highly progressive in 1993 in endorsing a whole bevy of rights that the American founders and French founders would have enjoyed, including in their declarations two centuries before. And Russia, suddenly long trampled, long closed, was suddenly open to Western missionaries and to a bevy of specially American and European and South Korean-based
00:13:08
Speaker
activists who came for the first time in a century into this long-closed and trampled regime to share the gospel, to share their good news, to create schools and charities, to have concerts and crusades, and do a variety of things to bring the gospel as they saw it to the Russian Orthodox Church. Initially, the Russian Orthodox Church welcomed these foreigners, welcomed the opportunity to learn from them, and then rather quickly
00:13:36
Speaker
began to realize that this Western democratic human rights-based formulation of life was a toxic compound that the Russian people simply were not ready to absorb. And the Russian Orthodox Church in particular was not able to participate in the open marketplace of religious ideas.
00:13:57
Speaker
They had no seminaries. They had little literature. They had rather little parish life beyond that of the Parson priest who was almost always a political appointment. And they turned to the state to try to help them. And by doing what the patriarchs had always asked the czar to do, which was to close the borders and to reduce religious pluralism and to give special protection to the Russian Orthodox Church.
00:14:25
Speaker
That context was—that context—that is the context for the meeting that we had the privilege of organizing with the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church at the time, Patriarch Alexey, Harold Berman, my late great colleague and mentor, a great specialist on Russia and the Soviet Union.
00:14:42
Speaker
led a delegation of about 20 of us who had an audience with the Russian Orthodox patriarch and his retinue asking – we are there to ask the patriarch to abandon this kind of protectionism, to continue to embrace human rights and religious freedom, to help us understand the conditions under which that
00:15:03
Speaker
could properly be exercised on all sides, including the Russian Orthodox Church's side. And we were there to protect American-style religious freedom and demonstrate to Russia that in point of fact, that's what they have in their own Russian constitution and that's what their signatory – being a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with its very strong religious freedom provision was all about.
00:15:27
Speaker
So we are there armed with our arguments. We had it all choreographed as to who was going to say what. A lot of really smart lawyers. I'm not sure why I was there except for Caring Berman's briefcase. But I had been involved in that religious freedom world as well and had my own little arguments to make. And so we waited in this palatial setting and Patriarch Alexei and his retinue came in.
00:15:54
Speaker
Through an interpreter, he said, God bless you, my brothers and sisters. We devoured. Shall we pray? And so we had 45 minutes total. And for the next 44 minutes, we prayed. And we prayed in absolute silence. And eventually on our knees, on hard floor, he had a pad. We didn't. And
00:16:23
Speaker
Alexei stood up. We all stood up. And he said, oh God, it was taught us that there was a time to speak and a time to be silent. There was a time to sow seed and a time to harvest seed. God bless these brothers and sisters of mine who have come. Thank you very much. And he walked out.
00:16:54
Speaker
And there we were armed with all our arguments. We were there armed with all of our usual importance of open marketplace of ideas. And good ideas are balanced by bad ideas and vice versa. All the good work that we wanted to do, all the crusades we wanted to run, all the charities, all the good
00:17:15
Speaker
hard work we are doing on behalf of the Lord, we are rebuked, absolutely rebuked by another gospel truth, that there is a time to be silent, and that there is a time to speak, and that in the presence of God sometimes the best thing to do is to simply sit in reverence, and through this powerful, powerful expression of silence,
00:17:43
Speaker
We Westerners were schooled on what freedom of speech can actually mean and it was a very moving time for me and it forced me to appreciate the Russian Orthodox Church even more than I had already and especially the power of silence as a fundamental aspect of religious worship and identity and practice.
00:18:09
Speaker
and Protestants should know that. It's kind of what we're about, but it was good to be reminded, even if by a leader of another faith.
00:18:18
Speaker
So turning to the second part of the book, which you include talks to the public. These include meditations on religious symbolism, the institution of marriage, and the rights of children, among other topics. So these are all topics you've written about extensively throughout your career as a legal historian. And when these topics enter the public conversation, how do you see your role in contributing to that conversation?
00:18:44
Speaker
Yeah, part of it is playing to my strength. I'm not a litigator. I'm not a lobbyist. I'm not in the business of trying to craft legislation for the next generation. What I have been given is the opportunity to create a genealogy of those problems and issues and to think through the depth of some of the topics that are under discussion.
00:19:05
Speaker
suggest that sometimes when we're trying to reform things that we're actually upending 2000 or 3000 year traditions. Sometimes when we're trying to take a particular topic, my job is to contextualize that topic a little bit. Part of it is to, not to say there's nothing new under the sun, but to remind people that we have been through crisis moments before and we have survived and some of the tools of resilience and resolution historically were as follows.
00:19:34
Speaker
Maybe those can be thought about again. And the fundamentals of faith, freedom and family, the three things that people will die for.
Contextualizing Public Issues
00:19:42
Speaker
Those are the things that I have studied historically and those are the things that oftentimes get pressed very, very strongly to the fore and get reduced to bumper sticker, 20 second sound bite kinds of reductios. And I see my job as an historian, I see my job as a scholar to try to
00:20:02
Speaker
to widen the conversation a bit, to contextualize the conversation a bit, maybe to dampen the conversation a bit with appreciation for the sacrifices that went into the creation of some of the things that we're trying to change and the methodologies by which our forebearers found ways of living together and sometimes even if necessary with building fences. And sometimes fence building is what you're trying to encourage.
00:20:27
Speaker
And so these little op-eds, I've done too many of them. We're trying to distill some of these, some of the scholarship and trying to point people to resources beyond what currently is under discussion.
00:20:47
Speaker
John, in this volume, you move between personal experiences and academic reflections in a way that is almost an invitation to the reader into a conversation. And it struck us that many of the topics you cover here are what might be considered hot button topics. And we don't often see spaces where nuanced conversations take place around some of these issues.
00:21:10
Speaker
Can you reflect on the importance of speaking from both personal and academic perspectives while addressing different audiences?
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah, this book is new in the sense that speaking out of autobiographical experiences is not something I have done much before. It probably shows some of the awkwardness and tentativeness of some of my reflections there. Maybe this is apropos of what Whitney and I discussed a bit earlier about being in a little different phase of life and trying to distill what learning one has based on experience and being a little more comfortable in sharing that than historically I was.
00:21:50
Speaker
was and remain a pretty private person. But part of it is also, you know, I think we have come to appreciate the micro example much more than historically and historian ideas like I am would like to appreciate and lived history, lived law, lived religion has become, I think,
00:22:12
Speaker
an increasingly important dimension beyond the doctrine, beyond the cases, beyond the statutes, the Constitution, and the lofty debates around them. What that means on the ground and what it means for an individual person is, I think, I have come to appreciate that as an increasingly important part of
00:22:30
Speaker
public pedagogy. And so drawing to the extent I can from historical figures as I've always done and biographical narrative is an important part of what I've long done in my scholarship, I thought increasingly important to empathize with readers and listeners and share personal stories that might have a bearing. So just as a
00:22:56
Speaker
One example, all the heated discussion about abortion rights and pro-life and pro-liberty and all the hard dialectics around that. I'm always trying this for a via media position on a lot of these contested issues and on this one,
00:23:16
Speaker
It struck me as important to appreciate my own life path, which was back in mid-1959, my mother being told that this being in her womb, whatever it was and however you wanted to call it,
00:23:35
Speaker
really should be terminated because that being in the womb is going to kill her. She insisted, not out of real strong religious conviction, but just insisted on personal conviction that she wanted to bear this child to term. The child was three weeks late in a small little runt and it turned out to be me. My mother suffered amply from carrying me to term.
00:24:04
Speaker
But now, all of a sudden, there's a kind of a new experience of, well, you can appreciate a child's rights perspective a little bit better, perhaps, if you're the child who's enjoyed the benefit of it. And I'm not to say that her decision was the right one or the wrong one for everyone, but at least it, for me, underlined kind of personal experience with
00:24:25
Speaker
What was at stake? And I've been on the other side and listened to people telling these horrible stories of being, you know, the flip side of this was, you know, my parents' family, they lived through the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. And
Personal Story and Abortion Debate
00:24:46
Speaker
many of those young ladies, including in my mother's family,
00:24:50
Speaker
were systematically raped by the crew cuts that on furlough came to their towns and and simply raped them with a band and inevitably they got pregnant and they had a creative system of
00:25:08
Speaker
being rid of that odious fruit of that illicit relationship. Abortion then for them was the only option and the real option and sharing that kind of story too is an important part of people listening.
00:25:24
Speaker
and those that have a kind of brittle, uberolous, pro-life or pro-liberty, I think you have to appreciate the hard nuance of these stories and appreciate the anguish that would-be mothers have to go through if they choose the hard path of abortion and get past the caricatures that dominate this kind of discourse.
00:25:52
Speaker
In bringing together these types of reflections, the academic and the personal, we thought of it as a conversation, but does that resonate for you? Is this an invitation for people to think about some of these academic themes in their own personal perspectives?
00:26:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean part of writing it in this vein as hopefully accessible set of reflections, part of it writing in little nuggets that people can share, putting it in open access format that anybody who's interested can read it, is designed to catalyze conversation and provide concrete cases and concrete reflections that people can disagree with.
00:26:34
Speaker
hopefully stimulate them to begin to think about their own narratives and about their own perspectives and whether around their own tables at home, the table talk or around Eucharist or other worship tables that they may gather around or
00:26:49
Speaker
perhaps around editorial tables and news desks, which they used to have. They don't have so much of that before, but I used to regularly go to these editorial meetings at different papers and would sit with 20 smart reporters and talk for an hour or two or three and answer questions. This is designed in part to reconstruct that and to give people the resources or some of the resources to be able to build their own conversations around their own tables and
00:27:18
Speaker
whether virtual or actual You alluded at the beginning of the outset of the podcast around this being a form table talk as a form and I wonder if there are specific examples I think you reference in the beginning of the book too and if you want to share any of those historical examples of table talks people who may be less familiar with the genre
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah. So John became very popular in the 16th century with the rise of the printing press and a desire to share reflections by leaders, cultural, religious, political leaders of communities. And the most famous of those 16th century collections was by Martin Luther, the 16th century German reformer who inaugurates the Lutheran Reformation in his
00:28:03
Speaker
vast 98 volumes of collected writings. There are probably more now, more volumes since I worked on him. But there are six of those volumes are what are called table talk, Tischbraden. And they were just collections of reflections that he, around his own table at home in the Luther House or sometimes around educational tables at the church or in the school,
00:28:25
Speaker
would reflect on things and he had a whole tribe of people taking notes and they would write down sometimes silly little manic notes, sometimes deep meditations or reflections in response to a question. Sometimes he himself would write a table talk and throw it into the collection.
00:28:44
Speaker
And, mercifully, his editors kept a lot of that stuff early on and it became a very valuable, as I said, form of connective tissue between his big sermons and big reformation tracks and his commentaries on the Bible and many of the other things that he did. This gave us an insight into the evolving mind and the editors were very good about dating these things too, which was, I think, quite helpful.
00:29:11
Speaker
Lawyers use table talks, too. And the most poignant example for me was this very complex legal philosopher and legal historian John Seldin, the greatest legal historian of the 17th century in England, who writes in this very complicated, convoluted Latin
00:29:33
Speaker
Verse almost impossible to read sometimes you have to because it was so profound but it was really difficult stuff and he's got 44 volumes of this stuff and it's just impossible to get through But the liveliness of his mind
00:29:49
Speaker
And our capacity to see what he's doing in some of these complicated texts was the fact that he wrote a little table talk. And he actually updated it a few times. And it was for him, private reflections on different things. Everything from abbots to zealotry, I think. And it was alphabetically organized around really nice little nuggets from a sentence or two, sometimes a whole page or two. And those were two of many, many examples that you find in
00:30:18
Speaker
the evolving Western canon, the print canon in particular. Playwrights like to use this. Goethe did some of these. Samuel Johnson did some of these. Many of the big philosophers did some of these. I mean, they get called various things. They, I mean, as bland as Pascal's, Pency's, which are thoughts to, you know,
00:30:39
Speaker
My life meditations on X or diary and reflective essays by, you know, Sidney Smith on Y. Titles are variant, but the genre is the same and it's a familiar genre in the tradition. Designed, I think designed in part for continued edification, often posthumously for a while, but when editors would gather somebody's works and they didn't know quite what to do with this miscellaneous, they would put them together.
00:31:06
Speaker
But eventually, they became quite deliberately self-generated texts that authors themselves, as they developed their own modes of thinking and shifted to new topics, thought it important to collect and eventually publish.
00:31:21
Speaker
Samuel Johnson is probably the best example of a literary figure who brilliantly uses table talks three or four times in his career. Here's the bend in the road and let me guide you down this next path and show you what I'm thinking.
00:31:41
Speaker
I wish we would have had Immanuel Kant do that so we could understand what he was talking about. That's another thing. I'm still waiting for that to be published. I love this idea of table talks. Even the imagery has kind of this democratic, eucharistic, kind of we're all in the same playing field. And so making this material accessible I think is really important.
00:32:00
Speaker
I mean, we talked about the importance of lived experience, lived history, these micro-examples, so it really is kind of a way to take these heady ideas and kind of deliver them in a democratic way. Yeah, it's the great leveler, isn't it? I mean, in church we all kneel at the bench and we take the Eucharist and we're humbled that way, but there's an authority figure above us, the priest who's delivering, you know, in school.
00:32:29
Speaker
We all sit at the same level to desk, but there's a teacher that's, you know, teaching you. Here, you're right. This is the fundamental leveler. And, you know, mom and dad who have authority at home, or mom and mom or dad or dad nowadays, who have authority at home, they sit at the same level with their children. And they talk to them at their level. And it's editorial tables, too. They're flat. I always insist in a seminar setting to
00:32:58
Speaker
sit with the students. And when I teach, I never stand behind a lectern. I'm always walking around and talking with them and walking up and down the aisle with them. And part of that is to make it, some of it's the priesthood of all believers writ large for us three Protestants, but a lot of it is just the recognition that you often tend to learn better when you're learning in conversation rather than having it declared.
00:33:27
Speaker
And conversational truth, the marketplace of discussion tends to be more resilient when you're trying to teach folk than having something declared at you. You'll remember a five-minute conversation around a table much more than you remember a 45-minute sermon that was bellowed at you yet again from the pulpit. That's kind of the inspiration for this.
00:33:54
Speaker
So John, you open the book with talks to students and you close the book with a collection of touching tributes to people that have been formative to you, one of which is your father, but also professors and colleagues. Could you tell us about your decision to end the book this way?
00:34:13
Speaker
Part of it's the historian of me again.
Importance of Mentorship
00:34:15
Speaker
Funeral sermons and funeral eulogies are an important part of how we learn about other people as well as learn about the author giving the sermon or reflection. Part of it is what we talked about a bit earlier, which is sharing experience that other people inevitably are going to have.
00:34:34
Speaker
and the anguish of losing a loved one or somebody formative in your life, trying to find a way of articulating what we have about that person that is important to share with other folk.
00:34:51
Speaker
It's designed to help choreograph empathy, if you will, for people that are suffering and have lost their loved ones. Part of it is just to pay tribute to the people that have made me what I am and I've found
00:35:08
Speaker
I've done way too many eulogies in my lifetime, too. But I picked the ones for people that I wanted to lift up. I wanted to credit and thank for their contribution in my life, but also write them. Pick reflections that might, by analogy, help somebody else who is suffering from the loss of a loved one and trying to put into words their grief in a way that might be meaningful and helpful.
00:35:41
Speaker
One thing that struck me in reading these is the role of the mentor in the formation of students, but also lifelong, lifelong formation. And I'm wondering if you have any advice for students as they start their careers, be it legal practice or in academia or even in religious training and on this importance of mentors.
00:36:04
Speaker
Yeah, we are in a The legal profession is by design a mentorship profession historically it was an apprentice system where you learn under a master of mistress and Absorb from them the instruction that they could give you the example they could give you and then you became a master mistress of the law yourself and
00:36:24
Speaker
Now, we do it through formal legal education, but the mentorship role is still there. And it's mentorship en masse with the students in your class, but it's also mentorship one-on-one and finding an individual faculty member or an important person in a legal profession that can be your go-to person, who can be your champion, who can be your confidant, who can be your confessor, who can be somebody that you can
00:36:47
Speaker
rely on to be a bedrock for you. Every person needs that. A bevy of them is even better, but a mentor, too, is really important to have in your, especially your budding professional life. And so that's the kind of role that I've been privileged to play with a number of students over the years. You get it intensely when you have a doctoral student or a student who's writing something major for you.
00:37:14
Speaker
But it often happens that you stumble into mentorship responsibilities where a desperate student comes into your office and you can sit with them and there's something that clicks and in that relationship you've kind of built the first steps of mutual trust that a student can build on. I have young students, students that were youngsters of teaching since 1987,
00:37:41
Speaker
And there are a few students that I taught in the late 80s and early 90s with whom I keep a bit of contact. And once in a while they'll call me up and run a problem by me or they'll just ask advice because they're concerned about this or that. And it's a wonderful, wonderful role to play now. And I was the beneficiary of that as a younger student and a young professional where I had great, great mentors in college and in law school.
00:38:07
Speaker
and at Emory when I got here. And Harold Berman, my great teacher at Harvard Law School, and then a mentor and colleague here at Emory. Frank Alexander, a young colleague who was here my age more or less, a little bit older, but he kind of played a very important mentorship role. Abdullah Naim, a great Sufi jurist who was a very important part of my life and appreciating
00:38:32
Speaker
the other people of other faith and people of other culture but you know fundamentally a brother having
00:38:41
Speaker
having those people in my life has been and continues in memory in some instances to be so critical to me and trying to pay it forward, as they say, and to do that for students and colleagues is what I think one of my big responsibilities is, especially as I get to be an old guy. John, is there any parting words you have about the book or last pieces of wisdom for our listeners here?
00:39:12
Speaker
I try to put into a little compact 85 page book, you know, the distillation of a lot of things that I've been thinking about and writing about and working on for a long time. I do think it
00:39:27
Speaker
underscored for me, which I would probably encourage young professionals to think about, is finding some way of keeping a diary or collecting these reflections or being more deliberate than I was about
00:39:44
Speaker
recognizing that down the road you're going to be asked to play avuncular responsibilities, mentor responsibilities, leadership responsibilities and it's useful to keep a record of that and it's useful to be deliberate about doing that even if it's not shared along the way.
00:39:59
Speaker
And I wish I would have done that throughout my life and had a diary that I had kept. Historically, I relied on my memory, but that's not quite what it used to be. And especially when you get busy taking the five minutes or 10 minutes a day to write down a few things. And when you get an inspiration to collect it,
00:40:29
Speaker
The other thing I would say is...
00:40:31
Speaker
I'm a scholar, and maybe this is not useful by analogy for people that are in different walks of life, but I have a folder on my word processor, or it's called now, called Ideas. And it's bizarre to me, but inevitably, when you're working intensely on something, completely unrelated comes this interesting thought about something wholly different. And one thing I have done, which I,
00:41:02
Speaker
Probably should have systematized even though I was starting to do it was to kind of keep this idea file when idea came Write it out and sometimes it's a five line. Sometimes it's five pages, but to pound it out and I would encourage listeners to have
00:41:19
Speaker
you know, both a deliberate, systematic way of diarizing, but also a spontaneous way of collecting good ideas. And the two of them together, I think, will give you a pretty big font of inspiration down the road when you need it. And beyond that, I want to thank my dear friends Whitney and John
00:41:43
Speaker
for their kindness and allowing me to be here. The book, Table Talk, is available in open access format through Whitney's Good Offices. We were able to get it released so that it could be out there. And we're probably going to do it in...
00:41:59
Speaker
Chinese language edition and a few romance languages too as a way of kind of an interesting cultural experiment to see to what extent these Insider kind of reflections have a bearing in another culture. So Look for down the road also free in an open access Excellent. Excellent. Well, thank you so much John for joining us this afternoon for the podcast. It's been wonderful to talk with you. Likewise. Thank you. Thanks