What have you learned about how sermons can actually sometimes help us navigate disagreement in faithful ways?

When I worked on my dissertation, which was on this topic, one of the things I was spending a lot of time thinking about was what preaching can actually do and not do, especially in times of conflict.

And I learned a lot about the process of conflict transformation, which tends to be focused less on the resolution of a conflict and more on the nature of the relationships we want to maintain with each other through a conflict.

So Instead of seeking some kind of final answer to the thing about which we are in conflict, conflict transformation wants to say, hey, the relationships that are being broken by this conflict are maybe even more important than finding an answer or finding coming to some kind of an agreement.

And this applies to all kinds of conflict from marital conflict or family conflict to social conflict to international conflicts.

And a lot of this, actually, what I was using comes out of the Mennonite tradition.

So speaking of ecumenical connections, the Mennonites have done a lot of good work on this.

Force.