Good Conversation (with my mom)

My mother across a table, a sparkle in her eye, is a portent of good things. Bent across the breakfast nook table, over a cheese egg quesadilla in our favourite hipster coffee shop, jostling with a cappuccino down a train track… the many permutations of this image in my mind represent the beginning of something more satisfying than the food inevitably involved: a good conversation.

One of the unique things about my mother was the way she always made me feel like my thoughts were worth listening to, engaging with, improving upon. From the time I was very little, I was not merely a child, but a conversation partner, a fellow discoverer of the world and investigator of its riches. Graciousness and honour were a high value at our dinner table; teaching my siblings and me to listen, disagree, and debate humanely was the constant struggle of my mother’s life. She was always teaching us to be good conversation partners: to have something worth saying, to say it well, to listen well, to ask good questions.

And so when she sits across from me, with a sparkle in her eye, I know that something good is coming.

I recently sent my advisor a full draft of my Phd. The process of editing the full draft got me to thinking about how a PhD is the culmination of a immense entanglement of many conversations. Conversations with my advisor and my colleagues, certainly, but best bits were born on long walks in the University Parks with my mother, over cups of coffee with friends, at the dinner table with my brother, late night arguments with myself. And then there’s the mysterious conversation with the hundreds of sources and books and authors with which I engaged.

I think of theology as a conversation which spans centuries, a long tradition of asking "What is God like? How do we live together? What is the meaning of life?" At its best, academic study is learning to join in on those conversations, learning the etiquette, the right way to ask questions, to listen, to evaluate, to have something worth saying. And this is a lesson I learned far before I flew across the sea to Scotland, and even before I drove across Death Valley to my undergraduate degree in California. I learned the art of conversation around my dinner table, where my parents asked us questions, taught us to ask questions, and they tried as best as they could to help us honour each other by listening, arguing, and thinking well.

So when I think of my Phd, it is not the fruit of some personal brilliance (ha!!), but the culmination of many conversations, and hopefully the beginning of more...

A good conversation is about the joy of discovering, enjoying, clarifying truth together. It is about discerning what is true, wise, trustworthy. It involves trying many points of view on for size, about entering into the mind of another, comparing it with your own, broadening your horizons. It involves communion, vulnerability, the fear and elation of being seen, understood, and known. A good conversation with a friend is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and most essential gifts.

And when I look at the world, I see that we are losing the practice and the joy of good conversation. And in losing it, we lose both the wisdom that comes from listening, and the joy that comes from connection over conversation. We are lonelier and more foolish for it. And I want to do something about that.

So this year, I’ve chosen conversations as the theme for my podcast and Patreon.

Each week on my podcast, I will host a conversation with people I admire, enjoy, and whose brains I have long desired to pick. Some are old friends, some are new friends, some are scholars whose work I have enjoyed at a distance, some are people whose perspective I crave. I hope that as you listen, you consider yourself a part of the conversation, and that it inspires you to join in the conversation— with a friend over a cup of tea, in the comments on instagram, through writing an essay in response. I hope these episodes will bring wisdom and a sense of connection. That they will be islands of tranquility and insight in the madness of 2020.

And as my first guest, I’ll chat with the person who taught me to converse: The Sally Mama.

We talked about education as an induction into conversation. About Christ as the conversation partner. About the importance of honouring the voice of others.

It is a little taste of those many times sitting across a table from mama, with a sparkle in her eye. I hope you’ll listen in this week and in the episodes to follow. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

(it is a conversation after all).

This episode’s conversation partner…

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Sally Clarkson (known to me as “Mom”)

Sally Clarkson is a best-selling author, world renowned speaker, and beloved figure who has dedicated her life to supporting and inspiring countless women to live into the story God has for them to tell. She hosts a weekly podcast "At Home With Sally" where she invites you into her home, thoughts, and life to share her candid wisdom and winsome discipleship. The podcast reaches women around the world and now has over twelve million downloads.

Sally has been married to her husband Clay for almost forty years and together they founded and run Whole Heart Ministries an international ministry seeking to support families in raising faithful, healthy, and loving children, in an increasingly difficult culture. Sally has four children, Sarah, Joel, Nathan, and Joy, each exceeding in their own fields as academics, authors, actors, musicians, filmmakers, and speakers.

Sally lives between the Mountains of Colorado and the rolling fields of England and can usually be found with a cup of tea in her hands.

Awaking Wonder: Opening Your Child's Heart to the Beauty of Learning

By Clarkson, Sally

Buy on Amazon

The InkletsWant to join a weekly discussion group and supporting Speaking with Joy?

After a fulfilling summer book club of Revelations of Divine Love, I decided I wanted to institute a more regular reading group. Thus, the Inklets. This is a smaller group of people dedicated to reading and talking together, and who are keen to help me finish out this Phd journey. Each week , I will post a reading, a mini-secret podcast on that reading, a short essay about it, and discussion questions. The readings will always be small, and available somewhere for free online. My conversational goal with these posts is threefold: First, to introduce you to some of the historic conversations about goodness, truth, and beauty. Second, to make you feel confident in joining that conversation yourself. And finally, to invite you into conversations with each other, to try on ideas, to see things in new ways, to disagree when you must, but most of all to enjoy, to learn together, and to be a small online outpost of literary companionship.

Here is a list of the readings so far (in no particular order!):

Learning in Wartime by CS Lewis

The Five Ways by Thomas Aquinas

Harlem by Langston Hughes

Rook in Rainy Weather by Sylvia Plath

Excerpts from After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

Excerpts from Life of Saint Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa

Ethics of Elfland by Chesterton

The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Why I'm Not Going to Buy a Computer (and selected poems) by Wendell Berry

If by Rudyard Kipling

What Man Has Made of Man by Wordsworth