Dear Friends,
I am so grateful for your signing up for Hope& Practice, the quarterly newsletter of Hope& Consulting. I look forward to using this space to share practical ideas, inspiration, and updates on projects relating to faith and civic collaboration for common good.
This summer, I’m sharing a foundational practice of mine: attention to detail. What I mean is not meticulousness - although that’s also worthwhile. Instead, I mean the practice of careful attention to people and communities such that their nuances and complexities come into view.
American author Marilynne Robinson characterizes attention to detail as a spiritual posture and places it in opposition to another stance: contempt. As Robinson explained:
“Contempt imposes; grace discovers. Contempt generalizes; grace is charmed by haunting particularities. Contempt traps; grace frees.”
I like to keep Robinson’s account close at hand, particularly in this moment of cultural polarization with all of its flattening pressures.
Attention to detail is one antidote to toxic polarization and can even help us find something new in one another.
In hope,
Rachel
Recent Projects
Religious landscapes to aid outreach. For many civic organizations, faith partnerships are an aspirational goal - an idea heartly embraced in theory but difficult to launch. I’ve been helping folks get started on their faith outreach plans by mapping their regional and state religious landscapes. This process helps narrow context gaps between faith and civic leaders, generates prospects for new relationships, and - of course - generates lots of inspiring and provocative details.
