AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast

In Faith-Filled Pursuit of Better Politics with Nichole Flores

This is the second in our series on faith and politics leading up to the 2024 presidential election here in the United States. Our guest is Dr. Nichole Flores, one of the most exciting young theologians around. Nichole is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, and completed her doctoral study in theological ethics at Boston College. It was tricky to decide what to talk to her about because her work covers so many topics: Her research in practical ethics addresses issues of democracy, migration, family, gender, economics, race and ethnicity, and ecology. She talked with host Mike Jordan Laskey about her background and topics like polarization, faith and politics within the various Hispanic communities in the US, and how we might try to seek out spaces in our daily lives that are not just echo chambers of our own views. It was a wide-ranging discussion and it’s fascinating to see how Nichole brings her intellectual interests together with the very practical day-to-day stuff of family and community living. Dr. Nichole Flores: https://religiousstudies.as.virginia.edu/nichole-m-flores Nichole’s writing at America Magazine: https://www.americamagazine.org/voices/nichole-m-flores AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. www.jesuits.org/ www.beajesuit.org/ twitter.com/jesuitnews facebook.com/Jesuits instagram.com/wearethejesuits youtube.com/societyofjesus www.jesuitmedialab.org/

Duration:: 45m
Broadcast on:: 09 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) - From the Jesuit Media Lab, this is AMDG. I'm Mike Jordan-Lasky. Today is the second in our series on faith and politics, leading up to the 2024 presidential election here in the US. My guest today is Dr. Nicole Flores, one of the most exciting young theologians around. I've admired her work for a long time, and it was great to welcome her into our Washington DC studio recently. Nicole is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, and she did her doctoral work in theological ethics at Boston College. It was tricky to decide what to talk to her about, because her work covers so many topics. She's done research and practical ethics around issues of democracy, migration, family, gender, economics, race and ethnicity, and ecology. We talked a bit about her background, and then we got into topics like polarization and faith and politics within the various Hispanic communities in the US. We talked about how we might try to seek out spaces in our daily lives that are not just echo chambers of our own views. It was a wide ranging discussion, and I love how Nicole brings her intellectual interests together with the very practical day-to-day stuff of family and community living. Thanks for joining us. (gentle music) - Well, Dr. Nicole Flores, welcome to AMDG, in person here at our studio in Washington, DC. Thanks so much for taking the time. How are you doing? - I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me, and it's really great to be in studio. - Yeah, well, we're excited to do it live. It doesn't happen all too often, and I'm also excited to meet you in person, because I filed your work for a long time and seen you on the internet, and it's always nice to, well, yeah, turn that into a real connection. - Yeah, move beyond the parasocial relationship to the IRL in real life relationship. - And you were here in DC, 'cause you were on a panel discussion at Georgetown's Catholic Social Teaching Initiative last night with some other really esteemed panelists kind of talking about the election and faith in public life. So we're gonna do that here for our audience, and get to riff on some of those themes as part of our pre-election coverage here on AMDG. Which is, you know, talking about religion and politics, they always say is, employee company is risky, but we're willing, 'cause we think it's important, and you've kind of made your whole career out of that, so. - Yes. - I'm sure you're used to just sitting in the tensions. - Yeah, you just jump right in, you give 'em a bear hug. - Right. So let's maybe just start by telling folks a little bit about yourself and your own background and story. - Well, I'm originally from Denver, Colorado, and I know in this audio medium people can't see me, but I am Mexican-American, and I was raised in a Mexican-American Catholic church and a lot of my experience in formation in that environment really informs how I approach my work, which of course, as a moral theologian, is very interested in the broad, deep, rich tradition of, a theological tradition of our church, but is really grounded in the experiences of the people in my community, in my community, that. And whether that is the experience of my grandmother, Guadalupe, which has really informs my interest in thinking about who is la vie de guadalupe for people in the United States, whether that's the experience of my family members who are working class today and really struggling with how to maintain a life fully in the world, but also to be faithful in their lives. A lot of those experiences really inform how I approach my work in the academy, which I love. I'm definitely called to it. I love doing it. I love teaching. But yeah, other than that, I went to public schools in Denver, Colorado, including one for international studies, a magnet school in international studies for high school. And then I did a bachelor's in politics at Smith College and then earned an MDiv, a master of divinity at Yale Divinity School, and then my PhD in theological ethics at Boston College, which was my first foray into Jesuit education. But once I arrived there, I knew that it was a place that I had always been longing to be in terms of bringing together my passion for education, my passion for my faith, but also my passion for justice and a common life where everybody can thrive. It all comes together so beautifully in Jesuit institutions and Jesuit education. So it's actually really an honor to be here for that reason. - Oh, yeah, no, so happy to have you. And you were at a Jesuit institution last night. You were studied at BC, so you were describing here on the podcast, like that's most of our audience, people who kind of get that space. But you're teaching at a big prestigious public university with people from all sorts of backgrounds, religious backgrounds, political backgrounds in the classroom and you're talking about faith stuff. You're talking about politics again, in that setting. I'm just curious for you, like what kind of being in with students and what are you noticing? What are they interested in? What is that like they're kind of received? What do they know about Catholic Church? What do they know about faith in politics? Is there some suspicion that those things shouldn't necessarily go together? Yeah, I'm just curious for you. What are you like as teaching today in that world? What are you seeing? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, the first thing I should say is that the thing that best prepared me for teaching about theology in a public institution was being educated at Boston College, where so much of the mission of education there is to prepare us both to be women and men for others, but also to be people who are able to meet others where they are in the world and really care for people in their wholeness, their whole selves. So at UVA, I apply those principles except within a really broad community of people. So in my classes, even if they're tiny, even if they're 20 people, but certainly in my big 200 person lecture, I get people from all walks of life, students from all walks of life, some of them are Catholic, but often very different kinds of Catholics, but I'm teaching in Virginia, so I have a lot of evangelical Christians of various backgrounds in my classroom. Over last semester, I had a student who is family, they're refugees from Afghanistan, who is a Muslim Republican from Nova. And we just had these tremendously exciting dialogues about our common interests, about our politics, about how we live life together with all of the complex dynamics of what we experience in our society. So actually, what I really hear back for my students at UVA, you know, I'm a millennial, I'm an elder millennial as they call us, I teach Gen Z, so I don't pretend that people don't know how to Google who I am, so I just go ahead and tell them, even though I'm at a public institution, I'm Catholic, you can easily find that out about me, and I'm just gonna lay it on the table, but I'm gonna put that on the table because I wanna know, I don't want you to become me, I wanna know about who you are and what really matters to you, as a human, as a person who is Jewish, who is Muslim, who is evangelical, who is a nun, an ONE, and to really have us think together, bring our experiences and our common interest in learning and in being good citizens to bear on this work, and I hear back from students that that's really, in general, an inviting environment, if not intimidating a little bit, you know, to be in there with people who are so different from one's self. - Sure, and again, that feels to me, like it's almost a kind of taboo thing to be able to do, is to say like we, in some of those spaces, it's just like best to not, we don't wanna offend someone, you know, if I like, you know, claim something as like a religious truth, you know, am I gonna have space for someone else who doesn't agree? And so I think sometimes there's like that dialogue around like our universities, including at UVA, certainly about like what you're not allowed to say or you can't be your whole self here, but it doesn't sound like you've found that to be limiting, but you've been able to kind of create that environment for folks to bring their whole self to the table. - Yeah, yeah, and I think that there's a distinction in my mind between pluralism by subtraction. So we're just going to pretend that there's nothing different about us, that we don't disagree on things and try to make a space apolitical. Well, and I don't think that actually really resonates with who we are as humans, which is political. And in my world, you know, calling something political isn't bad or dirty. It is, you know, oh, this is, it's reality that we come together to try to think and discern together how we live in a society. And that is not something that needs to be, you know, all about, you know, internet politics means and mean-spiritedness and divisiveness. That is how we cultivate a thriving society. And so I've tried to kind of model, you know, another kind of pluralism, one that is really invested in that, which is particular and doesn't fear it, but seeks rather to understand it. - Because, you know, not just a classroom, this panel you were on last night is a bunch of Catholics but with very different views on things. Again, you don't even have to go outside the church to find that. Certainly you can turn on the presidential debate we had recently, this feel like, ooh, there's like a lot of just kind of ugliness out there. The situation could feel bleak to use a word we were using, you're using before we started recording. It's not like a place of a lot of hope like on the surface anyway right now. So I'm curious about like for you in your academic work and then also just in your life, what are some of the ways that you can try to take some of that from the classroom where it's like, hey, we can kind of set up the stage here, create an environment where people do feel like to be part of a pluralistic community, they don't have to subtract, they can be who they are and have a healthy respect for others. What, is there a way that we can within our church or within like kind of broader society, you've seen like, okay, like maybe these are some things we should be doing or here are some values that we can try to like let lead us in that direction because it certainly doesn't feel like a very kind of healthy world out there when it comes to our civic life. - Yeah, I think honestly Catholics, especially the, you know, those of us who have been formed both in Jesuit environments but also in other Catholic environments as well have a lot to offer if we bring the best of what our teaching gives us to our society that we know how to be not just in community but in communion with someone who is radically different than we are politically. If you think that you're in your parish, there's no political difference. I encourage you, I invite you to strike up some conversations about the most pressing issues that we face today with those around you. I think that you would be really surprised, not just, oh, some people are Democrats or some people are Republicans but that there's a really wide range of views among those of us who have faith in the living God and who remember and draw together as the body of Christ every time we participate in the Eucharist. That is real. So taking that and knowing that I can love that person that I, you know, and I'm on social media and I feel like those environments kind of live, it's not that they don't impact the real world and don't have an effect on things. So speaking of the debate, we saw several moments where things that are happening in internet political discourse kind of broke through in kind of bewildering ways, especially to normy people who are, you know, just tuning in after a long shift, you know, where they're not spending their whole day on Twitter or X or, you know, the platform that so much of this happens on. But yeah, they're having a space or cultivating a space where we are able to have conversations about things that matter. I really do think that's within the wheelhouse of Catholicism but we also, it depends on us being able to acknowledge that difference and pluralism within our faith is actually a strength and not something to kind of iron out or try to kind of lop off from the church. Oh, somebody disagrees with me politically about this particular issue. I can't, they're not really Catholic. And that's an impulse that I see. And of course we've seen that, you know, I've seen that over the course of my lifetime but especially having the second Catholic president of the United States, there was a lot of impulse to say either, you know, on one hand, President Biden is, you know, kind of the platonic ideal of a Catholic in America. And that's not true, but also to say that he's not a Catholic and not a Catholic who strives for faithfulness is also not true at all. - Yeah, so we're coming into our parishes and into any of those discussions kind of formed also by these things that are outside and that like, whether it's the, you know, the memes we're encountering or those talking points or cable news kind of then influencing us and often having a bigger impact on us than our faith and then trying to kind of squeeze the faith into those places. And then again, as we're kind of being formed to be people who are combative or disengaged or uncomfortable with a difference of opinion, it feels like we're like this uphill climb to like build any of this communion kind of given the water we're swimming in today. - Yeah, yeah, it really does. And I think a part of that sense of appeal climb has led to people feeling like, you know, politics isn't for me. These slogans that people are talking about, not just during the debate, but you know, online or even on the on street corners, you know, maybe I don't think this is unique to Charlottesville or DC where we currently are, but we have a lot of people standing in a lot of street corners with signs of various kinds. One of my favorite ones is this gentleman who's probably in his 60s who has a sign that he holds up near UVA that says liberal professors suck. And I'm like, oh, thank you as I drive by every day because I am, you know, the joke being that I am, in fact, a professor who would, you know, maybe be more aligned with being liberal than not. But that kind of sense of slogan mirroring is something that often alienates. I think the intention is to build coalitions or to find kind of people who agree with oneself. And it can work in that way. But I think for a lot of people, especially for a lot of Catholics who are trying to live faithfully in public life and as citizens, it's really off-putting to feel like, you know, I just don't fit into this very simplistic view of what this means. And I think that's true on a variety of issues, whether it's immigration or climate change or abortion. There's a lot of, there's a lot of flattening of really complex realities that I think is highly and attractive to kind of just Catholics and the Pew, normy people who I talk to who are looking for a point of entry into political life. - Have you seen anything happening or maybe that you're involved in? It's outside of the classroom say that you're seeing, okay, this is maybe some move toward better politics. I do feel like a lot of it maybe is, we get so obsessed with these national level things and these high level dialogues and that like a lot of it maybe starts on maybe closer to home in neighborhood groups or PTAs or around local campaigns or even something like zoning reform about who can live in our neighborhood. Can we have a duplex in our single family house neighborhood as a hot topic in a neighborhood where I live? But things where we can have some impact and effects our neighbors are directly in front of us are just curious about like what are some of the things maybe you've seen that, okay, like this seems to be a good way to start trying to kind of till the soil so that more healthy politics can grow. - Yeah, I'm going to give a kind of a weird answer for someone who is involved in politics on not just national and, you know, common wealth level in Virginia, but you know, locally, you know, being very attentive to what I call land use Twitter for example, in Charlottesville, but one of the places I see such richness in terms of fostering a robust common life on the local level is at my local YMCA. I, it actually took me longer than it should have to join the local Y, but the person who really sold me on kind of taking the leap because I, so I'm a member of a boutique fitness studio as a many, you know, many Americans are these days and I was, you know, spending a lot of time there, but when I'm there, I feel like I'm with people who are kind of like-minded. They're similar economic backgrounds typically, politics. Actually, I find, oh, there's a little bit of difference, but not radical difference because we're all people who are kind of finding our way to a very specific experience of fitness and wellness and health that we can afford. The YMCA, if you're not familiar with the way that these institutions work, they're diverse in every way that you can think of, including very economically diverse. You, there's a way, there's a sliding scale membership fee there, at least at my why. There's people from every background, every walk of life working out together. I love to swim, which is one of my favorite things about this podcast coming on the podcast that has featured Katie Ledecky and Missy Franklin, but when I am swimming at our local Y, I'm in a pool with people of every body size, shape, color, you know, levels of experience. And it feels like a place where the range of human experiences is really on vibrant display, but in a way that does not promote fear around those differences, that you're there in that space, sharing the basketball court with people of different races, religions, backgrounds, is actually a space, no, we don't go out there and have policy discussion per se, but it's a way to begin being formed in a way where we do not react to difference, especially in our public life, as this kind of problem to be solved. It is something that is a gift to be cherished. And it's a gift that, you know, we also present us with both opportunities, but also genuine challenges about how we navigate difference in our society. But institutions like that do important working grounding us in the reality of the other, of the young person who is sharing this space with me, the elderly person, the person who has a different health experience than I have, and makes that very, very clear. - Yeah, listening to your reflection, it sort of reminds me though, like at the same time in this world, like Robert Putnam writes about, you know, bowling alone in like the degradation of our kind of communal life. And then when it's happening, it is sometimes so often we're picking those places, whether it's online or in real life where people are very like us and can kind of tailor our experiences and live in neighborhoods that are clearly like, set in a certain way or not. And so you kind of have to, I feel like, make an effort in some ways to like put ourselves in places where we could have those encounters, but like almost like a spiritual practice. And like, no, I guess I'm like realizing, hey, so much of my time is with folks just like me, like there are maybe there are some options, maybe it is like giving up one membership to something and looking for something else. But as like a part of a discipline in some ways of like being a human being in a world that doesn't look just like me. - Yeah, I like that framing. The other place, which is free, to see democracy fully alive is a splash park. - I thought you were gonna say library. - Oh, yes, a library counts too. But if you ever wanna see the future of democracy in our society, go to a splash park on a Saturday afternoon and you'll know everything you need to know. I'll just leave it at the end. - Yeah, a lot of your options involve people in relatively, you know, well bathing suit and other such a tire where you do, there's not much hidden, right? - Yeah, yeah. - So yeah, it's just kind of out there. Yes, no, we have visited many a splash park, certainly. So I love to, I know, so your first book, which came out a few years ago, it was called The Aesthetics of Solidarity, Early Day of Guadalupe and American Democracy. So you've done a lot of study and work and lived these kind of questions about kind of Latino American democracy and the way different Latino communities have interacted, how faith and public life can come together within those communities. And certainly as we're sitting here right now, a migration seems to be one of, if not the very top, one of the top issues in the presidential campaign and even how we talk about migrants has really kind of changed in the past few years, where it does feel like what's now like acceptable to say on like kind of all sides of the spectrum is kind of firmly outside of Catholic teaching on the dignity of migrants. Again, you would think, "Oh, this pro-immigrant democratic administration." Well, it's taken some pretty harsh anti-immigrant stances and that seems to be better for them politically, right? To do that, which is just kind of horrifying. So curious for you as someone who kind of grew up as the child of immigrants and has studied and worked within these communities, written about them, lived them, what are some things on your mind as this election is unfolding, especially like vis-a-vis Latino communities engagement and how so many of our migrant brothers and sisters seem to be being used as pawns on the chess board of our politics as Pope Francis has said. - Yeah, well, so much comes to mind and you're framing even of the issue because there are so many dimensions of it. There's of course, for Catholics, trying to assess what is happening in our politics relative to what our faith teaches. And I would be remiss if I didn't say that. The church actually has some really challenging but clear teachings about migration that states do have sovereignty, they have right and even responsibility to regulate and maintain safe borders, but those rights are all relative to the unassailable dignity of human beings. And that's especially when we are having conversations about migrants in truly vulnerable situations that the dignity, using language that dignifies, that honors the image of God present in every single person at the border is challenging, but it is as clear as day in our teaching. It's not ambiguous. And I think that somebody might push back against me and say, well, immigration policy is a matter of political prudential judgment. That might be true. But also, this teaching, this principle of the dignity of every human life is the foundation of what we teach. Actually, I used to teach a class when I was on faculty at St. Anselm College where I would say, even a few, so I would always say human dignity is always the right answer. So if you're taking a test and you really don't know the answer to a question, just write down human dignity and I'll give you like a tenth of a week. - Partial credit. - Yeah, and I had a couple students take me up on that, but I hope that the sign that they took away was, no, I really, if I've forgotten human dignity, I've forgotten everything. So really to take that as a very important moment, but to connect that to what you're saying about my experience, I am the granddaughter of Roberto and Guadalupe Flores and who are both Mexican migrants, and so I have, my entire American experience has been one, has been the being the Mexican American granddaughter of migrants and their lives and experiences, had they not unfolded the way that they are. I wouldn't be in this country that I love. And actually, I feel like I stick out a little bit in professorial settings because I am so pro-USA to the extent that my children, when we were returning from a trip to Canada this summer, as we approached the border, my six and a half and almost three-year-old started chanting, "You essay, you essay." And the border guard thought it was hilarious, right? So I really do come from a place of profound love for the United States and respect for its institutions, especially for the constitution, but I have seen in the shift around positioning on the politics of migration that a lot of it is actually happening in Latino communities where people share the same story or similar stories as I have, where including my own family, you wanna politically diverse institution, sometimes you just need to look at a really big Catholic family and you have everything you need there. We have, you know, not just Democrats and Republicans, we have libertarians, we have, you know, people voting for Cornel West, you know, we have the whole range within our family. We're a very interesting group, but I also think it's important to highlight as kind of the final thing that I'll say on, at least on this question, that so much of our positioning, not just on the immigration, but on every issue, I think Catholics need to be aware of the way that the kinds of political conversations that happen on these things can form and possibly deform our approach to such things from the perspective of our faith and our morality. That's just because, you know, the party that maybe you prefer has signs that say mass deportation now or, you know, the party you may prefer saying, oh, well, we need to, you know, height and border security as much as we possibly can, that those realities don't necessarily conform to the faith. They need to be interrogated in light of our church teaching on these issues. And I think if we do that, we'll realize that, A, they don't stand scrutiny, but B, that they form us, that these political slogans, they're not neutral. They're not just something we're hearing on the TV. They can really influence who we are becoming as humans in ways that are detrimental to, not just to our personal faith, but to the way that our faith impacts us around us. - There's been discussion in the past few election cycles of how Latino vote in different states is shifting one way or another. For me, it seems like maybe this is like a simplistic reduction that, oh, it's pretty clear that there's some very harsh anti-migrant sentiment coming from the right. And so communities of first, second, third generation who are citizens and voting would reject that and wholesale, which doesn't seem to have it. 'Cause again, like it can't just reduce the political participation of a whole, get a huge multi-valence community to like one particular issue. So have you seen that trend that's been talked about certainly a lot, is what's happening to the Latino vote, again, it was the big thing that might not even exist in that category, simply. But yeah, what have you learned or seen about some of the dynamics in shifts in those affiliations or behaviors over these last few years, especially? - Yeah, it's been really interesting to track because I think people who study Latino politics and those of us who study the intersection of Latino politics and religions, plural, so not just Catholicism, but also Pentecostalism and Protestant denominations more broadly, have been saying for a long time, for a very long time, Latinos are actually fairly socially conservative. Like this is not news, it shouldn't be news to anyone who has ever tried to persuade an abuela that they can wear like a sleeveless dress to mass, right? Like, you know, that this is not new, right? But so much of what has, I think there's that force, I should just highlight that. And you see that across different Latino communities and varying degrees, right? And I think that you are rightly gesturing to the fact that, you know, Latino communities, whether you're talking about Cubano's in Miami or Chicano's in Denver or Puerto Ricans in, you know, Hartford, Connecticut, these are different communities that have a sense of belonging to a larger Latino identity, but aren't identical in, you know, really in many ways at all, right? These are very different communities with very different concerns. But I also wanna highlight that the, what I think it's lost in our current discourse is that especially in the Southwest Western United States, there's a reason that Latinos were so closely associated with the Democratic coalition, especially early on, this was a part of the efforts to secure rights were more resonance with Democratic politics in the 1960s and 70s. So in Denver, Colorado, where I'm from originally, there were movements of Latinos who were trying to advocate for workers' rights, for cultural rights, for, you know, people talk about community relations with the police. Actually, the Chicano movement in the 1960s and 70s was really trying to address this issue and put it on the table due to an imbalance of power and an experience of being, you know, of not trusting the police, right? So those histories actually are really important to understanding why so many Latino communities in the United States had become allied with the Democratic coalition, even though there's these socially conservative beliefs. My dad, who, I don't know if anybody out there remembers Joe the plumber from the election, but we like to call my dad Randy the Sign Guy because he is a Catholic. He is from Nebraska originally, like, you know, Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz. They have that in common. But, you know, he's from a rural area. He's socially conservative, or at least was raised in a very socially conservative background. And one time I asked my dad, Dad, you seem conservative in all the ways that are important, at least socially, why don't you vote Republican? He was like, because I can't trust this coalition to honor me as a person who's not white, that I can't trust these leaders to really act in my best interests as a Mexican American man. And I think that some of that sense has been important for the way that Latinos have become associated with a democratic coalition. But I don't think that is, I think that some of that consensus is beginning to break apart. That more and more Latinos are saying, actually, what I think about, you know, these issues, you know, take, for example, abortion is more closely aligned with the Republican coalition. And I don't quite feel the same level of threat against my identity and maybe even my physical safety as maybe my parents felt in other generations. So I'm feeling more closely aligned there. Or you have people who have accumulated more wealth and who wanna say, well, actually, I feel better about Republican tax policies or economic policies. I don't need, you know, the same kind of resources from the government that I, you know, maybe my parents, you know, used or needed, but, you know, I don't need them. So why would anybody need them, right? Anyway, so that's a long answer to your question. But I do think that in order to assess where Latinos are in relation to party politics now, it's important to take account of both these socially conservative kind of, you know, social conservatism being in the water, really, but also a deep history of experience of colonization, a colonization, discrimination, and threat to not just livelihood, but even life experience by certain Latino communities that has kind of created this moment. - So as we're in the moment and you're kind of watching and participating, you're not teaching this year because you're working on a book project. - Yes. - And I do love to talk to authors when they're in the middle of kind of researching and writing is they're usually excited about it. You know, after a book comes out, it's like, I've been with this for so long and I'm sick of it. So I am curious, since you were telling me a little bit about it before, it sounded really interesting and also connected certainly to this conversation. So curious about, well, if you could tell us a little bit about what you're researching and then how kind of being writing and about this stuff, like in our current moment, is that, like, how has that been? Has that affected you as a scholar/human living in the world? - Yeah, yeah, well, it's so interesting because so many academic books, and what I'm writing right now is an academic book. It's a work of academic theology with a working title of a political theology of Advent. And I'm really interested in how Advent can be a resource for Catholics and even more broadly, Christians, thinking about how we interact with our common life in times that, as we mentioned earlier, are bleak, that can feel hopeless, that can feel like there's no resolution to these issues. We were just talking about migration. I think for so many people, it feels just hopeless, right? You know, especially for Catholics who wanna hold together and really value the dignity of migrants, especially vulnerable migrants, but also are concerned about rates of a lack of safety for an entire community based on the actions of migrants as an entire group, but some of the cartels and the kind of threats that have been made to the lives of those living on the border, for example. And I think my work really takes, you know, as its starting point, that it is hard to have hope in these circumstances, that it's hard to have hope for democracy, in particular, when we are living in these times of such profound and seemingly intractable polarization, for example. So what resources do we have as Christians for thinking about how to engage in politics? Which again, my starting point in my position around politics is that they are good, that they are a part of who we are. How do we engage in that political life? What sort of resources can help us to navigate circumstances that in reality really are bleak? They don't just feel bleak, they are bleak. I think also of gun violence, for example, that feels so hopeless for so many people. Can our children ever attend a school again without us worried that we'll never see them again every time they walk through a door? If you're a parent like me of littles out there, you know that that fear is real, or not even of high school students, even of college students. I work at the University of Virginia, where we did have three of our precious students murdered in gun violence that took place on our grounds, and it was devastating, it was devastating for all of us. So that really does feel hopeless. But our faith has so many resources that I think remain under explored for the kinds of ways they can help us to remain grounded in the reality that we're in. So we're not living in a fantasy world, but that help us to pursue, to get technical and eschatological horizon of hope that involves both action now in the world that we inhabit, but also acting with hope for the world that we know that God is creating even now, right? That lives in the, you know, both, well, I like to say (speaking in foreign language) like, you know, here and now, but also in the future. So I think that the goal of the work is to think, really is to use Advent as a theological and aesthetic template for articulating a approach to our common life as Catholics and as Christians that holds all that together. - Well, Advent 2024 will be starting just a few weeks after the presidential election. So maybe a season of healing could begin then as we hope for-- - Definitely a season of repentance. - The repentance, that's right. - If you shared a factually untrue meme, say three Hail Marys. - Right, exactly, yeah. But just, yeah, that chance that like you await the coming of Christ in so many different ways, including now, yes, and to redeem, but then also believing that the last day, you know, there's that sense of that communion and unity and shared life that we're made for that can, if that is our horizon, can God maybe inspire us to keep at it, even though it is bleak out there? Well, Dr. Nicole Flores, thank you so much for taking the time and for being here in studio is a great conversation with us to think about. - Oh, thank you so much for having me. (upbeat music) - AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. We're based in Washington, D.C. The show is edited by Marcus Bleach. Our theme music is by Kevin Lasky. The Jesuit Conference Communications Team is Marcus Bleach, Eric Clayton, Becky Sandalar, and me. 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