Kelly James Clark Interview Published on: 23, May 2024

I was initially inclined towards philosophical questions because I was influenced by Christian philosophers who thought (and I agreed at the time) that they had proved that there is a God and that Jesus is God’s Son. I went into philosophy to prove that what I believed and only what I believed was true. While I would become skeptical of such proofs (and the arrogance behind my belief that only I and those who believed like myself were rational), I maintained an interest in philosophically understanding religion in general and Christianity in particular.

I became increasingly disaffected with the power of proof in philosophical matters; I was not happy, though. I had really wanted to prove that I was right and that everyone who disagreed with me was wrong. My dissertation director, Alvin Plantinga, through friendship and power of thought, directed me in a more anti-argument direction. I think here of a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson: “This World is not conclusion.” My Roman Catholic professors and friends at Notre Dame, the home of my PhD, led me away from my Protestant pretension—I simply could no longer think that God didn’t love Roman Catholics. Finally, my friendship with Stewart Shapiro, a brilliant Jewish philosopher, moved me to think about Christian intolerance, on the one hand, and the virtue and value of tolerance, on the other. Another pivotal moment—when I turned fifty I grew increasingly disaffected with abstract academic philosophy and decided to work harder on public philosophy. I will add one more pivotal “moment”—I because increasingly fascinated by the writing skills of non-philosophers such Annie Dillard, T. S. Eliot, and Emily Dickinson and determined to pay way more attention to my prose writing.

That book was my first foray into public philosophy. I invited five Muslims, five Christian, five Jews to write on liberty, tolerance and religious diversity from their own faith perspectives. Most Western defenses of these topics are Western, liberal, Enlightenment, which are held in suspicion by conservative religious believers (which constitute the vast majority of the world). If we want religious believers to take the side of tolerance, we need to persuade them from within their own traditions. I secured two former Presidents—Jimmy Carter (USA) and Abdurrahman Wahid (Indonesia)—and the rest were academics or public intellectuals. While I think favorable views of liberty, tolerance and religious diversity are on the increase among religious believers around the world, there is still an extraordinary amount of religious division and persecution around the world (perhaps most significantly in China where 1-2 million Muslims are being “re-educated” in internment camps). By the way, I think the violence that most of us ascribe to religion are due to more primal motivations such as fear of danger to ourself, our kin and our tribe (so violence is typically motivated by squabbles of food, land, injustice, etc, not religion).

I have taught and lectured at Christian colleges, Roman Catholic universities, secular universities, formerly Communist universities (in the Ukraine, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union), and currently Communist universities. I determined after several trips to conferences in China to actively listen and learn about Chinese thought from Confucius to Communism. I learned, the hard way, that exporting my own views without listening respectfully to the views of others is not the way of flourishing in conversation with those from diverse backgrounds. I developed my Golden Rule of Cross-Cultural Conversation: “Listen unto others as you would have them listen unto you.” I often begin talks in “hostile contexts” (I was, for example, the first non-Muslim to speak at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, the most influential university in the Islamic world for the past 1,000 years) with confessions of my own fears and biases, usually by telling a story in which my own Islamophobia reared its ugly head. Self-deprecation and self-confession are usually taken well.

Here’s a pivotal experience that most of us have but most of us ignore: when you wake up in the middle of the night, surrounded by darkness, feeling ambiguity and even some evil, and thinking about our most precious beliefs (about God, or Jesus, or the Prophet, or the afterlife, or freedom, or democracy, or Republicanism, or….) and wonder: could what I believe really be true? After all, you might think, most of the people most of the time have believed things quite different from me. Ever have that experience? In When Faith Is Not Enough I tried to encourage religious believers to honestly face rather than repress their deepest doubts. Why? The human condition—our intellectual equipment is limited (we are not gods). I feel about our intellectual equipment the way T. S. Eliot wrote about his writing abilities, “with shabby equipment always deteriorating.” And the world is, to be sure, ambiguous, sometimes light and sometimes dark. It took me a long time to move from attempting to prove my faith to coming to grips with my own doubts to thinking of how to do philosophy in the face of uncertainty (with shabby equipment always deteriorating).

My best Muslim friend, Enis, asked me to join in the development of the philosophy program at Turkey’s newest university. I have long been working to build bridges between Christianity and Islam, and teaching at IHU provided me with a very unique bridge-building opportunity. I’m not a Muslim and IHU is a clearly Muslim university. But I feel no compulsion to dissuade Muslims of their beliefs (conservative Christian philosophers find it difficult not to advocate for Jesus, and many secular philosophers are quite “evangelistic” about their atheism or agnosticism). I am typically asked to teach contemporary Western philosophy and philosophers, so much of what I teach has no obvious religious connection. I always try to get my students to think more deeply of their own tradition within the prism of contemporary philosophy ideas and tools. How do I get Muslims thinking about critical reflection on their religion: I raise problems from within my own Christian tradition, admit that I’m not expert in Islam, and then ask if they find similar issues within Islam. I think it worth noting the tremendous influence of Western anti-theists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, on young Muslims (young Muslims are increasingly likely to identify as atheists or agnostics); I try to help my students cultivate the skills to work their way through the issues such anti-theists raise.

I think philosophy has had a massive influence on how we think ethically. Western thinkers, for example, have defenders of liberty, and most of us Westerners today almost supremely value liberty (and have developed a liberal democracy around that commitment). Chinese philosophers, on the other hand, are considerably more communal and seldom speak of liberty, and most Chinese are more inclined toward familial, communal and even authoritarian values. I think that classical Western virtues—wisdom (prudence), righteousness (justice), moderation (temperance), and courage (fortitude)—as developed by the Greeks and refined and extended by our Judeo-Christian roots continue to inform our understanding of a good person and a good citizen. Finally, Americans often display a curious mixture of ethical principles as universal commands (rooted first in Divine Command Theory and later, during the Enlightenment, in reason) and as revisable (due to the influence of American pragmatists like William James and John Dewey).

I think you cannot underestimate the power of fear when it comes to relating to people with other beliefs, values and practices. Our fears are stoked by all of the bad news we read- or hear for example, Muslims (they are violent and want to take over the world) or the “invasion” of Mexicans (they are lazy yet (ironically) are coming to take our jobs). Fear closes door, loads weapons, drops bombs. In all of my projects with Muslims-Christians-Jews, I’ve had to work, not always successfully, to overcome fear-based Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.

In my own community, I try to build cross-cultural relationships one person at a time. As I write in my book, God may so love the world, but we love one person at a time. I encourage people to leave their homes and their communities (composed of people who are a lot like themselves) and walk down the street to the black family, or the Latino family, or the Muslim family and ask them over for a cup of coffee or even a meal. I encouraging taking that first courageous, bridge-building step. Love your neighbor, you might say.

When I’m working with larger groups, I always encourage gathering first over a meal and talking about anything but religion (or how nice our church really is or how good everyone is down deep). Talk about the weather, them Cubbies, and your kids (and ask them about their kids and hobbies). I try to get people to see people from different cultures as just plain old human beings. When you’ve built up some trust, then you can ask about their religious beliefs. And when you ask, LISTEN. Christians are especially bad listeners, unduly eager to share their beliefs (evangelize) without attending to the interest of their listeners.

I’ve directed a lot of writing workshops all over the world, and one thing I repeatedly hear is, “I am waiting for the muse to speak to me before I start writing.” Maybe I’m a cynic but the muse seems to seldom speak to me. I tell every aspiring write to stop waiting on the muse. Instead, I recommend the aspiring writer to discipline themselves to set and keep a regular writing time. Suppose my time is, say, 9-11am every day of the week. I sit in my favorite chair, in a quiet room, with the laptop propped up on my lapdesk. I turn off the internet and my phone and all music. And I start by reading what I wrote the day before and fixing up the prose or the argument or the story. And then I try to keep the goal I’ve set for each day of writing—two pages per day, for example. I may delete everything I wrote the previous day, but I seldom start a day looking at a blank page on my computer. I hate blank pages on my computer; I need to work with something. When I get stuck, I take a walk or a bike ride (with no music playing) or a class on a stationary bike and let my mind go blank. The muse speaks when my brain is empty and unfocused.

I will say just one more thing: what is the one thing you want to say in your book or article or paragraph? Clarify, cherish and cling to that one thing, and let that one thing guide the structure of your book, article, and paragraph. I just read a paper with no discernible thesis, which had a paragraph with five unrelated sentences. The following paragraph said, “As I claimed in the previous paragraph…” But the author had made five very different and not clearly related claims so I had no idea what the author was referring to!

When I was teaching at a Christian college, the Religion Department was in one corner and the Philosophy Department at the opposite corner of a building. At their shared corner, someone placed a sign pointing to the Religion Department which said: “Unquestioned answers,” and a sign pointing to the Philosophy Department which said: “Unanswered questions.” While there is a little caricature in the signs (some of my Philosophy colleagues could be just as dogmatic as some theologians), there is also a little truth in the signs. Philosophy takes little for granted, while theology can take a sacred text or a theological tradition for granted. Neither is better, just different (although I temperamentally favor my own discipline). Historically, philosophers were also often theologians and vice versa, so the boundaries can be permeable. I explore theological topics more philosophically (for example, in my free God and the Problems of Love, I wrote a chapter on divine love and hell in which I reject the doctrine of hell on philosophical grounds; I didn’t even attempt to square my views with, for example, the Christian scriptures).

I think every academic should follow their own heart, so I won’t advise on their interests. However, if they should have bridge-building interests, then I’d encourage them to seek out contexts shaped by differences and listen, sit on their hands, close their mouths, and listen. Philosophers, and this might come as a surprise, are not the best listeners. And they are trained to argue and to seek holes in the arguments of others. Sometimes, for the sake of compassion, they need to stifle their training. But I think that’s no problem because I think philosophy should become more communal and less combative. We should be willing to help anyone work out their own philosophy, their own search for truth, instead of continually asserting our own views. Philosophy should be more about our joint search for truth and less about winning.

Philosophers Who Believe contains spiritual autobiographies of contemporary philosophers. I have been deeply influenced by the philosopher William James who claimed that philosophy is more an expression of a person’s character than reflection on pure reason. James wrote: “who touches this book touches a man.” So I was eager to see what we could learn about the person as much as their philosophical positions. In fact, I thought we could learn about their philosophical positions by learning about the person. And I was right.

I think building bridges across differences is one of the central challenges of our world. We find deep and rancorous divides between, for example, Republican-Democrat, Muslim-Christian, Sunni-Shia, Israel-Palestine. People think those on the other side are not just wrong but also irrational, immoral, and even crazy. How can we bridge such deep divides? It turns out that diverse groups of people who do things together—sing, knit, build houses—and focus on their shared task rather than their differences are more likely to begin to treat the other as a human being worthy of respect. In such situations, people find they are a lot like those they disagree with—they want a better life for their children, a raise, to live in peace, etc.—and maybe can even learn to listen to one another share their differences. Some people build houses together, I get Muslims, Christians and Jews involved in international academic projects on philosophy, science and religion.

The biggest threat facing philosophy and higher education is the loss of soul in universities. University is becoming increasingly job-training instead of getting a broad, liberal arts education—education for the soul. Departments in all of the humanities are shrinking dramatically, some disappearing completely. In a former university of mine, they’ve dropped Classics, Art History and German (and many more); at the same time, they’ve constructed a $10million building for Business. Future students may become better profit makers or better engineers, but they won’t be informed and enriched by the true, the good and the beautiful.

My main aim with this book is distribution not profit or prestige. So, I’m selling the e-book for just $2.99 and the paperback for $7.99. If I had gone with a publisher, the e-book would have been, say, $15.99 and the paperback $29.99 (or more). I want the book to be easily accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. Cause the world, for sure, needs more love.

I have published more than 30 books previously but I’ve never self-published. Since publishers take care of the marketing, I’ve done little marketing myself. So I did a google search on self-marketing and AllAuthor was highly recommended. I am so far very pleased with AllAuthor but I’m still finding my way around.