Amy Uelmen, a lecturer at Georgetown University, was one of those in attendance. Uelmen, who would join Fordham Law School in 2001 as director of the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work, said she knew something big was afoot at the time.

“There was this sense of, how do we carry forward this thirst for integrity in our personal lives and our professional lives? I had the impression that there was a seed of something new,” she said.

“If you work for the poor or the homeless, it’s obvious in some ways how Catholic values dovetail with that, but if you’re working for large companies or in a large firm setting, it’s not so obvious. So, I think there was an opening to go to these areas that are less clear, and in some ways, a little bit more difficult to thread out the connections.”

A Reunion for Scholars

Uelmen will rejoin many of the attendees of that 1998 conference on Thursday, as the Institute marks the anniversary of it and a similar conference in 1997, at Religious Lawyering at Twenty, a two-day event sponsored by Fordham Law at the Lincoln Center campus. She will join the Honorable David Shaheed, retired Superior Court judge and associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, for a panel, “Humanizing Legal Education.”

On Friday, Fordham Law professor Russell G. Pearce, will lead a panel discussion, “Religious Lawyering at Twenty: In conversation with the next generation.” Pearce, who is also the Edward and Marilyn Bellet Chair in Legal Ethics, Morality, and Religion, was instrumental in organizing the original conferences.

Uelmen said that while Pearce had taken Tom Shaffer’s 1981 treatise “On Being a Christian and a Lawyer” and applied it to the tenets of Jewish Law, one of the noteworthy developments to come out of the 1998 conference was the involvement of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers, which had formed just two years earlier. One of the founders, University of Wisconsin Law School professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes, will be on the panel with Pearce.

When it comes to the past, she said she was excited to honor Howard Lesnick, the Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Lesnick, who retired last year, wrote core texts such as Religion in Legal Thought and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Moral Stake in Education, (BookSurge, 2009).

“We’re going to celebrate how Howard brought his insight into the implications for teaching pedagogical practice and helped students become more human, basically,” she said.

Looking Ahead to the Future

The conference will not only be a retrospective; Uelmen said she’s hopeful that the conferences’ panels, celebrations, and workshops will also highlight the work of scholars who are just getting started. Their input is particularly important, she said, because they’re working in an environment that is very different from 1998. In fact, Uelmen returned to Fordham in 2016 to co-teach a workshop on having difficult conversations.

“We’ve spent, in many ways, the last 20 years becoming increasingly politically polarized, which makes it difficult to meet each other, hear each other, and figure out how to exchange stories and ideas,” she said.

“It’s a wonderful thing to get together in person, and make some personal connections and figure out how we can bring ahead a really humanized approach to having difficult conversations where we might substantially disagree on important questions.”

As part of Ignatian Week, on Nov. 1 Fordham Law students learned techniques designed to promote civility and reduce instances of talking past each other.

“Dialogue and the Difficult Questions,” a workshop held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, was conducted by Amy Uelmen, lecturer at Georgetown University Law Center and founder of Fordham Law’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work, and Charles Camosy, Ph.D., associate professor of theology at Fordham.

Camosy said he feels strongly about pro-life issues and animal rights, but said it is his goal to be in solidarity with those with whom he disagrees. He cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who says that the positions we hold on the most controversial, polarizing issues are not often based on evidence and argument.

Instead, most of us hold a particular position because that’s the position of our “team,” or social group.

“Because it’s based on teams, it naturally results in a binary,” said Camosy. “There are the righteous, who are on our team, and there are the heathens, who are on the other team. That dynamic, and not actually engaging with other people’s arguments, is what is foundational, and drives polarization.”

He said many people derive their identity more from being in opposition to the other “team” than from identifying with their own group.

“This cuts us off from our ability to listen,” he said. “Our identity is so invested in being against the other, that [it]produces the tendency to come up with caricatures and straw men.”

Uelmen said she was motivated to address the subject by the tears of her friends in her own religious community. During the 2004 presidential election, they tried to engage each other but were torn by the fact that some members felt the others were literally going to hell because of their political choices.

The presenters offered a five-step practice for starting and maintaining conversations that are difficult, in order to reach a point of peace and acceptance of the fact that understanding is not the same thing as agreement. Participants were instructed to engage one another about a controversial topic, and to:

—Approach the conversation from the perspective of basic respect, in the spirit of Pope Francis’ suggestion that “We remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other.”
—Unplug from social media and stay focused on person-to-person interaction.
—Give the person on the other side an “out,” by using phrases like “maybe I don’t understand” or “maybe I need more information.” That way you don’t box anyone into a corner.
—If you learn something new during your conversation, express your gratitude.

One student participant wondered what one should do when a person is not interested in meeting you halfway in any fashion. Camosy suggested that you decide ahead of time that you’re not going to try to “win” the debate. You can even inform the other person that you just want to understand what they think and why they think it.

“It does take a bit of discipline to say ‘I’m not in this to win the conversation,’” he said, “’[but rather]to listen to somebody, take my shoes off, and understand their experience.’”

Hear what students had to say about healing the nation’s political divide:

Amy Uelmen knows a thing or two about balancing the demands of a law career with faith, family and friends.

Before joining the Fordham School of Law in 2001 as director of the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work, Uelmen worked primarily in product liability and commercial litigation. So difficult was it to get away from working 11 hour days, she turned her experience into a paper, “The Evils of ‘Elasticity’—Reflections on the Rhetoric of Professionalism and the Part-Time Paradox in Large Firm Practice” (Fordham Urban Law Journal, 2005).

It’s one of the many topics that fall within the bailiwick of both Uelmen’s personal research and that of the institute.

While the institute addresses how faiths of all stripes inform lawyers’ decisions, Uelmen has drawn from her involvement with the Focolare—one of the relatively new spiritual movements in the Catholic Church—to talk about issues that confront Catholics. They include hot-button topics such as abortion and the death penalty, she said. But in many ways, she sees that the day-to-day issues are more difficult for those who take their faith seriously.

“When you see that work is neither your god nor your identity, what then comes into the picture is a different way of thinking about how your life should be ordered,” she said. “There needs to be time for relationships and prayer and exercise, just to lead a healthy existence, and also to pay attention to your family and social commitments. This is a tough one, because in many firms there’s a system in place that treats lawyers as mechanized billing machines.”

This is not to say that “culture war” issues do not come up at all in practice, she said. But she believes there are many more instances by which Catholic teaching can shape a student’s ethical outlook as a whole.

“My own work experience has brought me to challenge students to ask themselves not just, ‘What kind of lawyer am I going to be?’ or, ‘Am I going to follow the rules?’ but, ‘What kind of person do I want to be?’ How that question is answered has consequences,” she said. “The work that we’re doing at the institute speaks to the idea that religious values can often be a resource for people in answering that question.”

Together with her co-author and the founder of the institute Fordham law professor Russell Pearce, in “Religious Lawyering in a Liberal Democracy,” (Case Western Reserve Law Review, 2004) and “Religious Lawyering’s Second Wave,” (Journal of Law & Religion, 2005-2006), Uelmen argues that lawyers have an obligation to be morally responsible, and religious values can be a resource to help lawyers fulfill this obligation.

“It’s a live wire discussion, but we think that the ‘religious lawyering’ conversation, as it’s dubbed, is making some headway in helping people to see that we can re-imagine professional life,’” she said.

Uelmen is not afraid to tackle touchy issues, either. Informed by Focolare spirituality’s efforts to draw connections between faith and everyday life, and to build bridges among people with different perspectives, she has written extensively on ways in which unity can be achieved, even for divisive issues such as abortion. In “‘It’s Hard Work’—Reflections on Conscience and Citizenship in the Catholic Tradition” (Journal of Catholic Legal Studies, 2008), Uelmen compares the Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics (2004) with the recent document issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (2007).

She critiques the “Serious Catholics” guide for its failure to capture the Catholic tradition’s nuanced analysis of the connection between moral principles and their practical application in the political sphere. In contrast, she said, the bishops’ recent guide balances the need to acknowledge real evils with a nuanced approach to how principles play out in real life.

The goal is to use dialogue to truly honor a richly varied Catholic tradition. In her Catholic Social Thought survey course, Uelmen said her students have managed to have civil and productive conversations even where they disagree about difficult issues such as abortion.

“I think there are very few people who are really ‘pro-abortion.’ Often, those who are setting out the pro-choice argument are deeply concerned with practical and economic questions that people who are struggling with unwanted pregnancies face, she said.

“On the other hand, those who articulate the pro-life perspective remind us that principles are important, and that the law can serve as a vehicle for expressing those values and educating society to what is right. Both dimensions are crucial. But what often happens is that the two sides talk past each other.”

Think of the two perspectives as tools to take on a hiking expedition, she said.

“You need a compass, otherwise you risk losing your sense of direction. But you also need a topographical map, because even if the compass points you in a certain direction, you need to know if that path might end in an impasse due to a rockslide.

“One way to move beyond polarization is to acknowledge that we need both the compass and the map,” she continued. “We need each other, because both perspectives are necessary to get us safely to our goal.”

As for the future, Uelmen is exploring how the relationships of love and gift in the Trinity might serve as a social model which can inform legal theory. Following her essay, “Toward a Trinitarian Theory of Products Liability” (Symposium: Catholic Social Thought and the Law, 2004), she is now considering how this model might shed light on formulating a legal “duty to rescue”—the legal obligation to come to the aid of a stranger in need.

“Most people agree that there is moral duty, especially when the rescue doesn’t put you at risk. I believe that the current lack of a common law legal duty is grounded in an overly individualistic notion of freedom,” she said. “Grounded in reflections on Trinitarian theology, I’m working on how to re-imagine the concept of freedom so as to include deep bonds of responsibility toward each other.”