My New Book: Learning to Disagree

Stories from my personal and professional life to help navigate a world awash in conflict

I have been working for the past three years on a new book, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. I am delighted to announce that it will be published by Zondervan in April 2024 and is now available for preorder. In fact, I think today’s post is the first official preorder announcement—so if you’re reading this, consider yourselves part of the inner circle.

Learning to Disagree seeks to help people disagree better. As I’ve noted in earlier posts of Some Assembly Required, we are not very good at disagreement: we view our adversaries not only as wrong but increasingly as evil, we resist notions of forgiveness, and we distrust institutions that try to mediate our disagreements.

Just this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted a new campaign by more than a dozen college presidents seeking to address growing free speech problems on their campuses. The Chronicle noted that although the campus leaders disagreed about the causes of the current challenges, they were united about what needs to happen in response:

Some are concerned about students and faculty members self-censoring. Others, like Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, are more wary of “right-wing power brokers that are trying to take freedom of expression away from teachers, professors, and libraries.”

Uniting them all, Roth said, is the idea that “you learn by finding ways of having good conversations with people who don’t agree with you. And that’s not so easy these days.”

Learning to Disagree won’t tell you what to believe, but it will change the way you engage with disagreement.

The book’s narrative flow follows the course of an academic year. Each chapter addresses a question for each month:

August: How Do We Learn Empathy? 
September: Can We Know What’s Fair?
October: What Happens When We Can’t Compromise? 
November: Can We Have Difficult Conversations? 
December: Can We See People Instead of Problems?
January: Can We Trust Faith?
February: Can Anything Be Neutral?
March: Where is the Line Between Wrong and Evil?
April: Is Forgiveness Possible?
May: Can We Be Friends?

The questions arise out of the curricular and extracurricular rhythms of my life. In the classroom, these questions are framed through cases and discussions from my courses in Criminal Law (which explores how and why we punish people who have done bad and sometimes horrible things) and Law and Religion (which tackles the constitutional framework for how we speak and act on the deepest questions of meaning and existence in a democratic society where not everyone shares our convictions).

The extracurricular parts of my life also affect how I come to see the issues in Learning to Disagree. As I like to remind my students, professors are people, too. Inevitably, my own experiences and idiosyncrasies make this book what it is. Yes, I teach students and write books. I also navigate complicated family dynamics, freak out in awkward social settings, and slip on blueberries.

The stories and vignettes are meant to complicate your assumptions, introduce arguments from “the other side,” and illustrate how people can recognize good faith disagreements without surrendering their most strongly held beliefs. This book is about holding in tension clarity and ambiguity, tolerance and judgment, confidence and uncertainty. It’s about what each of us confronts in our daily encounters with others who differ from us.

I’ll be sharing bits of the book in future posts, and it’s possible that parts of earlier posts have also made their way into the manuscript.

Preorder Now

You can now preorder Learning to Disagree on Amazon or wherever books are sold. In fact, if you have benefited from Reading Some Assembly required, the best way to support my work is to preorder your copy now (and encourage a friend to do the same). And as a bonus, you’ll also get the artistic insights of my friend and colleague John Hendrix, who is partnering with me to illustrate the book.