November 2, 2026
Relationships and Reconcilation
I read two newspaper articles yesterday that spoke to me beautifully about relationships and reconciliation. The first was from John Lorinc in The Toronto Star, who was brave enough to say what a lot of other people should have said awhile ago, which is that municipal leaders in Toronto need to finally begin to work together to turn down the heat from a local conflict that ostensibly began with the war in Gaza, but has since become its own thing entirely, and is setting a terrible precedent for how Torontonians get along with neighbours we might disagree with. (It does not help when candidates use such conflicts for political leverage.)
He writes: As they move beyond a divisive election, our political leaders, on both sides, have to find ways to communicate the critical work of de-escalating and re-establishing mutual trust. I don’t mean everyone has to agree on everything. But the city’s elected officials should be going out of their way to brainstorm ideas for repairing severed community relationships. As those who’ve gone through tough negotiations know, you don’t get to an agreement by fixating first on the most complex elements, drawing red lines, or lobbing accusations. Rather, you look for small wins at the margins and leverage those to build momentum.
The second was an opinion piece in The New York Times from United Methodist Minister Lydia Sohn who mourns that as we’re losing our religion, the real loss might be the language of religion, which provides so much wisdom as to how we can relate to one another, and try to understand each other across divides. The specific example she uses is the idea of “grace.”
She writes: What has replaced religious language for moral guidance? Professors Grenoble and Whaley observed that smaller languages tend to become displaced by those with greater political, economic and social power. The language of law and public justice — accountability, rights, reparation — has become the dominant framework through which many of us structure our relationships. What is fair? What am I owed? What are others responsible for?
The rise of neoliberalism in the late 20th century, and with it a growing familiarity with the logic of the marketplace, has also shaped how we relate to others. Scholars have described this as the “economization” of the social. The language of investment and return, cost and benefit, what one gives and what one is owed threatens to overtake private domains like our marriages, friendships and the schoolyard. It is little wonder, then, that “grace” has fallen out of our everyday vocabulary.
Grace, by definition, interrupts the logic of exchange. It is a gift freely given rather than earned or traded. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the language of the law and the marketplace, it is insufficient to the task of capturing how we seek to treat and be treated by others.
I hope you’ll read both pieces. (They’re both gift-linked, so you should be able to.) I found both to so be generous, and generative.
