Every now and then I read a book that doesn’t so much change my mind as give language to something I’ve been observing for quite some time. John Sanders’ Embracing the Prodigals: Overcoming Authoritative Religion by Embodying Jesus’ Nurturing Grace was one of those books.
For the past several years I’ve found myself wondering why thoughtful, sincere people can look at the same world and come away with remarkably different conclusions. Politics is the obvious example, but I see the same thing in the Church. Christians read the same Scriptures, inspired by the same Jesus, and speak of love, justice, truth, and freedom, yet often seem to land in entirely different places.
It’s tempting to assume the problem is simply a lack of information. If people only knew what I know, surely they would come to the same conclusions.
Experience has convinced me otherwise.
Sanders offers a helpful framework for understanding why these differences run so deep.
At the heart of the book is the claim that many Christians inhabit one of two broad moral imaginations. He describes them as Authoritative and Nurturant. These are not simply political categories or personality types. They are different ways of imagining God, reading Scripture, understanding Jesus, approaching justice, valuing tradition, and engaging the world.
The Authoritative imagination tends to value order, certainty, obedience, hierarchy, and the preservation of what has been entrusted. God is often understood primarily as ruler, judge, lawgiver, or king. Justice is closely connected to accountability and maintaining right order. Scripture is approached as the clear authority by which questions are settled.
The Nurturant imagination begins somewhere else. It values relationship, compassion, healing, inclusion, and the flourishing of persons and communities. God is first encountered as loving parent, healer, and faithful companion. Justice is understood primarily as restoration. Scripture is read through the life and teachings of Jesus, with love becoming the primary lens through which difficult passages are interpreted.
Sanders is careful to point out that these are broad patterns rather than rigid categories. Most of us carry elements of both, but one imagination usually becomes our default way of making sense of the world. From there it quietly shapes how we understand politics, economics, social issues, the Church, and even our neighbours.
Sanders clearly advocates for the Nurturant vision. He argues that it more faithfully reflects the life and teaching of Jesus and points to research suggesting that people whose primary image of God is nurturant tend to experience healthier attachment, greater psychological well-being, and more satisfying relationships than those whose primary image of God is authoritative.
Whether one agrees with all of Sanders’ conclusions or not, I found his framework genuinely helpful. It provided language for patterns I had already begun noticing in conversations with friends, in the Church, and in our wider culture.
The book also brought to mind Jonathan Haidt’s work in The Righteous Mind. Haidt argues that our deepest disagreements are often not about intelligence but about moral intuition. We instinctively notice different moral concerns. One person immediately sees threats to order, loyalty, or tradition. Another immediately notices suffering, exclusion, or injustice. We aren’t merely arguing about different conclusions; we are responding to different realities as we perceive them.
Robert Kegan’s work in adult development adds another helpful layer. Kegan suggests that maturity is not simply accumulating new information but expanding our capacity to make meaning. As we grow, assumptions that once unconsciously shaped us gradually become visible. We become capable of holding greater complexity, recognizing our own blind spots, and considering possibilities that simply weren’t available to us before.
Reading Sanders, Haidt, and Kegan together has reinforced something I’ve been slowly learning over the years.
We can’t see what we can’t see.
That simple phrase has become a reminder of my own limitations. Many of our disagreements begin long before we ever exchange arguments. We notice different things. We tell different stories about what we notice. We often imagine God in very different ways, and those images quietly shape how we understand almost everything else.
It’s little wonder, then, that we sometimes feel as though we’re talking past one another.
That realization has changed the questions I ask.
Instead of immediately wondering how someone could possibly believe what they believe, I now find myself wondering what they are seeing that I am not.
A friend, Tyrel, taught me that more effectively than any book.
Before I really knew him, I had quietly placed him into a category. He is politically conservative, deeply committed to martial arts, and someone I assumed I had figured out.
One afternoon I asked what had first drawn him to martial arts. I expected him to talk about discipline or competition. Instead, he talked about his wife and children.
He wanted to become the kind of man who could protect the people he loved. He spoke about responsibility and about stepping toward danger when someone vulnerable needed help.
Nothing about Tyrel changed during that conversation. The only thing that changed was me. For the first time, I understood a big part of the story from which he was living.
We still disagree about politics, but I could no longer dismiss him so easily because I had begun to understand something of the world he inhabited.
That, I think, is where Sanders’ book is at its most helpful.
It invites curiosity before condemnation.
That doesn’t mean every perspective is equally true or equally life-giving. They are not.
Sanders himself clearly believes the Nurturant vision more faithfully reflects the way of Jesus, and I find myself largely agreeing with him. The challenge, however, is that the moment I make that judgment, I face another temptation: to stop distinguishing between ideas and the people who hold them.
That is where our public conversations often begin to unravel.
We move from critiquing ideas to caricaturing people. We stop listening in order to understand and begin listening only long enough to prepare our rebuttal. Social media has only accelerated that habit. Every clever takedown earns applause from our own tribe while making genuine dialogue a little less likely.
Walls are much easier to build than bridges.
Yet if Sanders, Haidt, and Kegan are even partly right, contempt is a poor strategy for change. We cannot simply argue someone into seeing what they are not yet able to see. Shame rarely enlarges another person’s world. More often, it drives them deeper into the very story we are trying to challenge.
Love offers another way.
Love listens before it labels. It asks questions before it assumes. It seeks first to understand the story another person is living before evaluating the conclusions they have reached. That doesn’t require abandoning conviction. It does require humility.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of Sanders’ book.
Not that it resolves our disagreements, but that it helps us understand why they exist in the first place. And understanding is often where love begins.
If there is one invitation I took from Embracing the Prodigals, it is this: before assuming another person is irrational, malicious, or beyond hope, spend some time asking what they are seeing.
You may still disagree.
You may even conclude they are profoundly mistaken. But understanding another person’s story doesn’t weaken conviction. It simply makes it harder to stop loving them.
In a culture increasingly defined by fortified walls, that seems like a bridge worth building.
Sola Caritas,
𝞃Michael
