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Hosted by Princeton Theological Seminary President Jonathan Lee Walton, Expanding the Table gathers leading voices in history, theology, and public life to explore questions of faith, leadership, and justice.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 00:06
Welcome to Expanding the Table. A Princeton Theological Seminary series from the Office of the President. I'm Jonathan Lee Walton, the eighth president of the seminary, and at this table we gather leading voices in history, theology, and public life to explore questions of faith, leadership, and justice. Today we are delighted to welcome Dr. Suzanne Watts Henderson. The Senior Director of Faith and Health at Interfaith America. A proud graduate of Princeton Seminary, previously she was the Irwin Chair of Religious Studies and Dean of Belk Chapel at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. While it queens. Dr. Henderson worked closely with Interfaith America to foster cooperative religious pluralism on campus and beyond. Dr. Henderson, it is a delight to have you with us today.
Listen, I am curious, even thinking about your introduction, right? You're a scholar of religion, biblical scholar, dean of the chapel. How did you end up in this faith and health space?
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 01:17
Well, first let me say what a joy it is to be here with you, Jonathan, and to be back on campus at Princeton where I met my spouse and where I really gained such a rich theological rootedness in my own tradition. Well, when Ibu Patel, our founder and president, asked me to lead our faith and health work, I looked at him and said, well, Ibu, there's a little healing in the New Testament. My expertise is the New Testament. That's my through line. Is that good enough?
Yeah. I'm not someone who's trained in public health or in any kind of clinical practice. But I am trained in engaging religion and religious questions deeply. And what became patently clear during the pandemic, Jonathan, is that to neglect our religious diversity and our religious identities in broad social contexts around public health is really to miss a key asset to strengthen the well-being of everyone.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 02:19
So when you talk about a key asset, you're talking in terms of the spiritual lives, thinking about holistic human beings. Is this the approach?
Yeah.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 02:30
It is. It is.
I mean, think about public health today. I think folks would say public health in many ways like clinical health is in somewhat of a crisis moment. I was at a conference last summer with Atul Gawande who had just witnessed firsthand the impact of the slashing of USAID funds, for instance, on the African continent. And he said, look, we cannot minimize the devastation done by policy changes. He said, but the folks who are taking a wrecking approach to public health do not have plans to rebuild. And he said it's up to us as public health officials, public health leaders, thought leaders, to reckon with some of the gaps in our approach to public health. And I think from my conversations in the field, I'm a learner in the space of public health, but from my conversations with academic leaders, as well as folks who are at the policy level. They're increasingly recognizing that public health had become too much of a matter of statistics and data and population trends and in many ways like clinical health had begun really to factor out the human equation. I think we saw this in terms of the broad public response to many of the public health initiatives during the pandemic. Folks who said, for instance, well, we What, you're saying we can go to Walmart, but we can't gather as a worshiping community?
Right? You don't understand. That this is vital to our health. And I think even some of the research bears out the impact of the isolation that came from our very justifiable and understandable practices around keeping our distance.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 04:21
So you said that, you told Eboo that being a biblical scholar in the New Testament, kind of healing is the through line. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that in your conversations with public health officials, how you bring faith as this asset to the.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 04:38
Field. Right.
Well, mostly I continue to learn from them. I feel as if it's my role to come alongside them To find the folks, come alongside them and really support their work and build some skills around navigating religious diversity. I'll give an example of a great public health leader in eastern North Carolina. His name is David Tillman and he leads the School of Public Health at Campbell University out in Buies Creek. During the pandemic, he was called on as a public health leader to inform policy and to reach into communities. And he found himself increasingly in faith communities where there was great concern, for instance, about the coming vaccination numbers. Requirement and concern about the vaccination itself and invoking such language as it's a mark of the beast, right?
Well, David kind of coincidentally had came from a background in which that language was not foreign. And so rather than coming in as a public health authority and saying, you're crazy, That's just made up stuff. He listened.
Leaders from the community, including our moral leaders, including our faith community leaders, including people with lived experience, including public health officials and clinicians. We should come around tables and listen to one another and learn about the causes and the problems that lead to opioid addiction and learn importantly about what kind of interventions might be most impactful.
So I've learned from David to bring humility. To the conversation around public health and to do so in a way that really honors the particular identities and traditions of those who are part of the community.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 06:59
So it sounds like you bring your humility and you're being very humble when you say you walk alongside the public health leaders and you learn from them. But it sounds like the story from David, that it was his own religious literacy and understanding of the faith traditions that actually helped him as a public health official. Exactly. And so I was wondering in terms of how you're thinking about an interfaith America situation. Increasing the religious understanding and pluralistic understanding of a very diverse world. Faith diverse faith communities how's that work taking shape.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 07:34
So You've called me humble. This is not a humble ambition. We really want to move the needle significantly in the faith and health landscape. We really want, both on the public health front and on the clinical practice front, we want folks to normalize engaging religious diversity fruitfully to strengthen health outcomes, both at the individual level and at the societal level.
So that is not modest at all. We only want to change the world, Jonathan. One way that we're doing that is with the generous support of the John Taylor Templeton Foundation, we have a nationwide three-year project underway called Faith in Health Professions. What we are doing, because our organization historically has had strength on higher ed campuses, we are leveraging that strength and we are equipping faculty members and other leaders from campuses, not just to educate the next generation of health professionals across the health ecosystem, but to engage the community that they belong to in fruitful ways.
I mean, you know this. We're both academics.
So often campuses are siloed within their own ivy-covered walls, right? But we belong to communities, and we have lots of assets to share with them, not in a heavy-handed, do-it-our-way way, kind of spirit, but in a, how can we come alongside you in the community and listen and learn?
So we have right now 29 campuses that have received significant funding from us, another 30 or 40 that have been funded at smaller levels. Doing everything from equipping the next generation of nursing students to public health students to social work students, allied health, across all disciplines. Here's a couple things that are key about this work. As a religionist myself, I'm not that comfortable just saying to a nursing professor, go teach religious diversity.
So what we're doing is we're inviting folks to partner across campus, where there often are disciplinary silos. So we're having public health faculty work with religious studies faculty, we're having philosophy faculty work with pre-med faculty and everybody's happy because the nursing faculty, they knew that this was important, but they didn't quite know how to touch it.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 10:02
What do stories have to, how do stories play into this, right? I'm going back to your being a biblical scholar and thinking about One of this through line and one of the things that resonates often, they're the parables, they're the stories from our religious tradition, particularly so many about faith and healing. How do you incorporate those in the education of these religious professionals to kind of meet them where they are?
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 10:30
Absolutely. Part of the work with students has to do with engaging them in claiming their stories. And I think the faculty who are part of this program would say their students come alive at a different level than they have before in these pre-health classes.
So the stories of their own traditions, the ways in which their own lived experience connect with the stories of their own tradition. So there's that. There's I'm glad you mentioned storytelling, there's.. The importance of elevating the positive engagement of religious diversity in health spaces as a story to be told as part of our public narrative. I think the assumption has been, you know, religions over here, science is over here, you go to church for your spiritual well-being, you go to your doctor for your physical well-being, and yet we know at the individual and social level that That's just not true. And so helping people understand that engaging religion and spirituality in health care doesn't mean necessarily hopefully not, me, praying for you and converting you. It means listening to you. It means honoring you as who you are and sharing authentically out of my tradition.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 11:56
Now, We know. I mean, you hear that. Makes us feel good. And we know that we're living in very hyper-partisan, polarized, fractured times. Yes. When you're doing this heavy lifting, pushing this boulder up the hill of promoting diversity and religious pluralism, I was just wondering if you could even just speak to and address some of the challenges and how you continue to do the work anyway.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 12:25
I would love to. Our former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said, spoke a lot about social isolation and loneliness as an epidemic. And I think the research is pretty clear on the impact that isolation has on our polarized Setting right separation leads to objectification and dehumanization and we're seeing that in so many quarters. Interfaith Research is showing that people don't even want to work with people who have a different ideological bent.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 12:55
America. We create echo chambers within the social media that we surround ourselves with.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 13:06
At Interfaith America, we're a hopeful organization. We're an asset-based organization. We really believe that our diversity is a civic good. I'll- I'll distinguish between diversity and pluralism because diversity, we say, is kind of a demographic fact. And we know that we are increasingly diverse in terms of our worldviews or the categories that we would check on a survey box. - Pluralism is the fruitful engagement of diversity toward the common good. The fruitful engagement of that diversity toward the common good. And to your point, that's not easy and it is countercultural in this moment. We talk about kind of a three pillars or a three pronged approach to pluralism. And if you don't mind, I'll just walk through those. Please. And they're kind of basic verbs, but put together and put in practice, they can actually change our landscapes in our world. The first is respect. Starting with a basic respect For you as you.
Right? And in my tradition, that's the image of God.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 14:22
Mago Dei.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 14:23
Right, Mago Dei. Every major tradition, there is an innate respect for the sacred worth of humans and even for people who are not religious, the affirmation of the innate value of each and every human being. We go beyond respect, though, because respect could look like you stay in your corner and I'll stay in mine. We'll keep each other at arm's distance. And this is where it gets a little harder. The second word is relate. We got to connect. We got to connect. And we got to connect with folks who aren't just like us, don't just look like us, don't just believe like us, don't just act like us. And connect in a way that is meaningful. And when I say meaningful, gets at.
Some of... The most important things that make us who we are. Right.
So the research that our organization led a while ago now shows that even Two really meaningful conversations about religious identity, spiritual values. Anchor elements to who we are. Even two connections across difference. Forms and shapes us as folks who are eager to connect across difference.
So it actually doesn't take that much investment in relationship across difference. And then the third piece is cooperate.
So this means that Not that we ignore our... Or dismantle our differences. They're real and they're significant. And we think that they're valuable actually, but that we Find a shared goal. And pull together toward that goal. This is why I love doing interfaith work in the health space. It's clear what our goal is. Our goal is to improve health outcomes for individuals and for society.
So what is it about my tradition, my identity, that leads me into the care of others? And how can I bring that alongside someone of a very different Identity or tradition who similarly is motivated to care for.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 16:48
Others. So we have respect, relate, cooperate. And obviously in that cooperate ties to having a shared goal or a shared end. Are there any experiences or encounters that you could share where you saw people come across the varying social constructed boundaries of difference to help to work together to solve a particular health problem?
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 17:11
Only about a million. I've already mentioned the instance of David Tillman. One The point I didn't make about his work in Harnett County, North Carolina, was that they saw a year-over-year decrease of 70% in the hospitalizations and deaths related to the opioid crisis.
So that's a great story.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 17:35
So it sounds like that community, they were a little bit more monolithic as it relates to their religious faith tradition. No.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 17:44
Less so than you would think. Okay. There is actually a masjid in Fuquay Varina, which is not far. And so there were folks of all kinds of religious identity. And as you and I both know, within the Christian community, Umbrella, we have a lot of different Views and beliefs, right?
So lots of different kinds of flavors.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 18:05
Remember, I'm Baptist. First Baptist, second Baptist, third Baptist, fourth Baptist.
So yeah, those kind of, you know, in terms of, so I know, again, during your work during COVID and kind of in the post-COVID around vaccinations, love to hear some examples of people kind of coming together with respect, relating and cooperating.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 18:27
Let me share an example from a clinical setting. This is just fresh on my mind. This is an example to me of real moral courage. And leadership. On the part of someone who didn't know about our organization and our work. He's a clinician, the chief medical officer at a local children's hospital. Who is actually an active member of the congregation that my husband leads. And he had an experience with a child in ICU whose prognosis was not hopeful at all. But whose family was convinced for religious reasons that the child needed to be kept on life support. This introduced a lot of tension. Into the conversations between the family and the clinicians and the staff, the sense of distress that the providers felt worrying perhaps that they were doing more harm than good through the extreme interventions that they had introduced. The ethics committee met. As they do at hospitals and said this situation needs to end. Which of course sent the family into a tailspin. What I loved about the leader's response was that he was ill at ease. With the way in which the... The hospital system dealt with the family. And so he reached out for help. In what he wouldn't have named as applying the respect, relate, cooperate approach. Understanding the family not as barriers to health care, but as partners. Clinicians and providers certainly cared about the child, so did the family, right?
So it's a case in which, you know, things get messy and they're hard. And the respect, relate, cooperate triad of verbs doesn't make it neat and clean. But it's a way, it's an approach, it's a practice. In which the leader really decided that the team needed to be educated and equipped and skilled.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 21:01
You know our mission here at Princeton Theological Seminary. Preparing people for ministries marked by faith, scholarship, competency, compassion, and joy. I was wondering how you would think about theological education and helping to prepare leaders to work at this intersection of faith and health.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 21:23
- Jonathan, I would say there's never been a more opportune moment. For theological education to step into this work in a deliberate and purposeful way. If you think about it, 20% of our GDP And growing is health care. That means a lot of our population is somehow involved in caring for the well-being of others. We can assume that for many of those folks, they're motivated in part if not wholly, by their faith traditions and their faith identities. And I would say the clinicians I talked to say there was very little to nothing in their professional preparation or continuing education that equips them to address religious identity issues. Religious diversity. In a caregiving setting. Or in a public health setting. There's a big gap there.
So I think theological education in any tradition has great and exciting work to do. We've seen some of it already as a part of our Templeton grant funded projects. We have two seminaries that have already been a part of this work, building courses for students to engage religion and religious identity, not just in chaplaincy. I think that's conventionally where we would assume that theological education connects with health, but in ways of thinking about human well-being. There's a great professor at Hood Seminary down in Salisbury, North Carolina, who led in his D-Men coursework had all of his students write their capstone paper. They're all serving congregations spanning from South Carolina up to West Virginia. Had them write capstone papers about the role of faith communities in the public health landscape.
So they were looking at the history of it. Learning or recognizing that health and public health really are rooted in faith traditions.
So they're learning about that rootedness, but they're thinking practically and tangibly about how they as faith leaders in their communities can show up alongside public health officials and clinicians as collaborators. And so I think there's all kinds of opportunity in coursework. I think it's true that as you've done here at Princeton, so many places are beginning to think creatively about equipping folks who are already in the workforce, giving them space, helping them find their people and claiming their vocation more deeply and building some skills and some understanding into particularly around religious diversity and worldview diversity, to do just that.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 24:30
Is this... Which you just described. Is this a source of hope for you? It is.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 24:38
It is.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 24:40
And if you would imagine 10 years from now when you walk away from Interfaith America... What do you see?
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 24:49
I see the assumption across medical education, nursing education, theological education, the assumption that faith and health are partners. In the human equation of flourishing. I see curricular design that reflects that. I see maybe even more, hopefully, academic institutions being relevant partners in their communities, but to folks who are out in the world and are returning to academic institutions for further training. I see... The public narrative shifting to embrace the positive potential. Of faith and health.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 25:41
Dr. Suzanne Watts Henderson, thank you for your extraordinary theological imagination. Thank you for your practical application. And thank you for your inspiration to institutions like ours as we seek to Bridge the gap. Between faith and health in our professional worlds.
Suzanne Watts Henderson | 26:03
Jonathan, it's been a real privilege and joy to be with you today.
Jonathan Lee Walton | 26:07
And listen, thank you. Thank you for joining us at Expanding the Table. A Princeton Seminary series from the Office of the President. These conversations are one of the ways that we live into our mission, cultivating leaders shaped by faith, scholarship, Compassion. As well as opening our community to the world.
So on behalf of all of us here at Princeton Seminary, thank you for being part of this gathering. And until next time. May you continue to find ways to expand the table within your own communities. We appreciate you. One love.