Thank you to the entire Media Impact Funders team for this amazing event, and thank you for Nicholas for being in conversation with me this afternoon. Nicholas, you have a new film coming out called Leap of Faith. Folks in this room may or may not be aware that they have probably seen one of your films before. It's called Won't You Be My Neighbor, and it was the Fred Rogers documentary. Yeah.
So this new project, Pace has been proud to be a supporter, a very modest financial supporter, a very major reputational capital supporter of this film. Nicholas, why did you make this film? And specifically, why did you make a film about faith? You know, it's interesting because I don't even know if I have a really good answer to that question. And maybe I will by September.
I think part of it is this making a film is an act of faith. Right? You spend years toiling away over a film and you have no idea what's going to happen when you release it into the world. But you believe that there is something within it, some germ that matters, that you can see and that you hope at least someone else will see as well. be some communication.
And it's not just that temporal question. It's, I have an idea in my head that I can't force you to feel. I can just ask you to be present for it.
And film is a medium where that kind of synchronicity is possible. And I think also we talk about faith in a way that's so narrow, right? We talk about people of faith, people of reason. And I think that does a pretty wild injustice to both sides of that ledger.
People of faith. faith tend to work with a lot of reason. And people of reason, I think, tend to exercise a lot of faith. We talk about faith with a capital F, which we can think of as being creedal or being Christian or Hindu.
We can think of faith as being related to religion institutionally. But faith is what we choose to believe in in our world. And that can be as simple as having faith in the person next to us, in our families. And it can be as complicated as Haruka.
reminded us as having faith in our country and its institutions and norms. And so I think to make a film about faith right now and to center it within Christianity, which even though we hear all these words about how it's declining, still remains the vast, you know, the largest plurality of people in this country, seemed appropriate. And to ask ourselves whether those ideas, which are bigger than us, whether we can accept difference that lies beneath those big ideas.
Are there, is there Is there a hierarchy of ideas where those big ones allow us to tolerate difference that can at times feel insurmountable? The tagline for this event is Media Philanthropy to Bridge a Divided World. And as my colleague Amy, who is here, would say, each one of those words is its own universe to explore.
And so I want to break down the various components of that tagline by asking you how you understand them and what you learned about them through the course of making this film. So first, I want to dig into the word bridge. And at Pace, we often hear people say, well, of course I want to build a bridge because then it will be easier for you to get to where I am, right? And it seems to me that we think a lot about bridging and about media, for that matter, as something that helps people think, believe, understand, become educated in a certain way that we want them to. And less as a tool to help understand and know someone or know something, regardless of what that does or does not inspire people to do.
And so I'm curious, what does bridging mean to you? And what did you learn about bridge building through the course of this film? I mean, you said it all so eloquently. So I, what can I add? I, there is a kind of in-betweenness.
that we all encounter in our lives. How do we live in between? And I think right now, it often feels like a place that doesn't have a center of gravity that we're being pulled to say we have to identify as one thing or another.
And I think bridge building is about creating space for in-betweenness. This was a very hard film for me. It's a film that, you know, like everything in Christianity right now, seems to founder on questions of sexuality, even though there are many other questions that are of equal importance or maybe even greater importance that affect lives. But sexuality seems to be this place where, within Christianity, things founder the Methodist Church split just recently. And I think there's a question, it seems there's a binary, they stand on a line, they choose one, yes, or they choose no, would I officiate a same-sex wedding?
What does it mean to hold that difference between them? Is that possible, is that wise? Is that fair? What does it mean to express belonging across that divide?
And what is the emotional bridge that's required and what is a bridge too far? I think those are the questions that this film asks and what I think has been beautiful is that the answers continually surprised me and continue to surprise me. There's something that happens when you hold that space without expectation of it disappearing. it creates the space for possibility that you couldn't see before. And it's certainly possibility that I couldn't see before at the beginning of the film.
And it's certainly possibility that even at the end of the film, the pastors couldn't see. Now, a year later, I'm going back to Grand Rapids next week, and there are changes and evolutions and relationships that I could not have foreseen, and that if you had asked me to promise you two, three years ago when we began this process, I would have said absolutely not. not.
But that's the beauty of holding space over time. And I think that's what bridge building is about. If we know the answer, if it's that you have to come to me or I have to come to you, then we're not creating space for something that's truly new.
The next words I want to dive into are divided world. What statement do you hope this film makes at this moment in time? We may be more divided than ever, that's I think sort of a common cliche or statement, but we're less neatly divided than we realize.
I think if we look at those 12 pastors, I think none of us would get right how they divide on all the questions that they were asked. And the lack of neatness is a source of opportunity, because it means that there are... gradations that allow us to look for also umbrellas.
And I think we are very divided, but I think there is a yearning that I feel every time I talk to people about this film, and every time I talk to people about Won't You Be My Neighbor for how can we do it differently? There's got to be something different because this feels awful. And I think that is a very, very powerful force and one we shouldn't underestimate. Let's dive into the word media next. One of the reasons that Pace...
supported this film is because we think that there are a lot of dominant narratives and dominant portrayals in media and culture that at best misunderstand or misrepresent faith and at worst actually manipulate and weaponize it. What do you think media and culture get wrong in how they talk about and showcase faith? what it means to people, what it means to society.
Yeah, I think there is just a huge amount of smugness in both directions around faith. You know, a smug look from people that say, oh, I left that behind years ago, he'll get there, you know. Or a smug look from people of faith saying, you know, I know where you'll be, you know. I'm not sure that's a really helpful conversation.
I think a more interesting conversation is, you have faith in something in your life, I have faith in something in my life. Why is what's important to you important to me? to you and why is what's important to me important to me?
And maybe in sharing those stories with each other, we discover something that is of shared importance that we can build on. I think that's the essence of all the work that everyone does in this room. But I think to showcase it in this kind of very vulnerable way that these pastors do allows us to recover the idea of faith. as a source of ballast in difficult times, rather than something that is a source of division or a source of othering. That makes me think of an article I read a couple of years ago.
I forget the author. It was in, I believe it was Washington Post magazine, and it was titled something to the effect of how religion can actually save democracy. And one of the quotes in there that I'll never forget, it said, the whole premise of faith is humility. And that's so much of what our democracy needs right now.
And the quote said, the whole purpose of faith is to be able to say, I'm right. I know I'm right. I could be wrong. And you, who believe different than me, you are wrong.
I know you're wrong, but you could be right. Isn't that what faith requires of us? And isn't that in some ways what citizenship requires of us as well?
Absolutely. I mean, faith requires doubt, right? It's not faith if it is a testable certainty, right?
It's just not. It's faith requires doubt. Faith requires the possibility of rupture.
Faith requires the possibility of discord, right? But we have faith that if we experience that... There may be something on the other side of that too, right? There may be a risk of rupture because we have faith that there is a kind of repair that we can do afterwards. And I think that's where we sort of stand at the water's edge too often.
So afraid of rupture at this point that we prefer to put ourselves in places where we can never be hurt. And there is something extraordinary, as one of the pastors says in this movie, about experiencing love from someone that you thought could not love you and whom you thought was unlovable. And I think that is a very powerful thing. And I think that is the essence of what we think about when we think about democracy, right?
We have faith in a country that we can go through rupture and we can do the repair And we've lost that faith because we haven't done a lot of it recently, you know, we haven't done We've done a lot of rupture, and then we've walked away from it because it's just been too painful. So how do we go through the rupture into repair? And that doesn't mean that everyone can just say what they want, right?
These 12 pastors are incredibly careful in how they articulate themselves, and they still hurt each other, right? So it's not about saying, don't be careful. It's about saying, how do we find that vulnerability that we're willing to express in ourselves, find it in each other? and through that build something more beautiful, more perfect.
Going back to the theme of love, we're at a philanthropy conference. Philanthropy means love of humankind. It's also the last word that I want to interrogate with you. Okay, permission to say the hard thing that people in this room might not want to hear.
But when we think about philanthropy, what is it about the... business model and the flow of resources that risks perpetuating rupture, that risks perpetuating not creating the space that you're talking about. What is it about our work that makes your work and this type of repair harder?
So you all know your work much better than I do, so I don't want to, I can't really say, oh, well, if only you, you know, did this, and I hate it when people say that about movies. Well, if only, you know, the character, you know. It's just that simple. Exactly, exactly. I do think that what I learned through this film and what I see just all around us is...
A retrenchment into things that feel safe. And what I hope we can do is find possibility and explore things that don't feel safe together, right? Confident that...
amount of love that we share together will allow us to get through that difficulty and to something that's better. When it comes to film, you know, it's like, oh well let's finance a film that's already successful. Or let's finance a topic where we already know the audience. Or let's cover a topic where we can be absolutely sure we're not offending anyone or we're only offending the people we want to offend.
And I think... There is something beautiful about reaching out and grabbing the third rail of something and saying, no, let's dive in, right? Let's not reduce Japanese internment to a paragraph and a half in a history textbook, but explore the complexity and difficulty and contradictions inherent in it.
And I think that that's where philanthropy shines, because philanthropists have the opportunity to take risks that the rest of us don't often get a chance to take in our day-to-day lives, because, you know... We have a three-month-old daughter at home who's wondering where her dad is, you know, and I admire that, and when I see philanthropists take risks and fail, I feel heartened, and I feel like, well, then I can do that too. I can join that, and so rather than, I guess what I would say is I hope that philanthropists can lead in that space rather than waiting for individuals to lead in that space and to follow close behind them because To shine the searchlights that you have out into the wilderness and say, hey, check it out, is just one of the greatest gifts. And there is so much to discover in that sort of liminal space that can feel unsafe.
So like Caitlin and Ayanna before us, they only gave us 20 minutes. So I also don't have time for audience questions. But I want... people to, I want you to leave people hanging and I want people to be able to talk with you at the reception after.
I hope you have a receiving line of people waiting to ask you questions. But I want to end with this question. You, you are a brilliant creator. You are a gift. You also happen to come from a particularly artistic family and you are on the board of Silk Road.
And so what I want to ask you as we conclude our time together and we welcome Silk Road back, I want to ask you about some of the themes that we've been talking about today. Art, media, film, science, power, dignity, hope, faith, music. How would you tie that all together for us?
What themes or foundations should we take away from our time together today that also are a reflection of the work that you're trying to do? Look at what endures. You go back thousands of years, there are no countries that endure, currencies, certainly no companies that endure. Art endures. Music endures, faith endures, science endures, and all of those things require philanthropy in the present because no one else can work on that kind of a time horizon to say, what are we leaving behind, not in five years, not in 50 years, but in 500 years and in 1,000 years.
And we can't. We cannot know, and that is the gift of faith, we cannot know that the work we do today will be that work. But we can know that we are surrounded by an army of people who are trying, and that some of that work will endure, and will inspire someone to look to the future.
look back 2,000 years later and say, hey, maybe I can do something different with my life. The work that these three musicians brought to us earlier, Lullaby by Nassim Khorosani, More Perfect by Kaoru Watanabe, are examples of people creating art and playing with art and playing across instruments and across cultures to create art. something new that they hope will endure. And it's to do that fearlessly, knowing that we will get hurt and may not succeed, right, to do that intergenerational work that creates some possibility that someone out here will hear something and think something different. Brian Eno talked about art as a way of synchronizing our emotions, right, synchronizing our feelings, right. I think that is what endures those things that synchronize us and I think faith is like that too.
and so I'm grateful to be with you all today, and I'm grateful that you do the work that you do because you create what does endure, and because I forgot the names of the last two pieces, I'm going to look them up on my phone. We're going to close with Marta Guillarque, which is arranged by our wonderful cellist, Karen Uzunian, and Farika, which was composed by Maeve Gilchrist, our beautiful harpist, so I'm so grateful to be here and share this film with you, Leap of Faith film, if you want updates on it and happy to talk about it. I hope that there are many more films and many more. Pieces and musicians like this that come out of the work that you do. I'm grateful.
Thank you