Abstract
Avoiding friction has become a culture-wide phenomenon in North America, where personal comfort is of paramount importance. Risk avoidance, social avoidance, and the avoidance of difference are all on the rise among young adults. Yet eliminating risk, discomfort, and difference from our lives has dangerous consequences. Not only does it impede learning, it makes human connection vastly more difficult, valorizing technologies like AI that enable us to work around inconvenient human relationships. The loss of “connective labor”–work where people recognize and affirm each other's mutual humanity–has devastating effects on human relationships, and it is disastrous for a community that takes following Christ's “hard” teachings seriously. This speech challenges entering students at Princeton Theological Seminary to resist the urge to “smooth” out the intellectual and social challenges that seminary presents. Instead, students are challenged to embrace the inevitable friction of “connective labor” as the work of ministry.
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