Proclaim Peace Bonus Episode // Part 1: Nealin Parker on When Conflict Comes to Your Doorstep

For this 3 part bonus mini series, hosts Jennifer Thomas and Patrick Mason are joined by Nealin Parker of Common Ground to reflect on recent tragic events affecting the Latter-day Saint community, including the death of President Nelson and a horrific attack on a local ward that resulted in multiple fatalities. As they process these heavy developments, they discuss the emotional toll on church members and the broader implications for peace. The episode serves as a heartfelt exploration of grief, community resilience, and the principles of the gospel that can guide us in difficult times. 

[00:02:19] Peacemaking in challenging times.

[00:06:00] Redemptive suffering and compassion.

[00:10:01] Conflict's enduring legacy in towns.

[00:12:00] Long shadow of violence.

[00:16:50] Gentleness as antidote to fear.

[00:20:33] Fear replaced by love.

[00:25:42] Community support in tragedy.

[00:28:39] Prayer and gratitude for peace.

TRANSCRIPT:

(00:03-00:05) Jennifer Thomas: Welcome to the Proclaim Peace Podcast. I'm Jennifer Thomas. (00:06-00:12) Patrick Mason: And I'm Patrick Mason. And this is the podcast where we apply principles of the gospel and read the Book of Mormon to become better peacemakers.

(00:15-00:35) Jennifer Thomas: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Proclaim Peace podcast, where we talk about the restored gospel has to teach us about becoming better peacemakers. I'm Jennifer Thomas, and I'm really grateful today to be able to hear to process some of the events that we have been experiencing over the last couple of weeks with my friend and co-host Patrick Mason. Patrick, how are you doing?

(00:35-02:19) Patrick Mason: I'm doing all right, Jen, and I'm grateful that you had the idea for us to do some episodes. We obviously finished our big mega season on the Book of Mormon, and dear listeners, we are working on season two. We hope to be able to release those episodes in early 2026. But in the meantime, so we're recording this in early October, and just a few days after President Nelson's death, and then also after the horrific attack on the Latter-day Saint ward on Sunday morning, in which four people were killed, and then the shooter, an attacker himself, was killed by the police. And so obviously it's been a heavy week, I think, for Latter-day Saints on top of what was already a heavy month after the Charlie Kirk shooting that elicited so many strong feelings, especially because it happened in Utah and all the kind of connections that people have to Utah Valley and things like that, on top of a heavy year. You know, I mean, it was just like, you know, layer upon layer upon layer. And so, so I was really grateful, Jen, that you had the idea, partly because when I was at the Faith Matters Restore conference last week, I literally had so many people come up to me and say, when are new episodes coming out? So that was nice. So thank you to all those who are listening and want more content. So again, season two is coming, but we wanted to do a few episodes to kind of think about and process everything that we've been going through as a community, and what does a peacemaking response look like in this moment?

(02:19-05:05) Jennifer Thomas: Yeah, this is exactly when the rubber meets the road, right? I think for both Patrick and I, we do this work in different arenas, but the last couple of weeks brought peacemaking work absolutely to our doorstep, right? Like, what kind of people are we going to be? And I just want to pause before we jump into this episode and say two things. I am so profoundly grateful for the doctrinal and theological support that we have been offered by our leaders in this really critical moment. I think both Patrick and I would never have done this podcast, even though this is what we do. We wouldn't have even conceptualized it if it hadn't been for the prophetic call of President Nelson back in 2023. invite us all to be peacemakers. I think for both of us that either sort of, I don't think it changed the trajectory of things, but it definitely gave us a little bit of rocket fuel and a lot of inspiration. So I just want to honor that and honor that with literally his last breath. If you are nearing the end of your life and you know you have one message left to give, that His message to all of us in the most extraordinarily timely moment was this reminder of seeing the humanity in one another and that as disciples of Jesus Christ, one of our primary responsibilities is to be peacemakers. And the second thing I just want to honor and express deep gratitude for was President Oaks' personal response the Monday after the tragedy in which I feel like he walked this beautiful line of discipleship, which he was willing and able to mourn with his own people, like acknowledged our deep pain and suffering. but immediately and gently redirected us back outward. That twice in that statement, he was like, we are not the only people that suffer. We have an obligation to sort of take what we're learning here and have it make us better people that are, I read it as a call to be better people, better able to engage with the world. That I could sit in my suffering or I could say, hey, what is this teaching me and what am I learning and how do I go out to kind of decrease suffering for other people? So as we put together this podcast, one of the things we didn't need to do was lay any theological foundations. Those have been laid amply by the leaders of our church. But that doesn't mean that our members in this moment don't need sort of tactical support. And so what we thought that we could best do is introduce you, and we'll do that over the course of three episodes, to some extraordinary leaders who are doing peacemaking work in difficult situations and can help us know how to act in this moment. Our spiritual leaders can help give us the big why, but these sort of professionals can give us the skills to take that big why and that deep discipleship and put it into action.

(05:06-05:16) Patrick Mason: precisely. And just before we introduce our guest for today, just last night, I was reading the memoir of John Lewis, the great civil rights icon.

(05:16-05:17) Jennifer Thomas: Good choice.

(05:17-07:04) Patrick Mason: And yeah, and it was so I've been inspired by his life for a long time and know a fair bit about him. But it was it was so interesting to dive into his memoir. And In particular, he had beautiful passages where he was talking about redemptive suffering. And this is something that Dr. King talked about all the time. It was at the heart of the civil rights movement. The idea that when you live in a world of conflict, and especially when you are working for justice, for peace, for the broader good, you will always come into conflict with the real world, a world of hate and enmity and even violence. And we can't always choose that. Of course, we wouldn't choose that, but it's just part and parcel of being in the world and doing the work. And what John Lewis talked about, what Dr. King always talked about is, and I think what our leaders with the scriptures talk about all the time, is what do we do with that suffering? What do we do with unearned suffering? Do we feed it into a cycle of recrimination and vengeance and further enmity and just double down on this cycle of hostility? Or do we turn that unearned suffering into something redemptive? And do we turn it into, just as you said that President Oaks invited us to, turn it into a kind of solidarity and empathy and compassion for others? not just for ourselves, not just turning inward about woe is me and how persecuted we are, but actually what does it mean to be human at this moment? What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? And how do I take my suffering, which is real, but use it as the fuel for greater compassion in the world?

(07:05-09:19) Jennifer Thomas: Okay, I love that. And I think that our Savior is exactly our best example in this. This was a person who voluntarily accepted just an unprecedented amount of suffering in a desire to sort of bring us all redemption. And so the best thing we can do is follow His path. Okay, well, with that, those beautiful words, thank you so much, Patrick, we'll go ahead and introduce our remarkable guest. Neelam Parker leads Common Ground USA as its inaugural executive director, and Common Ground is an organization dedicated to bridging conflict and divides in very particularly difficult situations. As a leader in identifying solutions to polarization and political violence in America, Naylin brings to this role at Common Ground decades of experience in senior domestic and international positions dealing with conflict, poverty, and social change. And I love that it's all those things, that conflict, poverty, and social change. Before joining Common Ground, she founded and co-directed a Bridging Divides initiative at Princeton University. She worked as the Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and she's also done work at really extraordinary organizations in leadership policy and program development with the Center of International Cooperation at NYU. the Carter Center, the International Foundation for Election Systems, and she's just done a lot of really extensive writing on American politics and the role of peacemakers in that work. So without further ado, we will bring this wonderful guest to you. Welcome, Naylin. Neelan, you have been such an extraordinary friend to MWAG and a good counselor for us as we have grown and tried to become better peacemakers. And one of the things that I'm hoping that we can start this conversation with today is you sharing with the people listening a little bit about your story and why you got into this work. Because I think many of us are relatively new peacemakers. We know why we feel like we've been called. But one of the things we find that's most helpful is for people to understand what draws their colleagues and co, the people that are joined with them in this effort to the work.

(09:19-11:29) Nealin Parker: Thank you. And again, I just want to say thank you so much for letting me be here in community and in conversation with you. I have so much respect. More than that, I draw a lot of inspiration from your work and your community. So it means a lot to be here in this moment. And thank you for that lovely and warm introduction. But I do think that resumes give you a kind of very thin sense of what it is that is the why we do this work. I'm I come from a sort of middle of nowhere, Appalachia, and but it's a civil war town, a town that had two Confederate generals that are from that town. And the long tail of conflict lives today in that town. So 150 years after the end of the Civil War, there are still conflicts that date back to that time and people still have paraphernalia and stories of their family members in that war. And so I don't think I knew it at the time growing up. But that, that kind of, that was underlying my thinking all the time. And then my father's from Chile, and I lived there as a little person at the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. And my family, just on family outings, would get caught up in political violence. We had to stay in the home of a family for six or seven hours while there was bombing going on outside. They bombed the house next to ours. And I became friends both with people who were connected to Pinochet and who had been tortured by his administration. And I loved them both. So I think there grew in me this powerful sense of the human piece that holds us all together and that what success looks like in our world is where the goodness of these sides can manifest and grow and flourish and we can be something better than we would be apart. And that's really driven the rest of my career, whether it's working overseas in countries recovering from war or back here in the United States.

(11:30-13:17) Patrick Mason: That's really helpful. We're recording this just a few days after the horrific attack where a man attacked the church in Michigan, the LDS congregation, while it was in services. I want to pick up on one of the phrases you just mentioned out of your own biography, the long tale of conflict. You know, in a lot of ways, Latter-day Saints live in the long shadow of violence. We still tell stories about the 19th century. All you have to say is Missouri, and Latter-day Saints can tell you stories. And there's always this sense, especially if you're outside of Utah and the Mormon corridor, of being a very small minority, oftentimes being misunderstood. having good personal relationships with your neighbors and coworkers, but always feeling like you're a little bit on the outside. And you see the kinds of conversations, you hear the things that the people say. And so while this particular act of violence was very localized, it seems it came out of a personal relationship and a personal animus that the attacker had, it felt familiar and personal to Latter-day Saints. across the country, probably around the world. And so given all of the experience that you've had with communities in conflict and individuals, you know, who are at some point in that long tail of conflict, either nearer or further from the act of violence itself, What would you say in this moment, especially for those of us who weren't in Michigan itself? It's one thing to talk to the people who are in the congregation. That might be a different conversation, right? But for all the rest of us who do feel acutely what happened in Michigan this weekend?

(13:18-15:27) Nealin Parker: Yeah, I do want to start by just recommending being gentle with ourselves and whether or not you are in Michigan or you are in a broader community, the thing that you described is a very normal human thing. It grows, I think, a little bit out of the blessing of our empathy and that we can connect with each other and to people even when we haven't had a direct experience. But like so many things, that empathy plays lots of roles. And it can, in times of grief, overemphasize a connection based on one identity versus multiple identities, which again, I just want to say is very, very normal. And I would hate to get rid of the whole of that empathetic experience. In fact, I think it's critical and it's both the thing that can that can make us more scared and the way out. So I do a lot of work on election violence and one of the things that I always lean into is the importance of, when talking to reporters, the importance of reporting on the denominator and what I mean by that. is that an experience of trauma or a bad experience can make us color the whole remainder of experiences within that lens. And again, that's normal, but it also is a distortion. The importance of being able to remember that those community relationships, those daily experiences, those positive experiences hold a lot of weight and carry a lot can be helpful. And just sort of intentionally turning your attention to that, which you do have to intentionally do because of the way trauma works, it takes over all the pieces. So you have to sort of stand back and I think start with being gentle with yourself and then fill into that in a kind of Balm way, reminders of your various identities that you share with neighbors and with the community and with the country, a love of each other, a love of family, a love within faith, and to not allow an incident that would strip all that from us to define us.

(15:28-16:21) Jennifer Thomas: So I love what you just said, that the thing, and I think it's just the really difficult thing at the heart of peacemaking, is the thing that makes us most fearful is actually the way out. And that is so counterintuitive. And in the moment of the fear, that's the emotion. That is what overcomes you, and it's where you feel like you're justified in sitting. So I have two questions for you. The first is, if you could just us. Give us, I know this is going to sound very toddler, but if ever there is a group of people that is hard on themselves, it's us. Latter-day Saints are professionally hard on ourselves. We are epically good at it. I don't even know if we know how to be gentle with ourselves. So I would love you to have us give us like a couple of very specific examples of what does that mean? I don't even know. I'm listening to you. I'm like, I don't know. How do I do that, Meeland? What do I do?

(16:22-16:25) Patrick Mason: And then what you need to do is be better about being gentle.

(16:25-16:30) Jennifer Thomas: Better about being, yeah, gentle with myself. I'm like, I'm not excelling at being gentle with myself.

(16:30-16:31) Patrick Mason: What do I do?

(16:33-16:49) Jennifer Thomas: Help me Nealyn, help me. And I think that that gentleness, like the reason I'm drilling down on that is I actually think that that is the anecdote to fear in some ways. Like if me being hard on myself also gins up the fear, right? Like, so I would love if you could help us with that. Help us.

(16:50-20:23) Nealin Parker: since i've met you a little bit outside of this interview i will say that i just coming from you that is such a special and like wonderful thing because you're a person that i look to as part of the light as what is bringing all of this this goodness and the and it it is a little bit of a killer to me that is the people who are so central to bringing that grace to us all that are in fact like holding it in them to allow that space for others. So a big piece of it is just hearing in this conversation that you are beloved and I am speaking to you but I'm actually speaking more broadly that you are made of the goodness in this world and to sort of like just hold that. I have a number of tricks because I am not unlike you in this respect. So there are a couple of things that I do. One is I step back and I ask myself, how would I want someone to treat my child if my child were going through this? And then I write it down because it's hard for me to treat myself that exact same way. But then I try to apply that in listening to myself. Another thing that I do because I am a bit of a doer is that it can be helpful to me to get outside of my own head sometimes and to do something that feels like connection or use to somebody else in my community. This is a me personal thing so I think I'll put those things out there but also say for some people, I've asked people how they deal with it, for some people it's like I just want to hit a tennis ball so hard. And then feel that reverberate through my body and that does it for me. I just want to be in nature. I just, so there, I think there are different things that, um, that feel that connection and. and that sense of awe or that sense of gentleness with ourselves. But I also will say, kind of going back to where you started this question of the thing that we're most afraid of is also the way out. The first conversation that I had with someone about the Charlie Kirk assassination was a member of my team. who himself has a survivor of gun violence. And his experience was colored both by that and family members experiencing the same and that he had been on stage with Charlie Kirk a few weeks before. In other words, it was a deeply personal experience. It was not the political story. It was the, you are a human, I am a human. And before we found out that he had passed, it was, you know what it feels like to try to survive in these moments when you're bleeding. And I have often found that reaching out to people on that human level, and including people who are contained in the bucket of those who would be the other, has reoriented my relationship with fear, with threats, with harm, with the national dialogue. It has made, uh, it has made that story less present to me than, than human connection in front of me. And it has, it has shifted the whole rest of the way that I walk through the story and how much space I give to, to the fear or the bigger conversations that are often driven by people who are trying to capture headlines, or people who are on a cynical side, but on a not cynical side, other people who are afraid. And they're putting that fear in the places they know to put it, which is often online, and then it kind of spirals.

(20:23-20:33) Jennifer Thomas: I love the idea that fear is abstract, but that it can be sort of controlled and replaced by love that is concrete and deeply individual. I love that idea.

(20:33-21:42) Patrick Mason: So I want to ask you to help us think about how we individually and collectively can think about and talk about this event and our reactions to it. And I'm glad you brought up Charlie Kirk, because it's actually all part of the same month, right? And that happened in Utah. Obviously, not all Latter-day Saints live in Utah, but almost most American Latter-day Saints have a connection to Utah, right? Almost everybody knows where Orem is and knows somebody who's there or something like that. So so there was that we were already reeling from that. And then this happens and all of this. So so how do we what kind of advice would you give for for how people would not only process it internally, but to talk about these kinds of things, especially on a platform, you know, on social media platforms and in this weird kind of private public space. Right. That is so given to to to so much nastiness and knee jerk reactions and But there also can be a space of grace as well and generosity. So what would be some concrete pointers that you would give us in terms of how to engage the public conversation about these things?

(21:42-21:43) Nealin Parker: Online.

(21:43-21:44) Patrick Mason: We love it so much.

(21:44-23:34) Nealin Parker: We love it. We love it. I mean, OK, so I think let's start with what online is and isn't. I think you're right, but a little bit maybe generous in saying that it can be a place of grace. And it can be. It can be. It is. In general, it is a place that people go to to reassert a position that they already hold to people who already agree with them. And that is not the context in which you are likeliest to have deep human connection over a very tense moment. So one of the things that I say is if that's what you're looking for, if that's the kind of experience you're wanting to have, then public posting back and forth in comments online is unlikely to be the place that you feel that strength and feel that connection and have that experience. Online is a place that I usually go for purpose. It's not a place that I spend a lot of time for that reason. I feel like you either got to be in it and be like, I am gonna do this or it's okay. To take a break, there's a lot that comes out around. And one of the other features of online is that people who are having extremely different in real life experiences are platformed right next to each other online. So that somebody who is having a deeply personal feeling of being attacked, maybe in fact was physically attacked in this moment, is sitting right next to somebody who's sort of philosophically having thoughts that are relatively tangential to this thing. and then they're both posted right there and and it can in fact feel extremely harsh and rude and hurtful and even like an attack. You know, like can't you just stop with acknowledging my grief? Why do you need to continue into a And now I have other thoughts.

(23:35-24:27) Patrick Mason: And I think a lot of Latter-day Saints experienced that this week because, you know, anytime Mormonism sort of comes up, bubbles up in the news or whatever, then there are so many people, there are lots of people who have theological disagreements with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That's fine. We live in a pluralistic world. But they took the occasion, right, to remind everybody that Latter-day Saints aren't really Christians. right? And those became really loud voices at that moment. So that at the same time, there were a lot of online voices that express solidarity, and love and kindness. And actually, I've read, I did spend more time on Twitter this week than I have recently, mostly because I wanted to see what was what was happening. And, and there were a lot of beautiful stories of like, no, let me tell you about my Mormon neighbor, or my co worker or something like that. So it was sort of like the best and worst of social media.

(24:27-24:48) Jennifer Thomas: But it's the accident of the algorithm, what you see. So you can be a Latter-day Saint who's just been like, I was just physically attacked. I feel like I'm physically less safe than I was 24 hours ago. And now suddenly I'm finding out that a whole bunch of people are denying me my core identity, which is that I'm a follower of Christ, right? And it just, I think those two things, that one-two punch was very, very hard.

(24:49-28:07) Nealin Parker: Very hard. Yeah. And, um, uh, and, and you started off by asking sort of what does one do? And I went into a, like a, well, hold on, hold on their limits too. So, but let's, let's go into what was, because you, you actually said one of them, which is, uh, as you were. as you were on Twitter. And again, in the wake of tragedy is a time that many of us will engage much more online than we would otherwise. And that also colors our idea of what's happening. Whereas if you were having an experience in real life around people that you knew, it might filter into your understanding a little bit differently. But one of the things that you said is that there are these beautiful stories that were online. I talk a lot about the impossible stories, the stories that we tell ourselves can't happen in these moments of tragedy. And quite frankly, the Mormon community created one of those stories. I don't tend to cry a lot in this work, but I did. I did when I read about the $200,000 that the community raised for the family. In 2001, I remember being in college and when the planes flew into the Twin Towers. I don't know why, but the first thing I thought of was a little child sitting at a breakfast table eating cereal and his father being the person who took that plane down and that he would live the rest of his life with that as the background. And I always felt maybe a little odd for that being the thing that hit me in that moment. I don't actually know the circumstances of their families. And this took me back to that moment and threaded through every moment since there about what that feeling looks like to be in community and to be manifested in such a powerful way. Most of the donations were anonymous. The things that people said and what you were saying about online can also be a space of grace. If ever there was a moment that created grace online, it was the opportunity that people took to call in, to recreate this beloved community, to make a future that is not defined by an end point of hatred and hurt, but that that is a conduit to building something different in the future. That is a story that I have been told many, many times, is a naive story, one that can't happen. For people who are living in conflict in particular, that imagination is very hard to grasp and then to hold onto. So when there is a story like that that is written, and that we write in the face of these tragedies, and that you have written, it is a gift in this moment, it is part of the healing, but it is also the thing that in the future I will point to as what it looks like to walk out of the cycles of violence and into a different place. Elevating those stories online, can be really powerful. It can be powerful both because it is part of that healing for people who are going through it and also shows that way out. Like, very concretely, this is how we walk out of this space for everyone.

(28:08-28:39) Jennifer Thomas: OK, I actually don't know how we could end this podcast any better than that. So but I am going to ask one favor of you. We with all of our guests, we ask them to end the podcast with sort of an extension of to our listeners of how they themselves find peace. We live in a troubled world. We always are trying to help our listeners find access to new ways that they can introduce peace into their lives. And so we'd love it if you would share with us how you do it. you do very very difficult work. So what centers you? What gives you peace?

(28:39-29:42) Nealin Parker: I will trust that this is not too smushy for this podcast. We're very smushy. But it is prayer and love and I have a lot of people to love. I maybe more concretely, periodically I join a group of 10 people and we are a gratitude group and the It's an online kind of WhatsApp group. We come together and you go out each day and you find something and you bring it back to the group. and you share with a group your gratitude. And it's like children's pockets, you know, full of like little rocks and like little pieces of greenery. And, and you know, that there's magic in that. And the curation of finding what you're grateful for is part of the story of what I, what I bring to this group and what I give to this group. But then seeing what else, what other fairy magic they've brought in to it is, is a recentering for me that I find that I need at least every year. Lovely. Thank you so much for what you are doing.

(29:42-29:52) Jennifer Thomas: Well, we just want to thank you so much for joining us. You are a light in my life. So thanks for having us. And thanks for having this conversation with us. We really appreciate it.

(29:55-30:14) Patrick Mason: Thanks everybody for listening today. We really appreciate it. We just want to invite you to subscribe to the podcast and also to rate and review it. We love hearing feedback from listeners, so please email us at podcast at mweg.org. We also want to invite you to think about ways that you can make peace in your life this week. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.

(30:19-30:35) Jennifer Thomas: Thank you for listening to Proclaim Peace, a proud member of the Faith Matters Podcast Network. Faith Matters holds expansive conversations about the restored gospel to accompany individuals on their journey of faith. You can learn more about Faith Matters and check out our other shows at faithmatters.org.