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Pam King: If your community is not well, then you are not well. Alexia Salvatierra is an organizer, activist, and pastor whose career has shown how individual thriving is intertwined with collective justice. With respect for marvelous people. Human Complexity. She’s encouraging us to get out of our heads and into our bodies and emotions and is inviting us to compassion for the marginalized and to ground our spiritual health in our connectedness to the human family across cultural and economic lines.
Alexia Salvatierra: What does a healthy community look like? This beautiful image of being unafraid, of everybody having what they need, of everybody having opportunity to reach their dreams, Everybody being able to take care of themselves and not having it taken away from them. All of those are part of the vision of a good life, right?
It’s not just an individual good life, communal good life. Concertación, if you were just literally translate it means coming into harmony and the way that it works in our communities is to hear somebody else with your heart. You hear them from the heart. And when you hear them from the heart, you spontaneously shift.
You are automatically standing on common sacred ground and you just shift generously.
Pam King: I’m Dr. Pam King. And you’re listening to With and For, a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance toward spiritual health, wholeness, and thriving on purpose.
For those of you seeking your way and your role in this chaotic world, this conversation offers deeply felt and practical insight into the we that begins well being. Alexia Salvatierra, my wise and wonderful colleague at Fuller, the Dean of Centro Latino, professor, pastor, activist, dancer, and, I would say, social healer, not only offers insight to the dis ease that so many persons across ethnicities and socioeconomic classes face today, but she also offers solutions to moving forward and growing more whole as individuals and societies.
She vividly makes the point that if your community is not well, then you are not well. Thriving is collective. True spiritual health enables us all to flourish. Alexia offers practical insight into how to be you in a purposeful and healing way. Prayerful wrestling, collective listening and discernment calls us forward to a path of action.
Alexia is holistic. She affirms the wisdom of the body. She highlights cultures over biasing the power of the mind at the expense of listening to the heart. There’s a collective cost when we fail to attune to suffering and joy in our bodies. She encourages us to listen to what troubles us, to attune to our anger and pain as signposts to injustice, and to point toward a path to purpose, fully immersed in the complexity of community conflict and differences. In her work as an activist, she has supported fractioned communities to reconcile through the power of a shared dream.
In this conversation with Alexia Salvatierra, we discuss the unique wisdom that Latin a o culture brings to spiritual and theological conversations. about thriving in spiritual health, the complex communal and collective nature of thriving, how her theology as a Lutheran pastor was formed by compassion and concern for the poor, the challenge of Western Christians to see beyond individualistic rationality And the atomic unit of the self when thinking about wellness and thriving.
The transformative potential of a common dream to unify and reconcile. The power of beautiful stories that are deeply connected to truth and goodness. And seeing relationships as they are. is not just an end goal of thriving, but a means to thriving.
Alexia, my dear and highly revered colleague, I brought you on the show for your passion, your wisdom, and your insight around spirituality, justice, and love. in community and these being essential to a true understanding of the good life. You bring to your work a beautiful dimensionality. You talk about the importance of faith and also social transformation.
Alexia Salvatierra: Yeah, I became a Christian when I was a teenager in the Jesus movement, so I am that old. And basically all my Christian life, a core part of my calling has been engaging the church in what we call integral mission. which is the full integration of spirituality and social transformation.
Pam King: I wanted to start with Alexia’s sense of purpose.
What drives her theological vision and sense of calling in her work of community organizing? And then connect that to her definition of thriving. She tells the story of an evangelical response to liberation theology, a movement that takes seriously the unjust suffering of the poor and marginalized.
Alexia Salvatierra: So the phrase, Mision Integral, comes out of Latin America, and it came out of the evangelical church as a response to liberation theology.
That Liberation Theology was the first theology in Latin America to take really seriously the intense and unjust suffering that most people in Latin America experience. And to say, you know, God is with these people and we have to see through their eyes in order to see all that God is saying to us. So that was at the heart of liberation theology was this shift in perspective.
Whose eyes are we seeing through? What questions are we asking? Well, evangelicals like Rene Padilla, Samuel Escobar, were really deeply convicted by that. So they said, wow, we also really need to be responding to this reality that we live in. We need to not see it through secular eyes. We need to see it through Christ’s eyes.
And Christ has this, um, profound. compassion and concern for the poor. They really said, well, what does it mean to approach this from an evangelical perspective? And it meant clearly don’t throw out evangelism and don’t throw out spiritual discipleship, integrate that with social transformation as integrated as the body and the soul.
Pam King: Now, when I hear social transformation, justice, Liberation. I personally immediately go to the concept of thriving. And as we get going in this conversation, I’d love to hear from your perspective how you might think about the word or how you might define thriving.
Alexia Salvatierra: Well, the word bien estar means wellbeing, but it’s not just individual is never just individual. is the translation in the Reina Valera, which is the most common sort of like the new revised standard, right? That in the Reina Valera for Shalom. So it always has a communal dimension because our cultures are much more communal. So there’s really this sense that if your family’s not well, you’re not well.
If your community’s not well, you’re not well. Of course, we’re never perfectly well. I mean, we’re not pretending that your family is never perfectly well. And of course, when we think of family, it’s not nuclear family, it’s extended family. Your family is never perfectly well. But are you on the road to wellness?
Are you experiencing wellness? And are you growing in your experience of wellness? That can’t ever just have to do with the individual. Because we’re too connected for that to be true. So there’s always this collective and familial dimension to bien estar. And to Shalom, of course. At Shalom, I love the image a Jewish rabbi once said to me about Shalom, that Shalom is not just peace in the sense of the absence of conflict, but a table.
A banquet table with everybody seated around the table and everybody welcome and everybody valued and enough to eat.
Pam King: The Hebrew vision of shalom and the New Testament idea of abundant life means so much more than absence of conflict or just a shallow peace. So I really get this communal collective sense, but you kept using the word wellness or on the road to wellness.
And I’d be curious how you would define wellness.
Alexia Salvatierra: So I connect it with abundant life, you know, so the promise of the promise of Jesus is never just eternal life, it’s abundant life, but abundant life is not just individual, it’s communal. And I, there’s a lovely scripture, Isaiah 65, it’s this wonderful scripture.
So it’s very tangible and it’s a picture of communal abundant life. Like what does it, what does a healthy community look like, right? And it says that. You know, everybody has their own land, so nobody is landless. It says that people don’t build houses that they can’t live in, that they enjoy the fruit of their labors.
It says that children are not sold out from under them. Where are children sold out from under us? Well, not in the United States, but all over the world, right? And I even hear echoes, not just of sold out, but you know, what happened when children were ripped away from their parents at the border, right?
That children, your children are not taken from you. That old people live a full lifetime. You know, years ago, the head of public health in Alameda County was a Baptist pastor. He used to talk about the sounds of a healthy community. And I always thought of Isaiah 65, that, that he said in a healthy community, you can hear the old people talking, sitting there without fear.
You can hear the children laughing because they have enough to eat and they have the opportunity to reach their dreams. And, you know, this beautiful image of being unafraid, of everybody having what they need, of everybody having opportunity to reach their dreams, of everybody being able to take care of themselves and not having it taken away from them.
All of those are part of the vision of a good life, right? It’s not just an individual good life. It’s communal good life.
Pam King: And I love marrying that with the image of the table that you offered with Shalom, of this gathering and this festivity and this feast of abundance and being able to enjoy together.
I was really curious when you talked about in children have the opportunities to pursue their dream. When you think of a dream from the perspective of Bienestar, what is the dream?
Alexia Salvatierra: When you say dream, I think of a peace process in El Salvador and Guatemala that I would share about. I think of the use of a dream to unite and inspire us, right?
But I think that when I think of what children dream, I think of the body of Christ. That this image of the body of Christ is that every part is able to play its part and every part is valued and every part is coordinated. So, you know, that’s what every child wants is to be able to give their gift and to be recognized and to be valued.
And in fact, part of what I love about the concept of the body of Christ in Corinthians is not just that every part is valued, but it says give more honor to the parts that have lacked it. It says so that there will be no dissension in the body, but that Every part will care equally as if the goal is for all the parts to be equally valued in this world.
You have to counteract the natural bias that makes us value, you know, the lifestyles of the rich and famous, not the lifestyles of the poor and unknown, right? You know, makes us value people who are at the center more than at the margins. So Paul says you have to intentionally value the people more at the margins for everybody to end up equally valued.
And that’s the body of Christ image. And I think that’s what we all want. We all want to belong. You know, but we want to belong for what is our specific gifts. What are specific gifts and passions? I think of Frederick Buechner saying that vocation is where the world’s deep hunger and our own deep gladness meet.
That that’s when you find your, what you can contribute, the part of the body you are, that’s how you experience yourself. But you don’t just experience yourself in that way, you experience yourself in the community in that way. that what you have to give works with what other people have to give, and it all creates synergy, so it’s more than the sum of the part, and, and it’s valued.
Pam King: Absolutely. I very much appreciated the theme of the collective and the mutual reciprocity, which is a word I use a lot in my work as a psychologist, of the mutual give and take, that it even shows up in children’s dreams, as you’ve said. As you articulated it, that they are a part of something where they can contribute uniquely out of who they are.
That that collective sense, I think in many white contexts, dreams are hyper personalized. People are dreaming for themselves and their own success and their own career and that inherent in what you described. Essential to that was the connectivity and the contribution to a greater whole that is so through and through part of your worldview of shalom, thriving, the good life, dreams,
Alexia wants to lift up our moral imagination to dream of a just society. But history is showing us the realities of struggle on the road to shalom and collective thriving. Reflecting on trauma and the unjust suffering of the marginalized, she points out the importance of of a sense of agency to combat hopelessness,
Alexia Salvatierra: You know, that I think of Christianity as the way, right?
Hold on. That was the original definition of the way I’m, what I call Luther costal, that I’m Lutheran theologically, and I’m charismatic. So I’m with their custom, but the big dose of, you know, Mission Integral, but, but that means, you know, if I was just charismatic, I was just Pentecostal. I would be really focused on just the experience of positivity, just the experience of joy, just the experience of, you know, the Holy Spirit.
But because I don’t just see the world that way, I’m Lutheran, I think we live on this side of the cross, not with foretaste of the feast to come. And I think that often we can’t It, we have the experience of victory in the struggle. It’s not that we arrive. It’s not that we’ve created the perfect community that is described in Isaiah 65, but the sense of agency, the sense of being able to do something that moves us toward that is in itself deeply nurturing to the soul.
You know, I’m co teaching a course with Cynthia Erickson called Trauma and Faith. And I’ve been learning a lot about trauma and most of the standard resources on trauma talk about trauma as something that happened and then ends. And so now what you have to find for people is safety. In Latin America and in many Hispanic communities in the United States, that wait, wait, wait, it doesn’t end, right?
The situation doesn’t end. It’s not like you can find safety, you know, tell somebody who is a mother of citizen children, but they’re undocumented. No, where’s the safety, right? But what you can find instead of safety is agency. And that combats the sense of helplessness and hopelessness. So the experience changes even though the objective reality doesn’t.
So this sense of foretaste of the feast to come or victory in the struggle is very much what has sustained me all my life. That it is the promise of the resurrection. but it is also Jesus with us in the suffering. It is that experience of walking the way that is really what gives me life. So I don’t have long term dreams.
I’m not a utopian person. I’m not a prophet. I’m an organizer. You know, it’s all about can we get a little farther down the road, but it is the process of getting a little farther down the road that is satisfying to the soul. It gives you agency. It combats helplessness and hopelessness.
Pam King: She describes an early gift of empathy for others. the ways she felt injustice in the pain of others in her own body. So when she eventually discovered faith and spirituality, she identified with the compassion and empathy of Christ.
Alexia Salvatierra: I always had what we call the spiritual gift of justice. I actually heard that for the first time from my friend, Pastor Renee Molina, who told me that I had the spiritual gift of justice.
He said, a spiritual gift is a compulsion. It’s a fire in the belly. That then if you live it, it helps the body of Christ to have all aspects of the body of Christ of the call of the body of Christ. People find the, we would say, another little piece of grain of sand that they contribute to this full plate of all of the characters, the characteristics of the work of the body of Christ.
So I always, since I was a child, felt injustice happening to anybody in my own body. And I was not at peace until I could try to make it better. That just means that what I can do then is inspire and guide other people in the body to find their little way to participate that makes sense in their lives.
Pam King: The societal tendency to valorize suffering. There’s such a powerful narrative of noble sacrifice. And Alexia points out the detrimental influence this has, particularly on women. She points out two words that are really important to her, These are very interesting concepts. Latin American theologian Nancy Bedford defined dolorismo as the glorification of suffering for its own sake.
And Samuel Solivan explains the term orthopathos makes the distinction between suffering that results in self alienation and suffering that becomes a source for liberation and self fulfillment. I want to go back, um, when you were talking about people who live in chronic trauma where they don’t have a sense of safety.
That it’s not this trauma that it’s episodic, it occurs and it finishes and then you recover from it. But it is a constant threat, constant adversity and lack of safety. And you talked about cultivating a sense of agency as a bit of an antidote to lack of safety. I’ve also heard you in other contexts speak about love and grace.
And I’m wondering how experiencing God’s love and grace might also impact one’s ability to live under chronic threat.
Alexia Salvatierra: So there’s two words that people use in Latin America around responses to suffering. that are an answer to your question. And one word is usually seen negatively, but I actually don’t see it negatively, so I need to unpack that.
The word that is often seen negatively is called dolorismo. It’s connected with women who suffer in silence and who ennoble the experience of suffering, see suffering as noble, right? Very negative. And then there’s Orthopathos, which is connected to Liberation Theology, which says that we need, we see suffering as useful in attaining, that when suffering, when suffering can be useful in attaining justice, either because it spurs you forward or it helps you understand injustice better or, you know, whatever it does gives you strength, what, you know, whatever it does when it’s used to make, to change, to make change. That’s orthopathos, right? That’s what God would want. So these are juxtaposed. But I, at one point I was thinking about, you know, my grandmother and I was thinking about people of that generation, even my mother’s generation.
And I was thinking that dolorismo is about the first half of the serenity prayer. When you can’t change the situation, when you have no options, how can you not be destroyed by it? How can you transcend it? How can you have a sense that your suffering is the cross? And so your suffering is something that you are not helpless, you are Christ, you know, you are, he is in you, the Holy Spirit is your consolation, your consuelo, right?
And it is. Amen. Amen. And, but of course it isn’t alone, like you said, it’s in relationship, right? You’re not by yourself, you’re with other people that are also suffering and also experiencing this transcendence, you know, this refuge, like people in Pentecostal churches will talk all the time about the refuge of the church.
You get to go to this place of joy, of pure joy that the world cannot take away and you transcend all the suffering. When you have no option of change, there is nothing wrong with that, it’s sacred. Amen. It stops being sacred when you do have the option of change. The second part of the serenity prayer, have the courage to change the things that you can.
And then you need to shift over to orthopathos, that how is your suffering useful in changing the things you can. And of course, what is the third part of the serenity prayer? It’s the wisdom to know the difference. You know, I feel like God is with us in both sides, in both of those places. And I also think that those places are not static.
You know, some of our differences in theology or spirituality are really cultural differences. So what do I mean by that? I mean that I grew up with, at least part of my culture, with a very fluid worldview. You’re not either endolorismo or orthopathos. You’re not, I can’t change anything or I can change everything.
That we live in this fluid reality where you have to surf the spirit. I didn’t grow up with a world that was in boxes. I grew up with a world that was fluid and paradoxical. Dynamic and changing. Dynamic and you know, the world is a moving planet. And you don’t think you can control everything.
Pam King: A fluid reality where we have to surf the spirit. There is beauty in the acceptance of lived paradox and a recognition of the few things we can control in life. How does your Hispanic heritage, or perhaps Ukrainian heritage, influence that, the bounded set versus the centered set, and that fluidity?
Alexia Salvatierra: I didn’t grow up with this sense of control of the world, right?
It just wasn’t part of how I grew up. So I remember the first time I did some serious academic writing and I added it to a friend of mine who was a white male academic. And he said, where’s your point of view? And I said, what? He said, you’re supposed to say I’m right and they’re wrong. And you know, and this is why I’m right.
And they’re wrong. I said, but they’re all right in some ways. So this is what I would add to it. This is my perspective. And then this is how it fits with all the other perspectives. He was like, no, that’s not how you do it. I was like, oh, well, I’m sorry. I’m not going to do it that way. It’s cultural. I think a lot of things, Pam, in evangelicalism in the white community.
middle class world are, they’re cultural, but they’re assumed to be biblical.
Pam King: I think that’s very, very well said.
This reality really connected for me in the psychological terms of adaptivity, agility, and attunement. And when we apply this approach to spirituality and thriving, to justice work. It creates a very delicate and dynamic balance. I think again, the systemic ecological lens you have lends itself to your seeing the world so dynamically related that things like being adaptive, agility are very central to your way of being in the world.
And even the concept of thriving as being on the way towards wellness, it’s a very dynamic. journey, growth, understanding, and I’m guessing it’s not linear in your mind either that there’s lots of ups and downs.
Alexia Salvatierra: No, it’s not at all linear. No, you know, we live in the in between time between the first coming of Christ and the second coming and it’s like the sun and the clouds.
There’s some time you have to be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove. There’s some times when people are going to be their carnal and sinful selves and you better be ready to deal with that. And there’s going to be other times that people are, that you can encourage people to be their new self, their best self, their holy self, and then you have to make room for that.
But you have to be constantly consciente, aware, conscious. Because the sun and the clouds in this in between time, sometimes you turn the other cheek and you save your opponent, sometimes you turn the other cheek and you get shot.
Pam King: And going back to your comments on the serenity prayer of knowing those moments when to accept you can’t change, living with the presence of Christ in the sense of being able to transcend, experience joy, even in the midst of suffering, and then knowing when that suffering can be a catalyst.
for progressing or moving along the way. And then the third piece I’d like to ask you about, the wisdom to know the difference. How in your perspective do people cultivate the wisdom to know the difference? Because I think generationally people have a different sense of empowerment gender wise, station in life.
People often feel more or less empowered to change. And how would you encourage people to cultivate wisdom to know if this is something they should accept or if it’s something that they should fight back?
Alexia Salvatierra: What a wonderful question, Pam. And I do want to go back for a minute. I don’t make the collective into an idol.
You know, a lot of people come to this country because the freedom that individualism gives you. Especially for women who come from societies where we might not have a lot of power. That the power that’s available in the U. S. for women, individual is astounding, right? So, so I’m not trashing individualism, but I’m just trashing the super individualism that happens in this culture, which to me is crazy.
I think there are three things that I would say. The first one is that you do discern in context of community. You know, you can’t see the log in your own eye. You really need to talk to a lot of people and you need to listen well, always. And some people are in positions of sacred authority. And I particularly, you know, I tend to expect the Word of God to come through the bishop.
I also tend to expect the Word of God to come through the poor. There’s these loci of revelation that are really helpful, right? That come to us, these places where God particularly speaks, these thin places, as the Celtics would say. Um, but you also have to do your individual discernment. You have to. sort things through with the best of your secular capacities or your worldly capacities and the best of your spiritual capacities, all of the above.
But then the third thing comes out of liberation theology, which is that you learn by doing. So you have a sense of what God is calling you to from what you hear from others, what you hear in yourself, what you discern in the word, what you know, what you’ve learned, all of those things together. But then you know that you’re not, you know, you are never perfect.
So what you’re going to do is obey the best that you know. And you’re going to trust that as you do it, then you learn more. And that’s, you know, that’s what the liberation theologians were saying. They were saying, do justice. Like, live what the Word is calling you to. Try to respond effectively. Be good stewards of every gift God has given you in your response to the poor.
Right? So respond to unjust suffering with every gift God has given you. And yeah, maybe you won’t get it right, but then you’ll learn because God will not stop speaking. So Gustavo Gutierrez recently, you know, one of the early liberation theologians said, yeah, we were really wrong about socialism. Yeah, we were utopians and we were wrong, just wrong.
But we were trying our best, you know, and God continued to speak and you know, things So. evolved and we’re learning, you know, and that, and I think that’s what we have to trust, that you obey and then God reveals more.
Pam King: You know, I really appreciate this notion that the Spirit is on the move. God’s work continues in this world and there’s new gifts needed and called forth and recognized through those beautiful criteria you offered.
And in terms of the Serenity Prayer, there might be seasons where it is accepting the suffering and there might be seasons where it’s like, no, I need to stand up and challenge this. I might have new skills. I might have new perspectives. I might have new relationships that can enable me or support me in this injustice.
Alexia, love the Serenity Prayer. You’ve highlighted really three beautiful, important components of it. I would be so grateful if you would offer our listeners an English and Spanish version of it.
Alexia Salvatierra: Sure. You can join me, obviously. You know, there’s probably more of your listeners speak English, so you can join me and then I’ll do it in Spanish.
God give us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Dios concedeme serenidad para aceptar las cosas que no puedo cambiar, valor para cambiar aqueas que puedo, y sabiduría para reconocer la
diferencia. Amén.
Pam King: Amén.
Alexia told me a story about coming into harmony. A beautiful metaphor for justice and thriving in spiritual health. And it leads us to a very practical exercise. Alexia calls it the dream exercise. And it draws together individuals into a common imaginative understanding, a common dream. Alexia, you have alluded to your time doing quite a bit of work in conflict resolution.
We’ve been talking about the significance of empathy, and you also talked about how different cultures can come up with out of the box solutions. And I’d love to hear a bit more about what you’ve discovered about working outside of the box, or perhaps what’s typical or expected, and especially in the area of conflict resolution.
Alexia Salvatierra: So there was a civil war in Guatemala for 36 years. There was a civil war in El Salvador for 16 years. And the U. S. really was instrumental in funding those wars, keeping them going. And then the U. S. stopped the funding, and there was a real desire for peace. But. These are small countries. And in small countries, when you’ve been in a civil war for that long, people in power are directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of each other’s families.
So the desire for vengeance is very deep. And so there was a formal peace process in the United Nations, but it was going nowhere. Hence, Dr. Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, he was the president, decided to do an informal peace process behind the scenes. And I was actually working for an international organization that raised the funding for this process.
So we were able to have somebody at the table. I was very young, but I was the only person who spoke fluent Spanish. So anyhow, I got to be at the table. And um, they all just thought I was somebody’s daughter. But part of what Oscar, Dr. Arias did, was that he didn’t just invite the two warring sides. He invited the top leaders of every sector of society.
So the top business leaders, top academic leaders, top union leaders, political leaders, the mothers of the disappeared, civil society, they’re all in the room together. And you can imagine the tension in that room. That was horrendous. It was horrendous. And then, uh, Dr. Arias did something very surprising. He handed out little cards and he asked everybody to write their dreams for their country in 20 or 30 years.
And they put their, they had to put their dreams up on the wall. And as they did that, the room changed because their dreams were similar. You know, everybody wanted prosperity, peace for the kids. You know, a life for the dreams for the kids, you know, all those things. And what happened, the change in the room was that the potential for the future became more powerful than the pain of the past.
And then they were able to move on and they were able to end up with decisions, conversations that led to decisions that were reflected in the formal peace process not very long afterwards. So he did, Oscar Arias work did make the peace agreements possible. And then, but there was a word that they kept using through all those days.
Right. That after that first initial experience called concertation, I had never heard that word before. And I, but I began to notice what they were talking about concertation. If you were just literally translated, it means coming into harmony. And what struck me was that what they were doing, what started with that moment of getting that potential for the future, if they work together.
is that what happens in concertación is not what happens in negotiation. So negotiation is, you know, you get part of what you want. I get part of what we want. We meet in the middle. That’s a compromise. There’s no word for compromise in Spanish. Compromiso means commitment. It doesn’t mean compromise, but it’s not because people don’t compromise.
It’s because it’s a different process. Negotiation is used in business. Negotiation, it’s a word. But personally, you actually use consultation. And the way that it actually works, and the way it was working, I saw it working, and the way that it works in our communities, is that what happens is you hear somebody else with your heart.
You hear them from the heart. And when you hear them from the heart, you spontaneously shift. You are automatically standing on common sacred ground and you just shift generously. And when I was listening to it and thinking about it, I thought about the way that people do going out to eat in a restaurant differently in the white community and the Hispanic community.
And in the white community, people divide up the check, right? Okay. This is what you spend. This is what I spent. In the Hispanic community, you say, okay, I’m paying for everybody. And then next time somebody else is going to pay for everybody. Right? Because it’s about generosity. It’s about, okay, I get you, I’m coming to you.
Don’t worry about it. But then when that happens both directions, you end up in the middle, but you end up in the middle in this different way that really has everything to do with the cultivation of empathy or the experience of empathy.
Pam King: I think about the impact of shared vision that can heal and reconcile relationships. When we can find those de centering experiences that pull us out of our myopic tunnel vision and truly allow us to share a vision with others, whether significant others or even stranger others, this, I think, is truly an important movement toward collective thriving.
She spoke about this all in the context of violence and deep conflict in Los Angeles. But what about in our day to day lives, in our polarized society or fractioned congregations, even within our families? How can we find and create a collective vision together? What are our common human hopes and desires?
Alexia Salvatierra: Um, so the dream exercise, I want to share with you what that meant when I started using it on a personal level. Years later, in the United States, between Black and Brown communities in South LA, um, there was terrible conflict. This was right after a million people marched for immigration reform in Los Angeles.
and some of the old guard leaders from the black community held a meeting, just African American leaders, and they invited the Minutemen. So that just tells you something, the Minutemen from the border, the anti immigrant forces, that tells you that the level of the tension that was happening, that tension was real.
And so the mayor at the time was working on it, he brought together people, but he brought them together transactionally. He didn’t want to involve the religious community because he thought we were divisive. So he brought them together transactionally, and it fell apart in minutes, you know, because when there’s real hostility between people, you feel ripped off so easily, you feel like your deal’s not fair.
So we said, let us do something, and we brought together a bunch of people. who were leaders, a lot of clergy, lay leaders, and congregations. And I said, I was saying, Oh, let’s do the exercise. Let’s do the dream exercise. So we did the dream exercise. People put their dreams for South LA up on the wall. They were very similar, but it didn’t completely work.
And so the leaders, we were like, sitting back, we were like on the break, like what’s going on? What’s going on? Why is it not working? And we realized that as poor people, we have trouble believing that our dreams can come true. Period. Like, you know, it’s lovely that we have common dreams, but we don’t actually believe that these dreams can come true.
And so we can’t let go for that generosity and that empathy to happen. And so what we asked people is we asked them what God’s dreams were for South LA. Did they have a scripture? Did they have something that told them what, and were God’s dreams the same? And as people began to do that, there was a laughter that went through the room.
And I think of it as a laughter of Sarah that it was too good to be true, but it was true. And then everything shifted and the coalition developed that then, you know, did amazing things together. But that moment of getting it, of getting that it was possible to find a common dream that could unite and inspire us and we could actually work on together.
That opened the doors for this sort of concertation experience where people began to be generous with each other, spontaneously generous. and, and cultivate that kind of empathy. I want to just share how I used it on an individual level. Um, I was working with a couple in my congregation and of course we didn’t have therapists in my congregation.
My Spanish speaking congregation in the Central Valley, it was farm workers, there were no therapists. So I was trying to help this couple and they had been having the same fights forever and they were really dug in on their fights. And I, at first, I was trying to help them with negotiation, you know, what I learned in pastoral care class, you know, and they would all nod.
They were both nod and then they wouldn’t change anything. And then I finally talked to them a little bit about the concertación process. And I said, just stop. You’re just going to listen to each of each other from the heart. And it just shifted. They were like, Oh, I’m so sorry. Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize how I was hurting.
Oh, we don’t have to do that. We can do like, you know, it was just really powerful to watch. And I remember thinking, you know, I know this works in my community, but this is something that I think might be useful for other communities, might be a gift that we bring.
Pam King: Absolutely. I think that’s super profound.
There’s so many things that I’m, And I think that’s what you were hanging on to in what you said, that enabling people to encounter each other from the heart, having empathy.
Alexia Salvatierra: And I think that starting by finding a common dream is really helpful. That can unlock a capacity.
Pam King: When at the very beginning of our recording, when I asked you about the role of dreams, like dreams for children, you said, well, one role is dreams unify people.
And I think that’s the key. Absolutely beautiful. In my own personal work, I’m very obsessed with telos as kind of God’s goal, purpose, dream for humans. And I find that as a very uniting concept for people, that we can all get on board with God’s purpose for us.
Alexia Salvatierra: It’s hard to argue with the dream.
Pam King: I think that’s so powerful.
And I, you also said earlier on that, I think you said, hope for the future, hope for the dream, outweighed the pain of the past. And that by sharing this dream, people were able to let down the weight of the past, that pain, because the hope was more profound. But then yet in South LA, They didn’t believe in their dreams or they actually didn’t have hope that their dreams could come true.
It didn’t work until it was God’s dream. That’s right. And then that hope was empowered.
Alexia Salvatierra: That’s exactly right.
Pam King: Taking God’s perspective or in research terminology, taking the perspective of a benevolent third person in regards to someone that you’re frustrated with. or in deep conflict with. You might ask yourself, how does God view that person that you’re so frustrated with? How does God view the individuals that make up the other side of the political divide?
God loves them. How do we wrap our minds and hearts around that? There is a great book on marriage is out right now that an intervention for couples in conflict is exactly what you’re seeing. The guy’s last name is Finkel at Northwestern and he talks about in conflict to stop and take a benevolent third person’s perspective.
of your partner or the person that you’re in disagreement or frustrated or angry with, and think about that benevolent third person, aka God’s perspective of that person. And that takes you out of your pain and gives you a more transcendent perspective and that begins to enable people to find a common pathway forward.
Alexia Salvatierra: That’s so interesting. That’s fascinating.
Pam King: You know, in a, in an era marked by polarization, having that unifying vision is very helpful. In fact, I did my dissertation on social capital and I operationalized social capital by a relational dimension that was like trust and respect, a structural dimension that was like interaction and time spent together, and a cognitive dimension, which was shared vision.
And that relationships. that share a vision and share values are more influential on each other. So when we can identify and name that vision and share it, those are more effective relationships.
Alexia Salvatierra: You know, the experience I have listening to you, Pam, is an experience of inculturation. So let me name, let me unpack that.
It’s the same experience I’m working with Cynthia too, is that the Jesuits in the 1500s went to Asia. They went to Japan and China. There’d been no effective missions in Japan and China before the Jesuits. The Jesuits were very smart guys. And when they got there, they went, Ooh, this culture is at least equal to ours, if not superior.
And so they became as Asian as they could. And they were accepted and they were able to bring the gospel. And they were able to bring also their Spanish culture. They were able to bring what was good about their Spanish culture. Well, they developed coming out of that, you know, they did it for only a hundred years because then the new Pope cracked down and said, you guys are acting Japanese and you’re not, you know, preaching the gospel and anyhow, but, and then they got kicked out.
But anyhow, they coined this word inculturation. And then my understanding of inculturation as they understood it is that if we talk about the truth, that makes our lives better.
Pam King: Maybe we talk about beauty a bit. Um, orthopoiesis, of knowing God not just through minds as you are in academic, but through beauty.
And how does that factor into your sense of spirituality and this thing of thriving that we’re talking about?
Alexia Salvatierra: So, you know, orthodoxy is knowing God through, you know, revealed intellectual truth, right? Early on in liberation theology, they went from orthodoxy to orthopraxis. Like I was talking about earlier, that you know God by obeying, you know God by living it.
right, by living the way of Christ. That’s how you come to know God. But then, you know, people are very creative. everywhere in the world and including Latin America. And so people kept experimenting and that’s how we ended up with the orthopathos, which was Samuel Sullivan came up with that use from Puerto Rico.
And, but it went all over the place. But then young people, I was recently in Latin America and I was listening to some young theologians. So they were all talking about orthopoiesis. I was like, well, what’s that? And that’s knowing God through beauty. And, you know, anybody who goes, you know, just even across the border, you go to Mexico.
One of the first things that people from this country say is look at all the colors of the houses. The houses are magenta and aqua and, you know, like children. It’s just an understanding of the joy of the, of los colores, of the, all the colors. You know, there’s this wonderful children’s song, De Colores, that Cesar Chavez made the anthem of his movement, meaning that all these different colors are such a gift, right?
The vibrant gift of color. And, you know, I think that, I think there’s a particular sensitivity in Latin America, in the Latin American context to the importance of beauty. I think it’s very connected to what you were saying earlier that people are very much in, in our bodies and very much in all aspects of our bodies.
And I think there’s some connection with that. and appreciating beauty. Um, but certainly this idea that God comes to us through beauty, I think, you know, this is named in Latin America, but I think it’s also true of young people in the U. S. I really experienced like Generation Z and some of the millennials, my daughters on the border, uh, between those two, but that there’s just, they’re all artists, right?
All of them are artists and, and they don’t trust orthodoxy at all. You know, they trust orthopraxis. but they also feel like, you know, they live so much of their lives on the net, where there’s no praxis really, where who knows what’s happening, you know, who knows what they can trust. And, but somehow this orthopoiesis makes sense to them.
Pam King: Hmm, I’m going to go out on a limb on a question. We often think of the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. And in an era where there’s really different understandings of truth across the You know, at least the United States. People seem a little less concerned with what is good and right and moral.
I wonder if youngers are appealing to beauty as, you know, a transcendental because truth and goodness are potentially so obscured in this era.
Alexia Salvatierra: Yeah, I mean, I remember a conversation I had just a few weeks ago. I’ve had the experience a lot of working with InterVarsity and Cru and with Millennials. And when I would tell Millennials the stories of the movement, the stories of how we had been able to achieve societies that are more inclusive and just and abundant for everyone, that they would be really moved by that, right?
Like they were just moved that they went from sort of nothing’s changed to, Oh, look, change is possible. And they would get very inspired and they would, you know, I love the passion of young people, but then when they were, you know, I had a number of That had become staff for InterVarsity and you know, for La Fe and Destino.
And so they asked me to come speak, but there were a whole bunch of Gen Z folks in the room too. And I was telling my stories, right? And the Gen Z folks were like this, like, what is going on here? Like, why aren’t you inspired by these stories? And so recently I was talking to a young Gen Z leader that I’m close to, and I told her that story and I said, Priscilla, help me understand this.
And she said, oh, she laughed, she said, because we don’t believe her stories because we are so used to stories coming at us that are, that are so beautiful and so moving and not true. She said, because we are deluged by a world in which we cannot possibly tell what is true and what is not. That the only way we know is, you know, if you live with us over time, we know you and we will see you a story.
We have a million stories. And we don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. And they’re beautiful stories. But you know, that’s just interesting to me in terms of, you know, every generation does have its core questions. Enlightenment generations were asking about what is true. Generations after that were asking about what is good.
These new generations, all they’re left with is what is beautiful. But I think, I don’t think we stop there. I mean, I think we do have to share life together in a way that gives people, it gives them something they can trust.
Pam King: I wanted to close by drawing out what Alexia has been saying about concertacion. A coming into harmony that really resonates with my work on reciprocal relationships. How mutuality and co evolution is central to who we are. as human beings. And it’s not just about who we are, but how we heal and become whole.
Reconciliation is a process of longing for the wholeness of the other for their own sake. And what I love and deeply appreciate about Concertación is that it goes so far beyond the transactional relating that so undermines relationships. and keep them from growing into collective wholeness and also individual wholeness.
So that relationality, going back to where we started in this podcast of how Interconnected we are.
Alexia Salvatierra: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pam King: We talked a lot about this process of thriving, of being on the way towards wellness, of being this collective sense of wellness where we all can participate out of our uniqueness and be interconnected.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how relationships and community are part of the way. So not just like the ends of thriving, but how are they also the means of thriving? How do relationships shape us and form us in our journey towards wellness?
Alexia Salvatierra: Yeah. So interesting. So Adrienne Marie Brown is one of the new thinkers in the universe of community social transformation.
And she talks about what kind of relationships we form that are nourishing, like not all relationships, not all community is equally nourishing. What are the kinds of relationships that nourish us? And she uses a lot of metaphors from nature. You know, how do mushrooms work? How do trees work? It’s really very interesting.
But a friend of mine, Peter Heltzel, writes about revolutionary friendships. What are the relationships that bring us health, that help us to thrive? And One of the aspects of those relationships that they both talk about is that they’re relationships where we are accepted as we are, they’re grace filled relationships.
And I want to underline this because we’re a very graceless society, a society at war is a graceless society, but they have to be grace filled. They have to be relationships where you feel completely accepted as you are, but also where you feel constantly called forward to become what you’re meant to be.
So there has to be this inspirational and challenging quality to the relationship. And the only way those two can be combined is if you really learn the ongoing process of reconciliation. That reconciliation is a process where you are called forward. And I think that’s why I wanted to have the conflict resolution.
But without really thinking it through, I wanted to have the conflict resolution conversation. Because if you don’t practice this, these processes of conflict resolution in community, the community will fall apart. C. S. Lewis says it’s not in the peaks that we grow, it’s in the troughs that we grow. It’s as we work through the hard things together, that relationship is formed.
that we trouble with and for each other. And I feel like we’re in a society that’s very instant. You know, we’re so ready not to do that work. Love is made by working through the hard places together. But working through them together in a way that really is focused on reconciliation. The novel hosts talk about opponents instead of enemies.
that enemies are out to destroy each other and opponents are, you know, they’re through the wrestling, they become something better. So it’s like these processes of reconciliation, um, the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa really brought that country forward on so many levels from what they had gone through.
You know, these processes of truth and reconciliation that we go through together that really take commitment. They take commitment. And I feel like that’s sort of the bottom line. of building revolutionary friendships. Um, there’s a word that Adrian Murray Brown uses co evolutionary, co evolutionary relationships, which I just love that word that you’re, you’re helping each other grow.
Um, Hoyt Axton, the country Western singer, he says this song where he says, I will not rest easy until all your dreams are real.
That’s really beautiful. And
to me, that’s
That’s the, that’s the co evolutionary relationship, that I’m committed to your growth. And that means I have to accept you as you are, just embrace you, but also push you and call you forward. You know, that paradox is at the heart of, of that relationship.
Pam King: When you were first talking about concertación, one of the most beautiful things I thought you said was about seeing the wholeness of the other.
Where in a compromise, you’re giving and taking, like it’s just bits and pieces, it’s transactional. But in concertación, there is an acknowledgement of the whole other person. You’re not asking them to give up who they are, but there’s a recognition and acceptance of who they are, but bringing the best forward.
Alexia Salvatierra: Yeah, sure.
Pam King: And that is how reconciliation happens.
Alexia Salvatierra: Yes, that’s right. You see the possibility that we see each other as the children that we are without the potential to grow. you know, that we never stop in some ways being children. And so you see the child in the other and you love them the way you love a child.
You want to love them into being everything that they can be.
Pam King: With my work in the telos of the reciprocating self, I always think of, you know, we are made to be in mutually reciprocal relationships where we do call the best forth of each other. And every time I have the opportunity to officiate a wedding, that is my prayer for the couple, that they grow more fully into their own selves.
And in their uniqueness as they grow in unity and that coupleness is emergent out of the two but they never lose themselves in that process.
Alexia Salvatierra: Yeah. And you know, I think that I always love the part of the traditional ceremony that says if there’s anybody here that thinks this should stop, say it now, right?
You know, that part of the traditional wedding ceremony. Oh yeah. You know, but you can turn that around and say, um, will y’all do all this in your power community vow to help them, to help them. to be whatever they can be, like to fight the dark forces that could stop this from working. You know, can we unite as a community to fight those dark forces?
Can we support this marriage? And I think that when we were a less fragmented society, that people had more of that support. It’s really, I mean, how can you be married without any support? You know, how can you raise a child without an extended family? I can’t even like name, I can’t even imagine it, but people do, but they do.
And there’s some heroism there, but. You know, we were really, we weren’t made to just do this by ourselves. Marriage is the advanced school of love. And so is parenting.
Pam King: Absolutely. Amen to all of that.
Alexia, I’m so grateful for you to enter in fully as you, um, in this conversation and to offer not just your wisdom and knowledge and insight, but also your intimate personal experience and cultural knowledge.
I really appreciate you bringing so much thought on what is. truth, goodness and beauty and how our faith plays into that. And not just for the ends of our own faith or our own journey, but for a greater vision and a greater dream that involves social transformation and relationality at the core.
Alexia Salvatierra: Amen Pam
Pam King: Alexia Salvatera’s life and work and theological vision all paint a beautiful picture of harmony and shalom.
A collective thriving that invites and embraces everyone and welcomes everyone into the family of abundant life.
The key takeaways that I will carry with me from this conversation are the following.
If your community is not well, then you are not well. Thriving is collective.
We all have a core psychological drive to belong and to be received and to contribute in our families and communities.
Thriving involves a necessary commitment to justice, and is beautifully captured by terms like shalom and concertation
The Christian tradition of compassion and concern for the marginalized can pull us out of our heads out of our tunnel vision and move us towards the transformation of society
And lastly, communicating a common dream or shared vision can help us move from an atomic individualistic mentality to loving community and reconciliation.
With & For is a production of the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary. This episode featured Alexia Salvatierra. This season, new episodes drop every Monday. For more information, visit our website, thethrivecenter. org, where you’ll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose.
I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of The Thrive Center and our With & For podcast team. Jill Westbrook is our senior director and producer. Lauren Kim is our operations manager. Wren Jurgensen is our social media graphic designer. Evan Rosa is our consulting producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy.
I’m your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.
Episode Summary
“If your community is not well, then you are not well.” Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra (Fuller Theological Seminary) is an organizer, activist, and pastor whose career has shown how individual thriving is intertwined with collective justice. With respect for marvelous human complexity, she’s encouraging us to get out of our heads and into our bodies and emotions… and is inviting us to compassion for the marginalized, and to ground our spiritual health in our connectedness to the human family, across cultural and economic lines.
Show Notes
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"What does a healthy community look like? This beautiful image of being unafraid, of everybody having what they need, of everybody having the opportunity to reach their dreams, everybody being able to take care of themselves and not having it taken away from them—all of those are part of the vision of a good life. It's not just an individual good life, it's a communal good life. Concertación, if you were just literally translate it, means 'coming into harmony' and the way that it works in our communities is to hear somebody else with your heart. You hear them from the heart. And when you hear them from the heart, you spontaneously shift. You are automatically standing on common sacred ground and you just shift generously." (Alexia Salvatierra) Wellbeing begins with we. “If your community is not well, then you are not well.” Thriving is collective. But our atomic individualism and narrow focus on ourselves is constantly pulling us away from the mutual belonging, reciprocity, and vibrant flourishing that can only be found by seeking the good of the wider human community—the neighbor, the stranger, the migrant, the farm worker, and the poor. Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra is a scholar, organizer, activist, and pastor, and is Academic Dean of the Centro Latino as well as the Assistant Professor of Integral Mission and Global Transformation at Fuller Theological Seminary. She offers a healing message for those who wrestle with the pain and suffering caused by structural and systemic injustice, calling for listening, empathy, and action. Alexia’s faith is rooted in community and kinship. She affirms the wisdom of the body and cautions against over-intellectualization, offering instead a larger emotional vocabulary, emotional attunement, and the ability to hold and live with complex feelings. The power of community is on display in our ability to celebrate and suffer together. And in Alexia’s work as an activist, she shows how fractured communities can reconcile through the power of a shared dream.In this conversation with Alexia Salvatierra, we discuss:
- The unique wisdom that Latin- a/o culture brings to spiritual and theological conversations about thriving and spiritual health
- The complex, communal, and collective nature of thriving
- How her theology as a Lutheran pastor was formed by compassion and concern for the poor
- The challenge of Western Christians to see beyond individualistic rationality and the atomic unit of the self when thinking about wellness and thriving
- The transformative potential of a common dream to unify and reconcile
- The power of beautiful stories that are deeply connected to truth and goodness
- Seeing relationships as not just an end goal of thriving, but a means to thriving.
About Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra
Rev. Dr. Alexia Salvatierra is the Academic Dean of the Centro Latino at Fuller Theological Seminary, as well as the Assistant Professor of Integral Mission and Global Transformation. Her work is a beautiful mosaic of immigration reform, faith-rooted organizing, cross-cultural ministry, and building vital holistic Christian community. Throughout her career, she’s played a central role in founding and convening communities for social justice, including the New Sanctuary Movement, the Guardian angels Project. Matteo 25 a bipartisan Christian network to protect and defend families facing deportation, the Evangelical Immigration Table, and the Ecumenical Collaboration for Asylum-Seekers. She is co-author of God's Resistance: Mobilizing Faith to Defend Immigrants and Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resiliency of Marginalized Christian Communities.Show Notes
- Explore Alexia’s work in God's Resistance: Mobilizing Faith to Defend Immigrants and Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resiliency of Marginalized Christian Communities.
- “If your community is not well, then you are not well.”
- Pam King introduces Alexia Salvatierra
- Mision Integral and Liberation Theology
- Alexia Salvatierra answers, “What is thriving?”
- Bien estar—”wellbeing”
- Isaiah 65:17-25: “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice for ever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—and their descendants as well. Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.”
- The sounds of healthy community
- Equal value
- We all want to belong
- Frederick Buechner: “Vocation is where the world's deep hunger and our own deep gladness meet.”
- Trauma and faith, agency to combat hopelessness
- Spiritual gift of justice
- Dolorismo: ennobling suffering, suffering in silence
- Orthopathos: when suffering can be useful to make a change
- “The Holy Spirit is your consolation, your consuelo.”
- Surfing the Spirit: Fluidity and dynamic balance
- Serenity Prayer
- “I don’t make the collective an idol.”
- The importance of freedom, while critiquing “super-individualism”
- Discern in the context of community
- Individual discernment
- Liberation theology: “You learn by doing.”
- Meditative Prayer Practice: The Serenity Prayer (In English and Spanish)
- Civil War in Guatemala and Panama
- Dr. Oscar Arias of Costa Rica—informal peace process behind the scenes
- The Dream Exercise and Concertación (”coming into harmony”)
- The difference between concertación and negotiation
- “It’s about generosity.”
- Generosity vs dividing up the check
- Dream Exercise
- “As poor people, we have trouble believing that our dreams can come true, period.”
- Eli Finkel’s All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work
- Social capital and trust
- Jesuits in Asia
- Enculturation: Encountering the truth (and each other) at the intersections of culture
- Orthopoesis and beauty
- Knowing God through beauty, not just truth or goodness
- “De Colores”—the joy of all the colors
- Adrienne Marie Brown and Community Social Transformation
- Peter Heltzel and “revolutionary friendships”
- “We’re a very graceless society. A society at war is a graceless society.”
- Reconciliation: Navajo on opponents instead of enemies, and South Africa
- Hoyt Axton’s “Less Than The Song” (1973)—”I cannot rest easy until all your dreams are real.”
- The co-evolutionary relationship
- “Seeing the wholeness of the other” in concertación
- Loving the child in the other; calling the best forth in each other.
- Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
- Pam King’s key takeaways:
- If your community is not well, then you are not well. Thriving is collective.
- We all have a core psychological drive to belong and be received and contribute in our families and communities.
- Caring for our emotional brains and bodies is essential in seeking collective thriving.
- Thriving involves a necessary commitment to justice, and is beautifully captured by terms like shalom and concertación.
- The Christian tradition of compassion and concern for the marginalized can pull us out of our heads, out of our tunnel vision, and move us toward the transformation of society.
- Communicating a common dream or shared vision can help us move from an atomic individualistic mentality to loving community and reconciliation.
About the Thrive Center
- Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
- Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
- Follow us on X @thrivecenter
- Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter
About Dr. Pam King
Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.About With & For
- Host: Pam King
- Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
- Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
- Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
- Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa
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