Some may call Andrew DeCort a “dissident theologian” — but that’s fine by him. He’s unafraid to speak up about the importance of allowing God’s love to teach us to see people not as strangers or enemies, but as neighbors. In 2016, he founded the Institute for Faith and Flourishing in Chicago, and in 2019, he cofounded the Neighbor-Love Movement in Ethiopia. Together, the two ministries have impacted over 20 million people. An accomplished author, Andrew’s latest book is Reviving the Golden Rule, which explores how the ancient ethic of neighbor-love can heal the world.

In today’s conversation, Andrew shares how he and his wife enjoy blending Chicago and Ethiopian culture at the dinner table and how he’s witnessed God showing up through strangers. He also gets honest about how he pushes through when the tragedy of human suffering becomes too much for him and the resources that have shaped his views on faith and nonviolent peacemaking.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?

My favorite meal happens at home with my wife, Lily, near Chicago, often with friends around our table. We love cooking Ethiopian dishes — spicy stews, sautéed vegetables and sizzling beef — and serving them alongside deep-dish pizza. It’s an unusual pairing, but it captures our story.

Lily and I met 18 years ago in Addis Ababa. I was working on a sermon in a coffee shop when I scribbled my number on a scrap of paper and gave it to her. She called, and three years later, we were married. Since then, our lives have stretched between Ethiopia and Chicago.

Ethiopian food is eaten by hand, shared from one plate, a ritual of breaking bread together. It’s messy but soul-filling. Deep-dish, by contrast, is thick, heavy and unapologetically cheesy. They couldn’t be more different, yet we delight in bringing them together on one table.

I don’t know anyone else who eats Ethiopian food and Chicago pizza at the same time. But for us, it’s more than a meal; it’s a picture of our life. Our marriage, friendships and work all ask us to live in the tensions of different places, languages and cultures. Sometimes it’s awkward and even ache-filled. But it’s also where we discover something transformative: difference isn’t a threat to overcome, but a gift to cherish. And when we bring what’s different together with love, something new and delicious always emerges.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?

Walking a local prairie path has become essential to my spiritual practice. I call it my little “Camino,” a daily pilgrimage in everyday life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “Christ plays in 10,000 places,” and St. Francis called creatures his siblings. I glimpse that truth on the prairie. The trees are my teachers, their limbs pointing in every direction, inviting me to notice what God has made. I pray with my eyes open, beholding creation and the neighbors who bear God’s image. Moving my body into stillness, I listen for the quiet whisper: “I’m here.”

Last Christmas Eve, I woke with an odd anger I couldn’t explain. Then I realized it was my first Christmas since my dad died. I went, as I often do, to the path. Soon, I stepped over some words scribbled in chalk: “Drop trou, defecate.” Crude, even offensive. But I laughed out loud. My dad was the only person I’ve ever heard use that phrase. In that strange moment, it felt like God’s mischievous smile, reminding me that my dad was safe and mysteriously still near. On a cold morning of grief, I received resurrection hope through the weird words of a stranger.

I’m learning that God is not confined to places we elevate as sacred. God meets me in the trees, in the ache of loss and even in graffiti that carries an echo of my father’s voice. The “unspiritual” becomes deeply spiritual when I walk the prairie path.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you confront its power?

The grief of human suffering unsettles my soul. I’ve lost my dad and a young friend named Eyob, who was homeless in Addis Ababa, and I’ve witnessed the devastation of Ethiopia’s recent civil war. Over a million people were killed and thousands of women raped. These sorrows haunt me.

I hold a Ph.D. in religious ethics from the University of Chicago. I seek and write about God’s presence in the painful realities of life. And yet my heart is still devastated by human suffering. I sometimes cry out, “Why, God?” On my worst days, I question if God is absent, incompetent or terrible. I ask if loss is the end of our story and whether I have the strength to endure.

This tension frustrates me. My own writing records many encounters with God’s mysterious presence — including that moment when random graffiti strangely echoed my dad’s voice and renewed my hope. I’ve met God most intimately in unlikely places, even in Eyob’s short but luminous life. But the ache of being human still disturbs me and can leave me empty.

My response is not a neat solution. I keep walking, praying, writing and sharing in honest relationship with others, even when my faith feels fragile. I resist hiding my questions and my tears, holding Jesus’ words, “Blessed are the grieving, because they will be comforted” (see Matt. 5:4). And I’ve found that the very weakness that unsettles me also keeps me open — to God, to others and to discovering love where I least expect it.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?

I met Eyob, a homeless child in Addis Ababa, on the brink of death. Ethiopia is one of the most religious countries in the world, filled with churches, mosques and spiritual messages. Yet no one came to his aid until it was too late. That searing experience left me with the question that obsesses me still: How do we see others?

Apparently, Eyob wasn’t seen as worthy of care. He was “othered” — reduced to someone outside the circle of human connection. Othering is subtle but devastating. It allows us to walk past suffering as if it has nothing to do with us.

At the heart of the Christian faith is a radically different vision: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This way of seeing could have saved Eyob’s life. And it’s urgently needed now, in a world where “others” are increasingly cast as threats or enemies. But few of us know where this moral revolution came from or how it has transformed societies.

My next book, “Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World,” tells that story — from its roots in the ancient world to its role in some of history’s most daring overthrows of othering.

I’m a writer and teacher, but at my core, I’m a witness haunted by Eyob’s memory. My vocation focuses on helping people recover this life-giving way of seeing so that others like him are never invisible again and “enemies” can re-see one another as precious neighbors.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

I’m repeatedly amazed by how God shows up through strangers. I know it’s God when my love is stretched wider across differences that might otherwise divide us.

Recently, while visiting my sister-in-law in Scotland, I walked with a local mom named Sabea while their daughters were at gymnastics. She shared about the fear of living in her homeland, caught between Russia and Iran and under constant threat of invasion. As she spoke, my heart grew heavy.

But her face radiated joy. Curious, I asked if she believed in God. She smiled and said yes, very passionately. I then asked her to describe this God in five words, without naming her religion. Without hesitation, she answered: “All-merciful, powerful, Creator, beautiful, kind.” These weren’t abstract doctrines. They were the passions of her soul.

What she didn’t know was that I was in a dark season myself, struggling not to despair over the suffering in our world. Yet as she spoke, something in me lifted. Her faith brought tears to my eyes and fresh hope to my heart. I felt the presence of God more vividly with her than in church gatherings earlier on my trip.

Only later did I learn that Sabea is Muslim. This experience was another whisper of the Holy Spirit that love is always more spacious, and God nearer, than I often imagine. In God’s love, strangers become neighbors, and hope is revived.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?

I’m in one of those fallow seasons we don’t often talk about: my spiritual practices don’t feel like they’re “working,” at least not in the sense of feeling good or triumphant. I long for God. I spend time in prayer, study and friendship. And yet, an unsettled emptiness persists. A voice inside me says, “You’re invalidating yourself. People only want to hear about what works.” But I believe honesty is essential to any authentic relationship with God.

In this season, the practice I keep returning to is daily meditation on the Beatitudes. This was the focus of my previous book “Blessed Are the Others” and is the heartbeat of my Substack, “Reframe.” Jesus begins with a startling promise: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That’s a strange way to launch a movement. Yet his words assure those who feel empty, inadequate or drained that they are not abandoned. God’s kingdom — God’s unconditional belovedness and belonging — embraces us even when we cannot feel it.

Meditating on this promise is a kind of challenging comfort. It reminds me that Jesus spoke first to people like me, who know inner poverty from the inside. He didn’t dismiss that experience as failure; he named it as the doorway into joy. This is a practice I cling to: receiving the Beatitudes not as lofty ideals but as living reminders that God meets us precisely in our emptiness.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?

Brother Lawrence’s classic “The Practice of the Presence of God” compactly describes how our everyday activities, like washing dishes, can become ways of opening ourselves to God. In this spirituality, the “sacred” and “secular” are reintegrated. As a war and plague survivor who lived with chronic pain, Lawrence has real credibility.

Terrence Malick’s movie “The Tree of Life” has spoken to my soul across the years. It tells the story of a family that suffers a terrible loss. The mother (Jessica Chastain) grieves fiercely but remains tender and grows in grace. The father (Brad Pitt) endures by hardening himself and becoming harsh in the face of failure. Eventually, he confesses, “I couldn’t see the glory when everything was shining all around me.” In this exploration of beauty and suffering, Malick subtly witnesses that there is hope for all of us.

For the third, I might cheat and bundle together Martin Luther King Jr.’s book “Strength to Love” and Erica Chenoweth’s 2013 TEDx talk “The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance.” We live in a time of escalating othering and violence. King’s book distills his nonviolent spirituality, which revolved around Jesus’ command to love our neighbors, including our enemies. Chenoweth’s TEDx talk then summarizes her groundbreaking research findings: nonviolent strategies are twice as effective as violent ones at transforming our political conflicts. Our best data indicates that Jesus, King and other advocates of nonviolent peacemaking were not weak or utopian but prophets of a more excellent way we need today.

Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. Does technology ever help you this way? Has an app ever boosted your spiritual growth? If so, how?

Counterintuitively, engaging with people on Facebook has boosted my spiritual growth.

During Ethiopia’s civil war, I became a prominent advocate for a peaceful, nonmilitary resolution to the conflict. I emphasized that, in God’s eyes, all human life is sacred and worthy of care. For my Christian readers, I highlighted Jesus’ teaching “Love your enemies” and his insistence on nonviolent responses to aggression. I also pointed to the undeniable realities that the violence was leading to mass death, displacement and devastation. But this position was extremely unpopular. My posts were regularly met with harsh insults, bitter character assassination and even death threats. During these years, I received countless hate messages threatening my life.

But Facebook became a platform to publicly work out my commitment to Jesus’ way of loving enemies and practicing nonviolence. Emerging out of my work in the Neighbor-Love Movement, I made a covenant with myself to never use insulting language in response to insults but to model respect. I tried my best to engage angry criticisms with empathy and curiosity, seeking to hear the grief beneath the rage. I honestly pointed out how the majority of the hatred that I (and many others) were encountering was coming from fellow Christians, inviting self-examination and repentance.

This kind of public dialogue amid extreme polarization is grueling. But it helped refine and strengthen my attempt to say yes to Jesus’ call to love my neighbors and to refuse to mirror hatred in the work of confronting it.

QUESTION #8: dream

God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

I’ve begun work on a new book about Christmas and how God is born into our world. In many ways, it grows out of a theme that runs through my previous books: God’s nearness to those we often overlook or push away.

What amazes me is how often the heart of Christmas gets lost in American culture, even among Christians. At its center, Christmas reveals God’s desire to bring dignity and belonging to unexpected people. Jesus’ great-grandmothers were scandalous sufferers who would likely be erased from today’s church stories, but they are named in his genealogy. Mary was a pregnant teenager who sang of God overthrowing the powerful and lifting the poor. Joseph defied religious law to protect Mary with mercy. And the first official visitors were foreigners, outsiders to Israel’s faith. Again and again, the birth of Christ unfolds around people religion tends to exclude.

Writing always mingles excitement and insecurity for me. The old questions surface: Can I do this? Will anyone care? Is my vocation sustainable? I’m living in the vulnerability of trying to say yes to God’s leading once more.

In a way, this project feels like another table set with pizza and injera — that unlikely but delicious pairing. Christmas, too, is about surprising combinations: holiness and humility, divinity and humanity, glory and scandal. My desire is to help us rediscover this story so we can see how God is still born in the least expected places today.

Andrew’s call to notice the outcast, the rejected and the overlooked is timely, considering the social and political turmoil of our world today. What does it mean to, in Andrew’s words, “bring dignity and belonging to unexpected people”? Maybe it looks like what Jesus did with the Samaritan woman. Or what God did with Hagar. Or what Samuel did with David.

May his words move us to self-reflection.

Ask yourself: who am I overlooking? Who is God calling me to notice and love today? How can I embrace God by embracing that person?

🎉 Easter Egg Activated!

Andrew DeCort