Education Quote by James Green Somerville

Somerville smuggles a quiet provocation into what looks like pastoral humility: he refuses to let status be the organizing principle of a community. The sentence opens with the kind of name-droppable power roster that usually signals prestige by proximity - congressmen, judges, Federal Reserve governors. Then he swivels, hard, to the people most institutions would rather keep out of frame: the homeless, the mentally ill. The hinge word is "also". It flattens the hierarchy without pretending the hierarchy doesn't exist.

The real intent sits in the second line, where "talk to" becomes a moral skill rather than a social reflex. Somerville isn't claiming saintliness; he's admitting fluency takes work. That admission carries subtext: even in a congregation - a place that claims radical equality - our default settings are calibrated to power. We know how to speak up the ladder. Speaking across, or down (a revealing direction in itself), requires unlearning.

Contextually, the quote reads like an observation from someone who has spent years watching institutions perform inclusion while quietly sorting people by comfort level. As a writer, Somerville frames conversation as craft: you develop an ear for different registers, different needs, different vulnerabilities. There's cynicism here, but it's targeted. Not at the people on either end of the spectrum, but at the easy fantasy that community is automatic. He's telling you it isn't. It's practiced, and the practice is political.