I have been learning so much about Dolly Parton since her death. The more I have learned, the more taken I have become by a life invested in something I can only describe as a beautifully holistic vision of flourishing—the flourishing of people, communities, places, and possibilities. The flourishing of all and everything.
So I started writing a tribute to Dolly.
And then I learned of the death of Gloria Steinem.
Suddenly I found myself holding these two women together.
There are people whose lives make the world feel larger. People whose presence, work, courage, and generosity somehow expand what seems possible for the rest of us. I am holding so much gratitude for these two leaders whose lives, in remarkably different ways, pointed toward a better world. They did not share the same vocabulary, politics, spirituality, aesthetics, or strategy. At first glance, they could hardly appear more different. And yet, somehow, both made more room for other people to live.
Steinem—the journalist, organizer, feminist, public intellectual, and movement-builder. For decades she named the ways patriarchy diminishes women and, in doing so, diminishes us all. She challenged structures that had learned to disguise domination as normalcy. She helped generations of women imagine lives beyond the roles assigned to them.
Parton—the rhinestones, enormous hair, Appalachian songs, self-deprecating jokes, astonishing songwriting, business empire, and Dollywood. A woman who somehow became one of those rare public figures capable of being loved across enormous cultural and political divides.
One confronted systems that constricted life. The other seemed almost instinctively to create spaces where life could expand.
One organized movements. The other wrote songs people sang while driving home from work, built businesses that employed her neighbors, and put books into the hands of children.
But perhaps these are not such different vocations after all. Both spent their lives enlarging the possibility of flourishing.
Gloria: Flourishing Requires Liberation
Gloria Steinem understood something fundamental: people cannot flourish inside systems designed to make them smaller.
Sometimes love must name what is wrong. Sometimes flourishing requires protest. Sometimes making room for life means confronting whatever is taking up too much room. Sometimes the work of creating a more beautiful world begins by refusing the world as it has been given to us.
Steinem helped expose how deeply patriarchy had entered our assumptions about work, family, sexuality, politics, bodies, leadership, and power. The genius of feminist consciousness-raising was partly its insistence that experiences women had been taught to regard as private failures were often manifestations of public systems. Steinem spent decades organizing around equality and women’s rights and helped build institutions intended to carry that work beyond any single charismatic leader.
The personal is political. That insight changed the world. It also feels deeply theological to me. Because Shalom cannot mean merely helping people feel at peace inside conditions that diminish them. Shalom is not learning to tolerate our diminishment more gracefully.
Biblical Shalom has always carried a social imagination. It asks about bodies and bread, power and land, neighbor and stranger. It is concerned not merely with whether I am flourishing but with the conditions that make flourishing possible—or impossible—for my neighbor, my community, and ultimately the whole creation.
It refuses a peace purchased through somebody else’s diminishment. Flourishing requires liberation.
And Steinem’s life reminds me that liberation is rarely bestowed by those benefiting from the arrangements that make it necessary. Someone has to notice. Someone has to speak. Someone has to organize. Someone has to gather people who thought they were suffering alone and help them discover that their stories belong to one another.
There is something profoundly beautiful about that. Flourishing is not simply growing wherever we happen to have been planted. Sometimes we have to break the pot. Sometimes faithful presence means standing up, speaking clearly, organizing collectively, and saying: This does not have to be this way. Another world is possible.
Dolly: Flourishing Through Generosity
And then there is Dolly.
Dolly Parton seems to have practiced flourishing differently. She made room.
The more I learn about her life, the more struck I am by the sheer range of her generosity. Not generosity merely as philanthropy, but generosity as a way of inhabiting the world. She gave books to children. She invested in the communities of Appalachia from which she came. She created jobs. She supported education, disaster relief, medical research, and countless forms of ordinary human possibility. Her Imagination Library alone grew from a program for children in her home county into an enormous literacy effort distributing books to children around the world.
But I think there is something deeper here.
Dolly seemed to understand that my flourishing need not come at the expense of yours. That may be one of the most countercultural convictions a human being can embody.
So much of our world is organized around scarcity: there is only so much attention, wealth, power, belonging, beauty, success, or love to go around. If you receive more, perhaps I receive less. Dolly seemed to operate from another imagination. …Abundance.
She became extraordinarily successful without severing herself from the people and place that formed her. She accumulated wealth and then repeatedly turned that wealth outward. She became famous and somehow retained the capacity to make ordinary people feel seen. And she did all of this while remaining gloriously, unmistakably herself.
Perhaps that too was part of her witness.
Dolly never seemed particularly interested in becoming respectable. She exaggerated herself. The hair got higher. The rhinestones sparkled brighter. The jokes about her appearance arrived before anyone else could make them. She took cultural expectations that might have been used to diminish her and turned them into theater.
There was liberation there too. Beneath all that sparkle was an extraordinarily shrewd woman who knew the value of her work, protected her agency, built institutions, and apparently never accepted the premise that becoming powerful required becoming less herself. Maybe flourishing looks something like that too: becoming more fully alive without requiring someone else to become less.
And perhaps Dolly’s most compelling gift was her unusual resistance to contempt. That does not mean she lacked convictions. It means she seemed to have cultivated another way of carrying them. She kept the table strangely wide. In an age increasingly organized around sorting human beings into allies and enemies, worthy and unworthy, enlightened and ignorant, Dolly seemed to keep asking a wonderfully simple question:
Is there room for one more?
Flourishing Needs Liberation and Generosity
This is why I find myself inspired to hold Gloria and Dolly together. Not because they were the same. Precisely because they weren’t. They reveal something about flourishing that I need to remember.
We need Gloria’s clarity. And we need Dolly’s generosity. We need people willing to identify the structures that prevent flourishing. And we need people capable of creating little ecosystems in which flourishing can actually happen. We need protest. And hospitality. Resistance. And generosity. Truth-telling that interrupts injustice and tables wide enough for people to discover that another way of being together is possible.
Maybe these aren’t competing approaches at all. Maybe they belong to one another.
Because liberation without the cultivation of flourishing risks knowing only what it is against. And generosity without liberation can become sentimentality—kindness that leaves the structures of diminishment untouched. Shalom asks more of us. Shalom asks: What is keeping life from flourishing here?
And then: What might I do to help life flourish?
One question turns us toward injustice. The other turns us toward possibility. We need both. This may be one of the central questions of practical theology for me: What practices form us into people capable of participating with G-d in the flourishing of all and everything?
Gloria answers, in part: Tell the truth about power. Listen to people’s stories. Organize. Refuse the diminishment of another human being. Change the structures that make diminishment seem inevitable.
Dolly answers: Give something away. Make room. Remember where you came from. Help a child read. Invest in your neighbors. Laugh at yourself. Make something beautiful. Refuse to let difference extinguish affection.
And perhaps together their lives offer another lesson I desperately need right now: There is no single faithful way to participate in the healing of the world.
Some march. Some organize. Some write. Some sing. Some build movements. Some build amusement parks. Some testify before Congress. Some give away books. Some expose what has been hidden. Some write songs that somehow give us language for heartbreak we didn’t know how to name. Some create beauty in places where beauty has been scarce.
Most of us, if we are fortunate, will learn to do a little of several of these. The point is not to become Gloria Steinem. The point is not to become Dolly Parton. The invitation is to become more fully ourselves—and then to offer that self toward the flourishing of others. That, increasingly, is how I have come to imagine Shalom.
It is a world in which nothing needs to be diminished in order for something else to flourish. A world where your freedom enlarges mine. Where my abundance becomes something I can share. Where difference becomes gift rather than threat. Where power is turned toward making room. Where liberation clears away what constricts life, and generosity tends what begins to grow.
Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton traveled remarkably different roads.One spent much of her life helping us recognize the walls. The other kept opening doors. And, of course, that distinction is too simple. Gloria opened countless doors. Dolly quietly pushed against plenty of walls.
Maybe that is precisely the point. There are a thousand ways to make room for life. These two remarkable women found theirs. And this week, as I grieve their deaths and give thanks for their lives, I find myself asking about mine:
What is mine to confront?
What is mine to cultivate?
Where can I make a little more room for life?
Thank you Gloria & thank you Dolly, dwight
