THE THING ABOUT GOING INTO SPACES WITH ALL KINDS OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE is that sometimes you wind up in the room listening while somebody calls your kind of person dangerous or stupid or destructive or wicked. Sometimes they say your kind of person is the enemy while you’re sitting there trying your best to love them. I’ve had this experience so many times, in so many contexts. It’s not something anyone is doing to me personally. It’s a side effect of categorical assumptions and dismissals of entire people-groups.

I feel tired sometimes.

Rates of political violence are going up. Threat levels against public servants and elected officials are absurdly high. More than a third of university students in my country now say that physical violence is an acceptable response to objectionable speech, and that number doesn’t change depending on whether the students are left-leaning or right-leaning.

At the Braver Angels national convention, I went to a debate (really more like a dialogue) about school shootings. It was a highly structured conversation. We did not intend to come to a conclusion. But we did hear many different points of view about the issue and quite a lot of suggestions for how we could improve things, including ideas that I never heard before.

My experience of that dialogue was that it was perfectly fine. It was an adequate container for an emotional issue, and what we said and heard was moderately interesting. And this is why I was so confused when other people started talking about how they experienced the event. Most said it was exceptional, transcendent, life-changing. One woman in her fifties raised her hand and said that this was the first time she’d ever had a healthy conversation about a contentious issue with people who disagreed with her.

It’s worth noting that the Braver Angels national convention is literally a self-selected group of people who are interested in healthy conversations across differences. So what does it say that a woman in her fifties who is actively looking for this has never found it before?

I had not realized how strange my Quaker experiences were. Friends enter intense listening processes around questions of great difference very frequently. We don’t always manage to do this with grace. I’ve been in meetings for business where people are shouting, and I’ve been in meetings for business where people are crying. I don’t think either of those two things are really necessary, but they happen often because we are so committed to trying, even when we’re doing it very, very badly. Sometimes we give up, but generally speaking, we stay committed to the relationship long past the point when many others would walk away.

Is there virtue in this?

I can offer secular evidence that there is. I can talk about how relationships across differences, even contentious relationships, even relationships that cannot possibly be called friendships, reduce overall levels of violence because there are feelings of seeing and being seen, because people who have eaten dinner with the “enemy” can’t help knowing that the enemy is still a human being. We can’t make categorical assumptions and dismiss entire people-groups when we know by our own experiences that individuals in that group don’t meet the stereotype.

And I can offer my spiritual experience. It’s very hard for me not to love somebody whom I’ve actually met. People are just so beautiful. And even the ones who are very, very ugly tend to make my heart crack open, because what happened to this precious child of God? Who hurt this person to make them believe that they must think and act this way?

When I think about God and the fact that God knows us, I understand why we say “God is love.” See, if I love each new person I meet–and sometimes that feeling becomes so much that it’s hard to hold–then how much love must God have to know 8.3 billion people? And yet, it’s even more than that, because love doesn’t end with death. So really, God loves all of the 117 billion people who have ever lived, and then we start thinking about animals and plants, and…well. God can’t possibly have space left over for anything else but love.

The thing about going into spaces with all kinds of different people is that sometimes you wind up in the room listening while somebody calls your kind of person dangerous or stupid or destructive or wicked. And yet we must keep doing it. Not all the time. It’s a hard thing to do, so I think we take breaks. But sometimes, we have to do this, if for no other reason than the fact that somebody has to go first. Moreover, I think that we who are Friends must witness this to others, and explicitly, and teach how it’s done. There should be no woman in her fifties who has never had a healthy conversation with people she disagrees with.

Plans are not in place yet, and the ideas are still forming, but my intention is to spend most of 2027 in universities and high schools, because somehow these things must be talked about with our young people–the idea, the reality, that relationship (even an oppositional relationship) is always more likely to lead to transformation than refusing to be in one another’s presence.

To “answer that of God in everyone” is inextricably linked with “living in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.” When I, or my friends, or my ideas are called dangerous, I want to be living proof right in front of somebody that that is not so.

Courageous Dialogues You Can Join This Month
Online or in San Antonio, Texas

Good News Associate, Emily Provance, is hosting a series of interactive workshops featuring speakers with diverse experiences around political violence—pastors, peacemakers, and commentators from the U.S. and Northern Ireland. Quakers of San Antonio Friends Meeting have offered space and their internet connection for these hybrid events. Attend any or all of the sessions. They are specifically designed to be as welcoming to non-Quakers as Quakers, and even to people who are not people of faith, so feel free to spread the word.

Why Should I Talk to My Neighbor?

August 10, Monday 7pm-8:30pm central time: A Conversation with Michael Mather.

• Mike Mather is a Methodist pastor at the First United Methodist Church of Boulder. His book, Having Nothing, Possessing Everything: Finding Abundant Communities in Unexpected Places, portrays the experience of a local church that decided to identify and support the natural gifts of the people around it, whether they came to worship or not. The tools and strategies we’ll discuss are relevant to both faith-based and secular audiences. Online registration here.

August 12, Wednesday, 7pm-8pm central time: Study and Discussion of the FIRE College Free Speech Survey.

• The Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression recently discovered that 34% of university students in the United States believe that physical violence is at least sometimes an acceptable response to objectionable speech. What are the effects of such beliefs? Here is the survey. Online registration here.

How Do I Talk to My Neighbor?

August 17, Monday, 7pm-8:30pm central time: A Bible Study of Acts 15. Online registration here.

August 19, Wednesday, 7pm-8pm central time: Words We Use, Study and Discussion of the “Talk Bridgey” Report from PACE.

• The organization “Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement” recently published an updated version of the civic language perceptions project, which is a report on how various words are defined and perceived differently based on political leaning, class, generation, and other factors. You can download the report here. Online registration here.

August 22, Saturday, 1pm-2pm central time: Learning from Northern Ireland: Will Haire.

• Quaker Will Haire spent decades in civil service in Northern Ireland and will share perspectives on how we can best speak with and coexist with our neighbors. Online registration here.

Can Changemaking and Peacemaking Coexist?

 August 24, Monday, 7pm-8pm central time, Political Violence By The Numbers. Study and Discussion of Rachel Kleinfeld’s Substack on Political Violence Data. You can read the Substack here. Online registration here.

August 26, Wednesday, 7pm-8:30pm central time: A Bible Study of 1 John 1 and Matthew 5. Online registration here.

August 29, Saturday, 1pm-2pm central time: Learning from Northern Ireland: Paul Smyth.

• Paul Smyth is the executive director of “Politics in Action,” a charity in Northern Ireland that builds learning journeys with young people and adults that empower them to act together on issues that matter to them to achieve social change. Online registration here.

August 31, Monday, 7pm-8:30pm central time: A Conversation with Mónica Guzmán on Changemaking and Peacemaking.

• Mónica Guzmán is a bridge builder, journalist, and author who lives for great conversations sparked by curious questions. Her best-selling book is, I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. This will be a Spanish/English bilingual conversation with interpretation. Online registration here.