The Future of Marriage ~ In the Room with Jonathan Rauch and David Blankenhorn (live video)
when: Wed. Oct. 10th, 2012 (12pm CT/1pm ET)
where: The Humphrey Institute, Minneapolis
Read and participate online here:
As our civilization struggles with how to define marriage, Krista will be talking with two leaders who have been on two sides of the gay marriage debate and see a way beyond acrimony.
Redefining the definition of marriage is a monumental cultural transition. But we’ve reduced our public deliberation of this matter — even inside our religious institutions — to a matter of votes and laws. The reality is, even one-third of Democrats still express opposition to gay marriage. But younger people of every political and moral persuasion are coming to a collective comfort level and consensus.
Jonathan Rauch is a gay man and gay marriage advocate who respects the values and concerns of social conservatives and wants them taken seriously. David Blankenhorn is a self-identified liberal Democrat and long-time family and marriage advocate, who testified for gay marriage opponents during California’s Prop. 8 ballot initiative. But he has recently withdrawn his legal opposition to gay marriage, acknowledging the emerging moral consensus. They have developed a friendship that has surprised and changed them both.
We’ll listen in on their common struggle to respond compassionately to both sides of our human and civilizational encounter with same-sex union, and to discuss it in terms of civil society and a pro-family agenda.
We’ll be live streaming this dialogue. Watch along and participate in the dialogue taking place online!
For those of you who can’t make it, not to worry. We’re live-tweeting at @Beingtweets (hash tag is #ccp2012).
Please be part of this. Submit questions to our guests, and participate in our live video stream.
Political Bridge People: Restoring Civility to the Debt Discussion with Alice Rivlin and Senator Pete Domenici (watch video)
when: Tues, Oct. 9th, 2012 (9am CT/10am ET)
where: The Brookings Institution, Washington DC
The video begins at 25:35.
Read the participation of the online community here:
When we talk about debt reduction and fiscal policy, numbers often dominate the discussion. But they don’t tell the whole story. How do we step outside the competing numbers that frame our economic debates, and consider together the human and moral realities behind them? How can we make a personal connection to fiscal policy that shapes our lives? How do we restore civility to the debt discussion?
This morning, from the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, Krista leads a conversation with Senator Pete Domenici, a former six-term Republican from New Mexico and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton and the first director of the Congressional Budget Office.
We’ll be live streaming this dialogue. Watch along and participate in the dialogue taking place online!
For those of you who can’t make it, not to worry. We’re live-tweeting at @Beingtweets (hash tag is #ccp2012).
Please be part of this. Submit questions to our guests, and participate in our live video stream.
Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Pro-Dialogue: A Civil Conversations Project Live Event with Frances Kissling and David Gushee (video)
when: Wed, Sep 26th, 2012 (3pm CST/4pm EST)
where: Humphrey School of Public Affairs, U of Minnesota
Discuss with others and ask your questions here:
Today Krista Tippett hosts the second of four live public events of The Civil Conversations Project (CCP). Krista’s guests at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs are Frances Kissling and David Gushee.
They belong to a constellation of reproductive choice and rights activists who are exploring real relationship with their political opposites. These encounters are scarcely imaginable against the backdrop of the absolute poles that frame better-publicized confrontation. David Gushee, who opposes abortion, has written this:
“Our legal stalemate about abortion is like a football game, with the two rival teams pushing each other back and forth across the 50-yard line and neither team able to win — especially if winning is defined by either the total banning of abortion on the one side or its unhindered legalization and funding as a routine health care practice on the other. The pro-life and pro-choice establishments appear committed to the continuation of this game of smash-mouth abortion football until the end of time. It is quite a spectacle, but the legal struggle is actually a distraction from the unresolved cultural and moral issues that have created it.”
This civil conversation will start there — with what is really at stake — and break out of the confines and categories of the usual debates.
Please be part of this. Submit questions to our guests, and participate in our live video stream.
Change and Hope Come from the Margins
by Krista Tippett, host
I can only urge you to listen to this wise voice of history and its deep resonance for the contemporary world. Vincent Harding uses the word “magnificent” often and he embodies that word.
He offers an essential and utterly helpful perspective, I feel, to our ongoing collective reflection on civility, moral imagination, and social healing. He was a friend and speechwriter of Martin Luther King Jr. and a force in the philosophy of nonviolence that drove the civil rights movement’s success. That is to say, he was at the center of a moment of human and societal transformation that was wrested from another American era of toxic division and social violence. And Vincent Harding has continued to mine the lessons of that time in the intervening decades, and to bring them creatively and usefully to young people today.
These are stories we rarely see or hear, and they are happening in neighborhoods in places like Detroit and Philadelphia where our lens is usually focused on despair and decay.
So among other things — interestingly, from a very different direction, echoing my conversation with Frances Kissling — Vincent Harding reminds us that change and hope come from the margins. And he has stories to tell about that hope as it’s embodied and lived on the margins of today.
This is also a beautiful hour of production — rich with the music by which people, as Vincent Harding puts it, did not merely demonstrate but “sang” their way to freedom in the 1960s. You will never hear the song “This Little Light of Mine” or the phrase “a Kumbaya moment” in the same way again. Enjoy, and be enriched.
How Do We Live and Honor Each Other Despite Our Differences?
by Krista Tippett, host
This show with Richard Mouw was as hard as any in my memory to produce, edit, script — and even to justify, as news unfolded while we were creating it.
I have known Richard Mouw for 15 years and interviewed him on this program in its early days. Other Evangelical Christian leaders have been more visible in American political and media life: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, James Dobson, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and on the more progressive side Jim Wallis and Richard Cizik. I have followed them, but I have also always kept my ear and eye on quieter figures like Richard Mouw. As president of Fuller Theological Seminary, with more than 4,000 students from 70 countries and over 100 denominations, he is training generations of Evangelical and Pentecostal pastors and global leaders.
A book he first wrote in 1992, Uncommon Decency, has recently been released in a revised version with the subtitle, “Christian Civility in an Uncivil World.” Mouw has long been a kind of bridge person — theologically conservative on some issues and more progressive on others — but he most fervently insists that the way people are treated is a greater measure of Christian virtue than the positions one takes. I’ve wondered rhetorically how our political life would have evolved differently if the Christian re-emergence into politics in the late 20th century had modeled a practical love of enemies.
My own deepest despair at present is not about the vitriol and division per se — as alarming as they are. It is about the fact that we seem to be losing any connective tissue for engaging at all, on a human level, across ruptures of disagreement. Across the political spectrum, many increasingly turn to journalism not for knowledge but to confirm individual pre-existing points of view. What we once called the red state, blue state divide is now more like two parallel universes where understandings of plain fact are no longer remotely aligned. This leads to a diminishing sense of the humanity of those who think and live differently than we do. And that is the ultimate moral slippery slope, for everyone on it and for the fabric of our civic life.
Richard Mouw lays out the imperative to all kinds of Christians for gentleness, reverence, humanity, and “honor” of the different other at the heart of the Bible and the life of Jesus. But this is not a feel-good plea for harmony. Even as he calls for civility and gentleness, Mouw reasserts his public and private opposition to gay marriage and civil unions. The civility he calls for would not minimize difference, at least at the outset, but would create a different space for discussing and navigating it — indeed for bringing differences into public life with virtue and vitality of expression. Picking up on a phrase coined by Christian historian Martin Marty, Richard Mouw builds upon this idea of “convicted civility.”
We had impassioned and difficult discussions on our production team about his ideas, and the complications and contradictions they present. When he says that, as a Christian, he sees other human beings as “works of divine art,” can that genuinely apply to a person whose sexual identity he defines as fundamentally wrong?
This all drives towards a question I pursue in so many of my conversations: How does social change happen? We will not all be “on the same page,” as Americans like to be, on sexuality or many other issues for generations to come. The 21st century has opened up questions Western civilization thought it had put to rest. Some of them are intimate and raw, terrifying in every life at some point and therefore all the more unsettling when we are forced to ponder them out in the open together. Same-sex marriage is but the tip of an iceberg of human redefinition: What is relationship? What is marriage? What is friendship? What constitutes a family? In this messy moment, we retain our rights and responsibilities as human beings and citizens to discern our truths and live by them. But we have no choice, at the same time, if we want this to end well, to search for new ways to discern our multiple truths while living together.
Richard Mouw suggests that we need to start some of our conversations again from the beginning, certainly the conversation about sexuality. He believes that only by naming our hopes and our fears, articulating them among ourselves, revealing them to each other, can we begin to recreate something called a common life, which can contain, and not be destroyed by, our differences. I want to believe him, to believe that this is one answer to the question of how social change happens. If I didn’t believe that a new kind of conversation can also be a starting point for walking forwards together — living together, differently — I would not do what I do.
And yet, maybe another reality we have to live with is that these critical new conversations will start small, in many places, compelling us to connect dots for awhile in lieu of convening the sweeping dialogue we might hope for. We’ve posted a piece we admire by fellow journalist Sasha Aslanian titled “Sex, Death, and Secrets” — featuring an interview with two lesbian pastors who’ve experienced a roller coaster ride of discernment within their own denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Please add your thoughts, stories, and pictures — your dots, if you will — to this difficult, dispersed, essential conversation.
The Key to Relationship? Good Old-Fashioned Conversation about Everyday Topics
by Krista Tippett, host
As I write this, I am still reeling from the nine-day production trip that took us to Jerusalem as well as Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron. Suffice it to say, everything I thought I understood about Israeli and Palestinian realities, indeed about “the Middle East” in general, was cracked wide open.
I realized in a whole new way how the humanity of those people, places, and histories is simplified and distorted by our focus on the politics of the region. We will be producing five or six shows in the coming weeks and months, hoping to open that up for our listeners as it was opened up for us.
And so it is with a bit of cognitive dissonance, but happily, that we release our show with Kwame Anthony Appiah this week. Of all of the “Civil Conversation” voices we’ve interviewed up to now, his credentials are the most erudite and global. He is the incoming president of the PEN American Center, a Princeton philosopher, and an American citizen raised and educated between the country we now know as Ghana and the United Kingdom. He has written sweeping, fascinating, and influential books, including Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. In his latest work, he analyzes the real-world ingredients of social change and “moral progress” in disparate times and places — the end of foot-binding in China, for example, or of the slave trade as a social and economic staple of the British Empire.
Anthony Appiah also has a rare kind of personal moral authority with which to analyze such things, and that makes him the kind of voice I love.
His intellectual passion is leavened by life experience. He is the product of a seismic cultural shift that seemed unimaginable but then transpired within a generation. Every culture has had these. In my lifetime, there is the fact that black people were still sitting in the backs of buses in American cities. And the interracial 1953 marriage of Anthony Appiah’s African father and British mother — the daughter of a former chancellor of the exchequer — was condemned as morally repugnant, the stuff of global headlines.
I pursue a bit of a thought experiment with him for the purposes of this conversation. What if we considered the breakdown of civility in American political, media, and cultural life as a moral crisis — a condition fed by our worst instincts and destructive of our highest ideals, which will rot us from the inside if we don’t address and correct it? How might Anthony Appiah’s knowledge about moral change inform our words and actions moving forward?
For all the gravity of that question and the scholarly intelligence Anthony Appiah brings to it, his response is a relief. Sometimes we need to address difference head on, he says, but often the best way is to “sidle up to it” — to accept and live it without forcing agreement or even addressing it head on.
He echoes a point made forcefully by Frances Kissling on this program, speaking from the context of the abortion debate, that our rush to come to agreement can get in the way of really understanding each other. But Anthony Appiah brings this closer to the ground. He muses on how differences retain their vitality within extended networks of friendship and family — not going away, often, but also not presenting a stumbling block to relationship. Appiah is a gay man, and he relates in his personal history experiences of family who may not accept his sexuality as moral, but with whom he can stay in loving relationship.
What we need more than agreement, he says, are simple habits of association with different others, encounters that breed familiarity. There is real social and even moral value to be had, he suggests, when we connect with others even on the most mundane topics of who we are and how we spend our days — whether it be soccer or football, shared hobbies or parenting. In fact, Anthony Appiah says, this kind of human exchange — as much a matter of presence as of words — is the old-fashioned meaning of the word “conversation.”
The trick in our time, of course, is that the world is conspiring against human presence even as it gives us a million new ways to connect. We have to work particularly hard to seek out those who are different from us. Anthony Appiah’s analysis on this point is provocative and helpful, one other piece of the puzzle of what has gone awry in what we used to call “common life.”
Yet even here, his prescriptions are doable. He tells a story of one especially formative relationship from his early life that he calls a great piece of good fortune. As a left-leaning student activist, he formed a friendship with an arch-conservative neighbor. He agreed with this man on virtually nothing, yet they conversed in a spirit of neighborliness and friendliness. This experience of connection that held and contained difference, he says, has shaped his movement through the world ever since. These, surely, are the kinds of encounters we could all begin instantaneously to nudge into existence, to sidle up to, and to do so with our children. I for one will be looking, with relief, for such good old-fashioned conversation.
About the image: Anthony Appiah’s mother, father, and siblings in the mid-1960s. (photo courtesy of Anthony Appiah)
Civil Singing...
by Krista Tippett, host
This week’s show with Anthony Appiah is many things at once: thought-provoking, funny, intellectual, and a kind of a relief. He has enormous wisdom about human resistance to change and how it then really happens. But he also makes the point that reaching across contemporary divides of difference need not be the great moral struggle we tend to make it. It can be about mundane points of human connection; these count.
While we were in production with this show, I heard surprising echoes of his point in a wonderfully pleasant and also moving piece on the BBC about how modern Germans are flocking to choirs. There are choirs for people who can sing and who can’t; they’re bringing people together who would rarely be friends or even acquaintances otherwise. There are even German-Turkish choirs that get Germans learning Turkish words in a way that school and culture would not — and that do so with joy.
You can listen here, and scroll down the page to “Chapter Four.” Enjoy!
About the image: The Rundfunkchor Choir from Berlin. (photo: Matthias Heyde)
What’s Your Chance Encounter with Difference?
by Susan Leem, associate producer
Our thought experiment for the week: draw on your own memories of a simple human encounter — unlikely relationships with non-like-minded people — that you may not have pondered as formative and important.
Listen to Anthony Appiah’s story — recounted in the audio above (mp3, 1:17) — about his neighbor. Before he became a renowned philosopher, he described himself as a “lefty” kid who became very fond of a “right-wing” neighbor and member of British Parliament despite their very disparate views. And it was luck that brought the pair together.
How might we encourage or inspire these kinds of encounters in our own lives, or for our children? Share your thoughts here and let’s talk about these chance encounters together.
And for those of you who prefer to read it rather than hear it, here’s the transcript:
“One of the great lessons of my childhood of which I’m extremely grateful for was that, when my grandmother got older, she moved from the bigger house that she lived in into the cottage next door and she sold the big house to a man who was a member of the British Parliament and was very right-wing, but extremely nice and very nice to me.You know, I had a subscription to the Soviet News and the Peking Review. I was a young lefty, but he was incredibly nice to me. He was not only nice, but he was willing to talk to me about politics and he was willing to let an 18-year-old whatever I was — young man — talk to him about politics and say things that he obviously thought were, you know, and he told me what he thought. He was frank. I mean, he didn’t pretend to believe things that he didn’t believe.
I learned a lot. I had to admit that I liked this guy even though I thought he was wrong about everything, and that was luck. It was luck that I had that experience when I was young.”
About the image above: Anthony Appiah in his late teens circa the time he met his new neighbor. (courtesy of Anthony Appiah)
Most Definitely
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
This poster epitomizes the thrust of our ongoing Civil Conversations Project:
“I hold some very strong opinions, but none of them are simplistic enough to be adequately expressed on this poster. However, if you’d like to find out more, feel free to engage me in a calm and intelligent discussion.”
Absolutely dig this photo.
