This election season has challenged and strained relationships. Nearly four-in-ten Americans report the election has led to tensions with friends and families. This Thanksgiving week, how can we reconcile and restore our relationships when we reunite with family and friends?
Civility
“Uncommon Decency” in the context of Pluralism
Christian hearts must be open to other people. God wants that of us. That is what I have just been arguing. But just how open are we supposed to be? We live today in the midst of many lifestyles, many systems of thought–don’t we run the risk of having our hearts pulled in so many different […]
Cultivating empathic sensitivies vital to “Uncommon Decency”
Civility requires that we reduce the psychological distance between ourselves and others. We need to develop a sense of commonality with people who initially strike us as very different from ourselves. One important means of doing this is by cultivating empathy. “Empathy” literally means “in-feeling” — it is to project myself into another person’s feelings […]
The Day for “Uncommon Decency” has come. Let’s embrace it!
As Martin Marty has observed, one of the real problems in modern life is that the people who are good at being civil often lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions often lack civility. I like that way of stating the issue. We need to find a way of combining a civil outlook […]
Is God Relevant in the Public Square?
A special thank-you to the Emerging Scholar from Johns Hopkins University who passed along notes from Is God Relevant in the Public Square? Living with our deepest differences in a world of exploding pluralism — Os Guinness (March 26, Veritas Forum).* Anyone have testimonies regarding or reflections upon the creation, cultivation, encouragement, and/or maintenance of […]