During the month before the High Holy Days, it's Jewish tradition to read Psalm 27, writes our guest contributor. She reflects on turning inward and the struggle of preparing for quiet reflection.
The Civil Conversations Project (CCP) ~ Season 1
Voices of Civility (Season 1)
Elizabeth
Alexander
poet
professor
professor
Anthony
Kwame
Appiah
philosopher
professor
professor
Frances
Kissling
activist
ethicist
ethicist
Richard
Mouw
theologian
Vincent
Harding
civil rights leader
scholar
scholar
Sherry
Turkle
sociologist
futurist
futurist
Terry
Tempest
Williams
naturalist
writer
writer
Words That Shimmer
"Are we not of interest to each other? What if the mightiest word is love?"
Sidling Up to Difference
"What is it for one to have a life of significance?"
Listening Beyond Life and Choice
"What can I see that is good in the position of the other? What troubles me in my own position?"
Restoring Political Civility — An Evangelical Perspective
"What is it about people like me that scare you so much? What is it about what you are advocating that worries me so much?"
Civility, History, and Hope
"Is America possible?"
Alive Enough: Reflecting on Our Technology
"What is served by having an always-on, always-on you, open-to-anyone-who-wants-to-reach-us way of life?"
The Vitality of the Struggle
"When have I changed, and why? What is the nature of my voice in the wider world? How do I use it?"
Selected Readings
- Poetry Is Not a Luxury by Audre Lorde
- Sacred Conversations by David Gushee
- A Civil Hug by Richard Mouw
- Between the Boy and the Bridge by Albert Mohler
- The Land That Has Never Been Yet by Vincent Harding
- Dangerous Spirituality by Vincent Harding
- The Robotic Moment by Sherry Turkle
Selected Poems
- The Kitchenette Building by Gwendolyn Brooks
- Autumn Passage by Elizabeth Alexander
- One Week Later in the Strange by Elizabeth Alexander
- Neonatology by Elizabeth Alexander
- Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander
- Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander
- Translator (James Covey) by Elizabeth Alexander
- Three Poems by Elizabeth Alexander
Pertinent Posts from the Being Blog
One author's view of the aftermath of expulsion from the garden of Eden.
About the Project
The Civil Conversations Project (CCP) — ideas and tools for healing our fractured civic spaces.
Season 2 (2012)
Season 1 (2011)
CCP is a series of radio shows and an online resource for beginning new conversations in families and communities. How do we speak the questions we don't know how to ask each other? Can we find ways to bridge gulfs between us about politics, morality, and life itself? Can we do that even while we continue to disagree, passionately? How is technology playing into all this, and how can we shape it?
This series features seven voices of wisdom, poetry, and practicality: poet Elizabeth Alexander, philosopher Anthony Appiah, abortion rights activist Frances Kissling, Evangelical educator Richard Mouw, civil rights veteran Vincent Harding, MIT psychologist and technologist Sherry Turkle, and naturalist and writer Terry Tempest Williams. In conversation with Krista Tippett, they model new kinds of conversation and relationship with difference. They offer ideas and tools for healing our fractured civic spaces.
Project-related Shows
Poetry is something many of us seem to be hungry for these days. We're hungry for fresh ways to tell hard truths and redemptive stories, for language that would elevate and embolden rather than demean and alienate. Elizabeth Alexander shares her sense of what poetry works in us — and in our children — and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times.
Our Civil Conversations Project continues with the Ghanaian-British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. His parents' marriage helped inspire the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He's studied ethics in a world of strangers and how unimaginable social change happens. We explore his erudite yet down-to-earth take on disarming moral hostilities in America now.
Frances Kissling is known for her longtime activism on the abortion issue but has devoted her energy more in recent years to real relationship and new conversations across that bitter divide. She's learned, she's written, about the courage to be vulnerable in front of those with whom we passionately disagree.
The civil rights leader wrote speeches for Martin Luther King Jr. and was one of his closest friends. Vincent Harding is teaching new generations about the lessons of that time — and how those lessons can repair divisions in America today. He finds hope in young people today and says they are his answer to the question that drives him: "Is America possible?"
Richard Mouw challenges his fellow conservative Christians to civility in public discourse. He offers historical as well as spiritual perspective on American Evangelicals' navigation of disagreement, fear, and truth.
Each of us, in our everyday interactions, chooses between letting technology shape us and shaping it towards human purposes, even towards honoring what we hold dear. Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, is full of usable ideas — from how to declare email bankruptcy to teaching our children the rewards of solitude.
Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist and writer, a biologist by training with a literary mind, who comes from a long Mormon lineage in Utah. She draws political, spiritual, and creative inspiration from her experience of the interior American West. She offers stories of neighborly collaboration that turns into environmental protection, and the value that comes from vitriolic disagreement inside families.
Special Funding
The Civil Conversations Project (CCP) ~ Season 1
September 20, 2012 Gabe Lyons and Jim Daly are two Christian leaders who are reshaping their part in common life, and the common good — something much bigger than politics. This often surprising conversation addresses subjects like gay marriage, abortion, and the strident reputation that Christian evangelicals have earned in the past decade.
July 28, 2011
Poetry is something many of us seem to be hungry for these days. We're hungry for fresh ways to tell hard truths and redemptive stories, for language that would elevate and embolden rather than demean and alienate. Elizabeth Alexander shares her sense of what poetry works in us — and in our children — and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times.
August 4, 2011
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-British-American whose parents' marriage helped inspire the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He's studied ethics in a world of strangers and how unimaginable social change happens. We explore his erudite yet down-to-earth take on disarming moral hostilities in America now.
August 11, 2011
Frances Kissling is known for her longtime activism on the abortion issue but has devoted her energy more in recent years to real relationship and new conversations across that bitter divide. She's learned, she's written, about the courage to be vulnerable in front of those with whom we passionately disagree.
August 18, 2011
Evangelical leader Richard Mouw challenges his fellow conservative Christians to civility in public discourse. He offers historical as well as spiritual perspective on American Evangelicals' navigation of disagreement, fear, and truth.
August 25, 2011
Civil rights veteran Vincent Harding has a long lens of wisdom on contemporary divisions and confusions. He says America is still a developing nation when it comes to democratic encounter across real difference. But he finds hope in the young people he's been bringing into creative contact with civil rights elders for decades. They are his answer to the question that drives him: "Is America possible?"
September 1, 2011
Sherry Turkle directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Her book, Alone Together, created a catchword for anxiety about the alienating potential of technology. But that's not really her message. We explore the real challenge she poses — that we can and must lead examined lives with our digital objects — actively shaping technology to human purposes.
February 3, 2011
Naturalist Terry Tempest Williams sheds light on the American West as a crucible of American divides and possibilities. And she offers up notions of neighborliness, sacred rage, and beauty as a matter of survival.