Living Room Conversations

Making Sense of the World, One Living Room Conversation at a Time

Photo from Edwin Hooper — Unsplash.com As this pandemic morphs into a new reality, I thought about the highlights and lowlights of my time sheltered in place. The lowlights are common to many of us — Zoom glitches, other people, and unidentifiable clothing stains — to name a few. One highlight is my foray into

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Loss and Transformation: Connecting with Others Amid COVID-19

Anxiety and loss are dominant themes in our lives as the path of COVID-19 careens through our communities. Underneath this, I keep hearing about bright spots and possibilities. That we might discover that we can improve medical care, climate care, work practice, education, provide necessities for people who are struggling…We might even discover and embrace the realization

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Bringing Living Room Conversations to the Classroom

A Living Room Conversation (LRC) is a model of sharing and listening to diverse viewpoints that can be easily implemented in a classroom setting. The model, developed in 2011, helps people with different ideological perspectives have productive conversations. Living Room Conversations have been held in thousands of locations across the country—in homes, libraries, coffee shops, places of worship, professional conferences, and college classrooms. The feedback we have received (with over 300 participants) has been consistently positive. Often, even participants who reported being nervous

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Political Diversity and the Wisdom of Boos

Editor’s Note: See John Gable’s take on this event here. Over the past decade I’ve been a regular attendee at the Wisdom 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. It’s an annual gathering that brings together thousands of like-minded and like-hearted people, and features a marvelous array of speakers: from wisdom teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Eckhart Tolle,

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“What IS the Point, If No One Changes their Mind?”

“That was really good,” Tyree told me at the end of the meeting. “Sitting down face-to-face changes everything!”  A home healthcare worker studying to become a teacher, this marked the first Bridging the Divide event Tyree attended. Although we at Bridging the Divide had been hosting bridge-building conversations for several years, this meeting marked another

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Conservative: She was not a faceless liberal

Note: this post, by Brazilian-American political activist and commentator Julia Song, originally appeared as part of CNN’s “Fractured States of America” series. (CNN)I am a political activist by nature. In my home country of Brazil, I helped organize peaceful protests against government corruption and abuses of power. At the time — way back in 2013

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