Living Room Conversations

Peilin Lu is a rising high school junior. She is passionate about social justice, history, and political science.  What led you to Living Room Conversations? Sonder is my favorite word in the English language, a noun for the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. From […]

Sophia He is currently a high school student going into tenth grade in the fall of 2020. She is a student at Newton Country Day School, which is a Catholic girls school located in Newton, Massachusetts. Sophia, however, was born in Shanghai, China. She lived there until she came to the U.S. to study when

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

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

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

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,

Dear ones, Staring down our vulnerability hurts in the forgotten places. Who knew the dial of these anxious times would suddenly be cranked up to 11? How are you? Really? Our team is comforted by knowing you are out there, beloved Living Room Conversations Community. Thank you for being islands of refuge in the churning sea. Stretching

Five of us gathered around my kitchen table last week armed with steaming mugs of tea, Skinny Pop Popcorn, and laptops—the weapons of suburban warriors.  To be more precise, we are mothers. Dangerous women, actually. Ready to steer the runaway technology train—Snapchat, TikTok, incessant texting—that had aggressively elbowed its way into our family’s lives. We’d taken

“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

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