"We have to learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
—Martin Luther King Jr.

From 2015 through 2018, I witnessed a shift on college campuses. Over four years, they went from being places of inquiry and debate to those of consensus and suppression. Of course, this shift wasn’t as sudden as it seemed – it was simply the materialization of an ethos that had long been building on college campuses.

During that time, I had a unique vantage point as editor-in-chief of a national magazine whose mission was advocating for diversity and inclusion in higher education. Through interviews and stories, we championed underrepresented groups and their causes.

But on the ground, it was percentages that mattered.

Because magazine sales themselves weren’t a big moneymaker, we developed and sold campus climate surveys. These were surveys for students, faculty and staff that measured the representation of people from groups society deemed diverse, as well as their levels of comfort and belonging on campus. Rather than prioritizing diversity of thought and openness to dialogue, these surveys became a litmus test for how virtuous a university was based solely on predetermined DEI metrics.

I watched as characteristics like skin color, sexuality and immigration status increasingly took precedence over long-held values like freedom of speech, dialogue and debate — those central to America. I saw students voice their grievances loudly and proudly, but show little willingness to engage in discussions with those they disagreed with. University administrators often accommodated their demands rather than encourage meaningful engagement and debate. Thus shouting down speakers and creating safe spaces became the norm.

Ultimately, two sides emerged: liberals, who often supported DEI-related efforts, and conservatives, who were seen as being opposed to diversity on its face.

It’s often said that what happens on college campuses doesn’t stay on college campuses — it bleeds over into society at large. Today, we’re seeing the consequences of an unwillingness to engage across differences in real-time.

We’re at a point where 65% of Americans say they don’t engage in in-person or online political discussions with people who have different political opinions; 56% say they’ve stopped talking to someone about political news because of something they said; and 58% say concern about making things uncomfortable has kept them from discussing the news with others.

Perhaps this reluctance is linked to our growing inability to listen – to be curious instead of judgmental. In a 2026 survey, half of U.S. adults said they believe that in most conversations about politics or social issues, people are largely trying to prove they’re right as opposed to trying to understand where others are coming from. Additionally, 85% said they’d avoided bringing up a topic in the previous month because of fear it might turn into an argument. And despite 91% of people agreeing that most Americans seek out information that confirms what they already believe, only 22% admitted to doing so themselves.

The nation, it seems, has become a radical extension of the college campus.

And when fellow citizens won’t talk to one another, bad things happen. For one thing, we increasingly see others as morally corrupt.

In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, Americans were more likely than people in the 24 other countries surveyed to question the morality of their fellow citizens. The U.S. was the only country where more adults characterized the morality and ethics of their peers as bad (53%) as opposed to good (47%).

Professor and author Dr. Robin Reames writes of the repercussions of this in her book The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times. “The further we are from rhetoric and argumentation,” she writes, “the closer we are to violence and coercion.”

The data do seem to suggest that political violence is up, with most Americans agreeing.

Eight-five percent of respondents in an October 2025 Pew Research Center poll said they believe politically motivated violence is on the rise in the U.S., though they’re divided over why. For individuals of both parties, the most cited reason for the recent increase in political violence was the rhetoric and behavior of the “other side”; polarization and lack of understanding ranked second and third.

This is compounded by the fact that 35.6% of American adults in a 2024-2025 study by UC Davis Centers for Violence Prevention said they believe violence is “usually or always” justified to advance political objectives.

Regardless of what the polls show, it’s not difficult to see how we’ve gotten to this point. We live among yet don’t speak to one another, and thus know little about each other. What’s worse, we’ve convinced ourselves we like it this way.

Yet our lack of insight into one another, as well as our motives, doesn’t keep us from making judgements.

Charlie Kirk’s murder is a prime example of the danger posed by the modern ethos that got its start on college campuses. A man whose life was centered around having conversations with people with whom he disagreed was shot and killed while doing the very thing that many people – young and old – are seemingly incapable of doing today. This is despite the fact they might find it to be a positive experience, as research by Michael Kardas suggests.

His 2024 study of 198 people of varying races, ethnicities, religions and political ideologies revealed that people often walk away from political conversations with strangers feeling more optimistic than they anticipated. “Conversation has a way of surfacing these areas of agreement that people don’t seem to recognize before they’ve had the conversation,” Kardas, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, told me. “Expressing genuine curiosity and learning from another person is not experienced as a threat to what you cherish — it’s more of a window into a different side of an issue.”

Civil rights and women’s rights didn’t come about by advocates avoiding, screaming at or physically assaulting their opponents. Throughout all of history, progress has been achieved through the slow, uncomfortable, often fraught discussing and hashing out of ideas and perspectives.

English philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill succinctly captures the importance of this pursuit in his book On Liberty, published in 1859: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

After all, having a diversity of perspectives – as opposed to relying on characteristics like race, ethnicity or sexual identity, which aren’t necessarily the best indicators of a person’s life experience or ideology – is a foundational principle of America. A commitment to individual liberty, rather than a common ethnicity, is what sets her apart from other nations.

As Libby Stegger notes, in America, “all perspectives have value and are necessary” — a concept called pluralism.

“That is a central organizing principle that doesn’t cut people off, but rather invites people in,” Stegger, founder of Civic Bridgers, told me. “I might prioritize a value differently than you do, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have values. It doesn’t mean there aren’t places where we can work together.”

Knowing this, perhaps the best place to start is higher education …

Expression

Americans left and right agree: Higher ed has an ideological-diversity problem

Americans may not agree on much these days, but a surprising majority across the political spectrum think our colleges and universities have become a breeding ground for left-wing groupthink…

Read more

7 days ago · 19 likes · 1 comment · Sean Stevens

Do you agree/disagree? Please share your thoughts in the comments — but, please, be civil. (Successful dialogue depends on it.)

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“Ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”
—William Shakespeare

Let’s imagine you’ve lived your entire life in a cave. Chained alongside others, you face the cave’s back wall, upon which figures and objects move about. Unable to turn your head, the comings and goings of these figures, including the noises they make, are all you and your commrades know and all you talk about. To you, they are the truth.

One day, however, you’re released from your chains and begin to make your way out of the cave. Along the way you see people with objects walking to and fro in front of a glowing fire, casting their shadows — the figures you were accustomed to seeing — on the back wall. Beyond that, the bright light from the cave’s entrance makes it difficult to see, disorienting you. Instead of pushing through your confusion and discomfort and continuing on, you rush back to the familiarity of the dark cave. If someone then tried to force you out, you’d resist.

If, however, you made it outside, after some time, you’d grow accustomed to the light and realize how limited your knowledge had been. You would realize that life beyond the cave is, in fact, the true reality, as opposed to a distorted representation of it.

“The cave of our ignorance is the only reality we know, and because it is familiar, it’s preferred,” writes Dr. Robin Reames, an associate professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington, in her book The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times. “Given the choice between a familiar lie and an unfamiliar truth, we’ll choose what’s known, familiar and comfortable. Even when it’s killing us.”

Although a metaphor to describe man’s ignorance, Plato’s allegory of the cave bears much resemblance to reality. Of course we’re not chained in a cave taking shadows on the wall for truth; yet our world is nonetheless distorted and our ignorance real. Rather, our eyes are glued to screens, believing whatever version of reality we’re served by the algorithms, politicians, influencers and news media. But because we’re incapable of seeing and experiencing everything for ourselves, we’re forced to rely on these secondary sources of information — all of whom have their own motives.

“So many of our online forms of media conform to superficial genre conventions that give the sense that they are ‘news,’” Reames writes. “It distracts us from noticing that, when it comes to what kind of action they are trying to perform in the world, they fall in a different category altogether — not the category of reporting what happened, but the category of telling you what to think about what happened and how to behave in response. They’re aiming to ignite our passions and mobilize our reactions rather than merely inform.”

Yet, as Reames notes, we’re not helpless against them.

In The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself, Reames explores the importance, the hazards and the utility of a tool that dates back to ancient Greece — rhetoric (i.e., the art of persuasion). By exploring the origins and impact of rhetoric, she offers a roadmap for how to counter it. I recently spoke with Reames via email to find out how the study and use of rhetoric applies to our modern times and how it can still aid us today.

In your book, you begin by sharing the story of the Sophists in ancient Greece. Today, sophist is a catchall term for people who use clever, deceptive language to persuade others, often for personal gain. Why were the Sophists able to have such success in Greece, and what conditions allowed them to flourish? What parallels do you see to today?

There is a long, complicated answer to this question that is spelled out in more detail in the book. Without reproducing that full explanation here, I’ll just say that before the rise of the Sophists, Greece had recently undergone a massive technological revolution due to the spread of literacy. The Sophists were the first “tech bros” in a sense, because they were the first people to recognize the social and political implications once speech could be severed from the speaker via writing. Suddenly, people could experiment and play around with words rather than be bound to them, and this meant that it was possible for people to be less accountable for their words, which caused massive implications for truth.

In a similar way, the spread of falsehoods today is accelerated by social media and the rise of AI, where the message struggles to keep up with the medium. Truth and accuracy become more vulnerable when people are unable to distinguish between the words people say and the things those words represent — between reality itself and the supposed reality that’s packaged in words. Our natural tendency to look right past or through the language rather than at it is in many ways unchanged from then to now. The art of rhetoric was invented to help people learn how to look at the language itself and to identify what makes it persuasive and believable.

If negative emotions such as anger and fear activate our brain’s reward center in the same way drugs or gambling do (i.e., we become addicted to negative emotions) — as you note in the book — what does this say about the modern news media’s business model, as well as that of social media companies?

There is an entire field of study behind the design of the platforms, which teaches engineers to harness cognition in the way you describe and to bypass our critical faculties. But as a rhetorician, I don’t study business models. Rather, I teach people that, even if an entire industry aims to persuade them without letting them know they are being persuaded, no one can stop them from studying rhetoric to learn why certain words have the power to make them angry, happy, sad or fearful.

The first study of the psychology of human emotions in the West is found in Aristotle’s book on rhetoric precisely because Aristotle realized that emotions enter our minds and bodies through words, and if we learn to control the power words have over us, then by extension, we can control our emotions as well. We don’t need brain scans to be successful at this; all we need is to understand rhetoric.

You write that “the further we are from rhetoric and argumentation, the closer we are to violence and coercion.” Rhetoric today is sometimes used in a way that deepens polarization and drives Americans further apart. So how can we use rhetoric for good, to counter this type of division?

Studying rhetoric is a matter of understanding how language propels belief. Suppose someone’s words, chants, slogans and so on, are intended to provoke anger, fear and thus violence. Someone who studies rhetoric understands that link, as cause and effect, and is arguably less easily provoked or manipulated as a result. They also understand how persuasive arguments work, so they can use argumentation (as opposed to incendiary chants and slogans) to reason with their opponents. This is how studying rhetoric clears a path away from violence and toward the kind of deliberation that’s necessary for a democracy to thrive.

The Greek’s idea of freedom emphasized less focus on the individual and more on the needs and concerns of the public. What did this look like in terms of rhetoric? Enforcing this type of civility obviously takes away some level of individual freedom, so how can we as a society reinforce this focus on the public good without forcing it?

Our assumption these days that freedom is more or less equivalent to individual freedom is possibly one of the greatest obstacles to overcoming our political polarization and ideological thinking. When democracy arose, by contrast, there was a fundamental understanding that freedom depended — utterly and absolutely — on social coordination and common well-being as opposed to individual freedom.

They believed that prioritizing individual well-being over the common good was, in a word, tyranny: Politics organized around the individual prioritizes the one over the many; politics organized around the common good prioritizes the many over the one. It’s not so much a question of force as a matter of what kind of politics each set of priorities gives rise to.

In your book, you talk about the notion that rhetoric can create an alternate reality, so at what point does persuasive language stop describing reality and start replacing it?

We can never access reality directly — it always must be packaged for us. The goal is for the packaging to attempt to match, rather than to deliberately distort, reality. Rhetoric arose as a discipline so that people would have a technique for assessing what the packaging was doing and how it was made to be persuasive and compelling. Because we have neglected the study of rhetoric for so long, our critical faculties have grown somewhat atrophied in this task. But it’s never too late to begin again! And luckily, all that rhetorical wisdom is still there, waiting for us to relearn it.

Knowing how increasingly difficult it is to know what truth is considering these alternate realities and the rise of AI, does thinking rhetorically come down to simply being aware of the impact of words, rather than whether they’re conveying truth? What does this say about the value of curiosity and the danger in certainty?

The question of certainty is particularly important. In Aristotle’s politics, ethics and rhetoric (which he interwove as a single tapestry), he makes a stark distinction between things done by humans and things that happen as a matter of mathematical, geometrical or scientific necessity. Unlike mathematics, geometry, astronomy and so on, the things that humans do are fundamentally unpredictable and ever-evolving, so they can only ever be contingent rather than necessary. This means that what we think about them can only ever be probable.

2 + 2 can only be 4, but the best course of action in politics is much harder to determine. The problem these days is that our wires seem to be crossed. We think of things like politics and ethics as absolute, and we treat science like it’s only an opinion. To properly uncross these wires, we should realize where certainty is appropriate and where it’s a misfit to the subject. And in politics, certainty is a misfit.

What we should aim for in our political life is what’s better, rather than what we believe is certainly or absolutely true. That’s what Aristotle would have us do, in any case.

Some examples of manipulative rhetoric are obvious; other examples are more ambiguous. So, what rhetorical signals should people watch for when consuming news or political commentary in particular? What habits can people cultivate to help them resist rhetorical manipulation?

A good starting place for learning is beginning to simply notice when you feel a strong response to certain rhetoric — whether it makes you angry, sad, fearful, etc. That’s the first step of beginning to think rhetorically rather than ideologically.

The next step occurs by learning the terms and concepts that developed over more than 2,000 years to explain how and why the words made you feel that way. The rhetorical tradition is composed of — I’m not exaggerating — literally thousands of terms and concepts for understanding how language tricks and manipulates. It’s here that I would direct readers to read the book.

In the book, I’ve selected out some of the most compelling and important ones, and there isn’t really a shortcut for learning how to spot the tricks of language. I wrote my book to make that 2,000-year-old tradition more legible and navigable, so that readers today could gain the same sense of empowerment that Aristotle’s own students may have had all those years ago in his Lyceum.

As always, I’d love to know what you think. And if this interview piqued your interest and you want to learn more, you can pick up a copy of Reames’ book, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times, here.

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“The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.”
—Adam Smith

For most of my life, I understood America as an idea reinforced by a series of actions.

The pledge of allegiance every morning. The raising of the flag. The singing of the national anthem at sporting events. Gathering around the table on Thanksgiving. Attending backyard barbecues every Memorial Day. Shooting off fireworks every Fourth of July.

These were the requisites of being an American. And I participated in each as other members of my generation did — reflexively.

Perhaps I took it for granted. But how could I not?

I was a child of the 80s growing up in the 90s. We were post-Berlin Wall, post-women’s suffrage, post-Jim Crow, post-Vietnam War and the turmoil that defined that decade. We were living in the age of dial-up internet, boy bands and Friends. Life was good — movies and music were great — and all we could do was romanticize America’s past hardships, for we faced few of our own.

It’s often said, or at least hoped, that every generation has it easier than the last.

I’m no exception.

My mom’s dad grew up on a farm where his family raised all their own food and from where he and his siblings walked a mile to church and school in shoes riddled with holes. My mom’s mom helped raise her seven younger siblings and tend the house, milking the goats every morning, hanging clothes on the line, ironing, mowing the grass and doing the dishes.

Both of my dad’s parents were raised in single-parent households. After my grandpa’s dad died, his mom raised him, along with his seven siblings, in a chicken coop. My grandma learned how to take care of herself at a young age, her mother having died when she was three and her father frequently gone.

My dad began working at age 9 at the family Dairy Freeze and continued to work in whatever the family business was at the time — a pool hall, roller rink or a rotating assortment of bowling alleys — bringing home all his earnings. With money always tight, hunting was a way to keep protein on the table and was done both in and out of season, with or without a permit.

My mom and her four siblings grew up shoveling the driveway, cutting the grass, cleaning the house, doing the dishes and paying for most things themselves, including clothes and extracurriculars. Her family ate out just one dinner a month – at McDonald’s – and every day they were expected to bring home their brown paper lunch bag to use for the next day’s lunch.

Frederick Douglass once said, “If there is no struggle there is no progress.”

His struggle, however, looked much different than those of my grandparents or parents.

Few people embody the idea of America more than the man who though born into slavery in 1818 had escaped it 20 years later. But his escape wasn’t his most notable achievement, rather his transformation from a person who had endured great personal injustice to someone who gave his life in service to the nation that had so long allowed it.

Douglass taught himself to read, write and orate, and ultimately founded and operated a newspaper, published three autobiographies, fought for the abolition of slavery, advocated for women’s suffrage, served as president of Freedman’s Savings Bank and was appointed the first black man to serve as U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia – among many other things.

He knew better than most that the path to improvement is littered with struggles. Douglass didn’t go in search of hardship or exaggerate it, rather when it showed up at his door, he faced it with dignity and humility.

Douglass’ association between struggle and progress was expressed in a much larger context. It was part of his speech, delivered in New York in 1857, commemorating the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress,” he said. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.”

Man’s folly, Douglass believed, was in how he took up his task, how he accepted the work before him — no matter how large or small.

When the founding fathers drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence, 250 years ago, they knew it wouldn’t be easy.

To Britain, it was a declaration of war, and the odds were not in America’s favor.

Great Britain boasted the world’s premier navy, a disciplined army and vast financial resources. The founding fathers knew that freedom would come at a cost. But they also had nothing to lose.

The colonists lived under the tyrannical leadership of an absent king and his 558-member Parliament a month’s journey away, where they had no representation. Governed by a corrupt legal system, forced to house and feed British soldiers, restricted in trade and westward expansion – while living a demanding, exhausting and precarious existence – the founding fathers and the colonists they represented thought they could do a better job. Or at the very least, that they had the God-given right to try.

I’ve often wondered if my generation and younger ones have had it too easy —

if the general lack of hardship has caused us to not appreciate the struggles and sacrifices of those who came before us. For the longest time, I thought my lack of tribulations somehow made me less American — or at least less worthy of the title.

But a careful retrospective reveals generations following in Douglass’ footsteps — doing what they could to make life better, for themselves, their families, their communities and their country. They accepted the circumstances of their lives while not becoming complacent with them, knowing what lay on the other side of struggle.

This is something that’s characterized America since her founding.

As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in 1835, having toured the country, “The first thing which strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to throw off their original condition.”

I may, at times, under-appreciate the sacrifices made by preceding generations and take my freedoms for granted. But in my 40 years as an American, I’ve never once thought I was done improving, or that our country was.

My life is easier because the founders wished and worked for it to be so. I owe it to them to not forget it — and to not let my children forget it either.

So like the generations before me, we’ll continue those practices which make us American: raising and saluting the flag, reciting the pledge of allegiance, singing the national anthem, attending backyard barbecues on Memorial Day, shooting off fireworks every Independence Day.

Recognizing America as an idea worth celebrating.

I’d love to know what you think in the comments. What does being American mean to you? Are we at risk of losing that?

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
—Jonathan Gottschall

In October 2020, my family and I moved to a new house at the fringes of the suburbs, but it would be many more months before I would meet my neighbor’s wife. I met him once or twice, only briefly, but I never got so much as a passing glance at her.

It didn’t take long, though, for my brain to begin creating all kinds of explanations as to why.

At dinner, I’d see the lights from their house through the tree line and wonder where she was — or what happened to her. Like any true crime lover, my mind naturally narrowed in on the husband. Bill must have murdered her and buried her in the backyard, I thought. (Morbid, I know.) How else could you explain us never having seen or heard her – not even so much as a glimpse or a whisper?

Of course I hoped this wasn’t the case. My mind, however, in the absence of information, created an explanation – albeit an irrational one – to fill the void. Unable to deal with uncertainty, my mind began telling itself stories.

Thankfully, my neighbor – Judy is her name – is very much alive (we met a few months later), and she makes some of the best sourdough biscuits you’ll ever eat.

Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

She was right in more ways than I think even she realized.

Storytelling, of course, is a survival skill — filling in critical gaps in information that might prevent us from becoming some bear’s next meal or a serial killer’s next victim. But it’s also a useful tool for making sense of the world and our place in it.

Stories help us understand how certain actions produce certain outcomes and can thus influence future events. It’s no secret that, as humans, we’re not the best at handling uncertainty; a lack of information fuels a sense of disorder and chaos that’s too much for our hungry minds to manage. Whereas stories – even made-up ones – allow us to retain a sense of control, as well as meaning, over our lives.

In ancient Egypt, it was believed that Ra, the sun god, sailed across the sky every day, from east to west, from morning till night. At night, he descended into the perilous underworld, where he fought enemies of creation. One of these, his greatest foe, was the giant serpent Apophis (or Apep). The Egyptian deity of darkness, chaos and destruction, Apophis sought to destroy Ra and bring darkness to the Earth.

Of course, what was really happening was the rising and setting of the sun — something we today accept as a basic and essential celestial phenomenon. In 2300 BCE, however, science was, in a word, rudimentary.

The ancient Egyptians thus filled their gap in knowledge with a story — an explanation for why this bright ball rose in the heavens every morning and disappeared every night. It was their way of making sense of, and finding meaning in, what we today know to be a natural rhythm. Every rising of the sun represented Ra’s triumph and rebirth.

But it wasn’t just the ancient Egyptians who did this.

Ancient Greeks believed in Helios, the Titan god of the sun, who drove his chariot across the heavens every day and returned by night by sailing underground via a golden cup or boat. In Norse mythology, Sól symbolized the sun, racing her chariot across the sky with the wolf Hati in hot pursuit.

The details varied, but the idea was the same — some godly being was responsible for the daily comings and goings of the large, light-giving object in the heavens. These stories were ancient peoples’ sensible attempts at answering looming questions using what little information they had.

The stories we tell ourselves can be good or bad, benign or dangerous, thoughtful or reckless, built on false assumptions or correct ones (sorry, Bill!). But they’re almost always based on something we’ve experienced in our own lives. Something that comes up short, that lacks an explanation, that seems unusual or illogical. That our mind demands an answer to.

Stories are thus similar to scientific inquiry in that they arise from the same human impulse – a desire to understand what we do not know. But unlike with science, these explanations go no further than the initial question of “why?” or “how?”

Thus it isn’t enough to be aware of our mind’s penchant for creating stories.

Combine this proclivity with another, such as tribalism or desperation, and the result can often be more reprehensible than an allegory of the battle between good (i.e., the sun) and evil (i.e., darkness and destruction). This can lead to phenomena the likes of Nazi Germany, snake oil salesmen, the Salem Witch Trials, Dust Bowl “rainmakers” and McCarthyism.

Though incorrect, the sun origin stories of ancient cultures were harmless. But for the person who remains loyal to one group at any cost or the person all out of options and feeling hopeless, the stories created in the absence of facts can be hurtful and destructive.

The solution, however, is simple.

And it requires a story of its own, the story we tell about ourselves – one in which we remain curious and inquisitive in the absence of facts.

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“Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.”
—Adlai Stevenson

Reaching speeds of upwards of 40 mph, coyotes excel at pursuing and catching prey that attempt to elude it through speed alone. Thus an animal’s best defense against the predator isn’t to try to outpace it, but to escape it – by going underground, for instance.

Badgers on the other hand are adept diggers, able to rapidly excavate burrows and chase prey below ground.

The two animals’ varying but complementary skills are what make them quite the powerful, yet unlikely, pair.

In this symbiotic relationship, the coyote works above ground, while the badger leads efforts below. If a coyote chases a rabbit into a burrow, the badger will pursue it, while the coyote waits patiently above. Should the rabbit emerge, the coyote is ready.

This mutually beneficial relationship (albeit not for the rabbit) increases the chances of either party satiating its hunger. And although coyotes and badgers don’t typically share their prey — whichever animal is lucky enough to snag it is the one who gets to enjoy it — their unlikely partnership means both animals improve their chances of survival.

And isn’t that the point?

Despite competing for the same resources, they often instinctively work together. They don’t concern themselves with who got the last rabbit or prairie dog, or who exerted the most effort in the chase, or whose stomach is empty. They simply do what nature demands of them.

I suppose that’s the beauty of being a wild animal.

Living unburdened by the emotional baggage that often hinders objective decision making. In fact there’s no decision making to speak of. The coyote and the badger are directed by biology, evolution and the will to survive.

Much like pistol shrimps and gobies.

In this underwater partnership, the shrimp digs a burrow, which it often shares with the goby fish. The goby then acts as the eyes for the nearly blind crustacean, keeping watch for predators and using “chemical cues” to alert the shrimp when it’s unsafe to venture out.

I could cite even more examples of the sort from the animal kingdom.

But these collaborations are not unlike those of humans and our ancestors … once upon a time. Take early members of the hominini species, for example.

Facing constant threats to their survival, these contemporary primates banded together much like these disparate animal species. Hunting large game together meant increased safety and success, sharing food reduced starvation, living together made child rearing easier and life safer. These advantages were the remedy to both real, physical threats and the emotions they invoked: fear, shame, anger, disgust.

Their collaboration didn’t occur because of a lack of competition. In fact, these early beings sought all the same things: natural resources, status, mates, influence. But cooperation often produced advantages that no individual could realize alone. Their success emerged not from the absence of rivalry, but from an unusual ability to balance competition with collaboration.

These tribes were proof that trust was an essential ingredient for survival. Those who lacked a sense of social cohesion fared far worse.

Today’s society looks much different even if our emotions remain the same. Survival isn’t a cloud hanging over us; it doesn’t infuse every decision we make or interaction we have. Yet we haven’t learned how to redirect these feelings in ways that make sense in our modern world. Thus today, the emotions and tribalism that once worked to our advantage often work against us, fueling polarization, hostility and conflict.

Cooperation — one might conclude from listening to politicians and watching the news and scrolling on social media — is no longer a requisite for our survival. Perhaps that’s a sign we have it too good nowadays.

Despite all of our disagreement and tribalism and infighting and undermining, we may be able to survive, but will we thrive?

Unlike coyotes and badgers or pistol shrimps and gobies, we humans are all part of the same species: homo sapiens — a Latin phrase meaning “wise man.”

Only time will tell, however, if we live up to the name.

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“You say that we’ve got nothing in common
No common ground to start from
And we’re falling apart.”
—“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something

In 2020, Libby Stegger was living in Minnesota’s Twin Cities when the nation caught fire.

With the pandemic still in its early days, the region experienced a more tragic and personal blow – the death of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis. The resulting public outcry gave way to a wave of violent protests that would define that summer, while a divisive election loomed.

It was in this context that Stegger caught herself doing something uncharacteristic.

“I realized I was making assumptions about a lot of people who I didn’t know that weren’t true,” she says. “I had become a victim of polarization, and I realized there was some cognitive dissonance. I saw myself as a bridger – as someone who respected people from different experiences and walks of life – yet somehow I was led to believe an entire group of people were fundamentally opposed to my worldview.”

So Stegger did what any curious, humble person would do … she began making an effort to build relationships with people with different perspectives. In the process, she discovered something surprising: “We often shared a lot of core values,” Stegger says, “but maybe we disagreed on how to achieve them.”

With this understanding, Stegger founded Civic Bridgers, a nonprofit whose mission is to prepare emerging leaders to bridge divides. By focusing on the population that’s feeling the greatest lack of agency – that is the “belief that their actions can make a difference in the world,” Stegger says – Civic Bridgers strives to build a sense of community among these young people.

“Bridging is about reconnecting people with civic life and with each other,” says Stegger. “It’s about leveraging our connective tissue and our belief and trust in each other to solve big challenges and find common ground where it does exist.”

As polarizing as politics is currently, that common ground — the way to bring people together to engage in and foster a more robust civic life — often exists elsewhere. Stegger believes it starts at a more basic, human level.

“A lot of what we learn in school is that civics is politics — it’s voting, and then you’re done — but we think about civic life as public life,” she says. “It starts with building connections regardless of our politics, regardless of our identities and backgrounds, so we don’t start by flattening.”

By flattening she’s referring to the radical notion of seeing people as more than a Democrat or Republican, or even Independent.

By embracing the complexity of each individual — yes, their political ideology, but also their background, personal values, ideas, et cetera — Stegger believes we may just find some common ground.

“We often say, ‘That person’s values don’t align with mine, so we can’t work together,’ when actually it’s about identifying how someone else might value something,” says Stegger. “I might prioritize a value differently than you do. It doesn’t mean you don’t have values. It doesn’t mean there aren’t places where we can work together.”

This concept is one called pluralism – the idea “that multiple perspectives have value, that they’re necessary in this world,” Stegger says. “That is a central organizing principle that doesn’t cut people off, but rather invites people in.”

Working toward a common cause

With programs for people in their early teens through young adulthood, Civic Bridgers is helping people build “the skill and will to engage in public life and bridge divides,” Stegger says, with groups working together toward a common cause. This can include engaging in a school community, local gardening or park cleanups, or working directly with civic organizations.

Politics is not the point.

A Civic Bridger is someone who engages in public life and does so with the core values of humanity, humility and accountability, Stegger says.

“Humanity means recognizing everyone’s inherent worth, acknowledging that we’re all imperfect – we make mistakes, and we’re accountable to each other,” she says. “Accountability means we take responsibility when we make mistakes, but we also take responsibility to say, ‘How can I help? How do I show up in my community to better these spaces?’

“Humility means genuinely seeking to understand different ways of knowing, being uncomfortable sometimes, being comfortable with uncertainty, being comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Help me see it differently.’ It’s not about compromising our core beliefs, rather recognizing that in a plural nation, we can exist with different belief systems.”

Civic Bridgers — the individuals — thus reflect America’s rich diversity of faiths, races and ethnicities, languages, nationalities and perspectives, Stegger says. Together they’re learning how to overcome polarization by focusing on the public good over politics.

There’s the America’s Future Summit, a two-day “high-energy” gathering, where high school students learn how to engage in their communities in ways that bridge divides. It culminates with teams pitching an idea and competing for prize money to bring their idea to fruition. Then there’s the 10-week high school program Beyond Civics in which students design a community action initiative to solve a problem in their area. For one group in Pelican Rapids, this included hosting various social activities for young people to get to know each other throughout the summer – color wars, bike rides, et cetera.

“That is absolutely civic engagement, it’s civic leadership, it’s bridging. It’s not political,” Stegger says. “All of it is good, and all of it is necessary for us to build strong, resilient communities.”

There’s also the early career fellowship component, with a year-long immersion program for emerging professionals, and the ambassador program for mid-career leaders.

Yet across all of Civic Bridgers’ programs, the goal remains the same: to help young people build the skills “to engage a group of people toward a common cause,” Stegger says.

This is what “bridging” looks like in real life. And it’s a skill Stegger believes is necessary if America is to not just flourish, but to exist in its current form.

“For the American experiment to continue for the next 250 years, we have to adapt to the current moment,” she says. “We have to understand that this is our shared future, that no one’s going anywhere. And if we want to live in a space that values that diversity, that values those different perspectives, we actually have to live that. That’s our civic duty.

“Our civic duty is to participate in ways that we can, in ways that value our own strengths, and to have the humility to recognize that we don’t always have all the answers and that there’s value in the perspectives other people bring.”

The risks of ceding our power

Contrary to traditional ideas of “civic duty,” Civic Bridgers’ philosophy emphasizes contributing in ways that marry what a person’s good at with what they care about for the betterment of their community. This approach not only helps individuals retain a sense of personal agency, but it’s a much more welcoming and empowering place to start.

“We believe the power of community and engagement and people bringing their strengths to bear is what fuels participation — not me telling them, ‘You must go do this because it’s your duty,’” says Stegger. “Start from what you love, what you’re good at and what you care about. This is a way of inviting people back in, telling them there’s a space for them – that whether or not they want to be involved in big ‘P’ politics, their voice still matters and their participation in their local community matters.”

This level of engagement in public life isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s imperative to ensuring harmony, civility and autonomy.

“When we give into division, when we give into despair and withdraw from each other and from civic life, we are ceding our inherent power,” Stegger says. “Divide and conquer is a real strategy, and when we’re all infighting, there are a lot of other forces that will step into that power vacuum and direct us the way they want to — or who will distract us from the core work of building community and solving the problems that need solving.”

“The work is laid out before us,” she adds. “It’s not small, but it’s also very possible.”

How do you make an intentional effort to connect with people beyond politics? How have you seen people of different political ideologies come together to solve problems in your community?

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On May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls commandeered a Confederate military cargo ship, sailing it out of Beaufort, South Carolina, and delivering it to the Union Navy. An enslaved man, Smalls’ act, along with the intelligence he shared, helped the Union capture Cole Island and directly influenced Lincoln’s decision to enlist black soldiers in the Union Army.

Smalls himself was appointed Navy pilot of the USS Crusader and eventually became the first black man to be promoted to captain.

“He fought heroically in the war and afterwards became a wealthy landowner and purchased the plantation on which he had been a slave,” says Robert “Bob” Woodson, a civil rights activist and founder of the Woodson Center, known for empowering leaders in low-income communities to confront crime, addiction, and family breakdown.

But as Woodson points out, Smalls’ exploits are largely unknown, often passed over for stories that highlight the victimization of black Americans while failing to also honor the sustained hope, courage, and humanity that led to real change.

“We should talk about the abuse and how horrible the system was, but we should also talk about the renewal,” he says. “We believe America should never be defined by the worst of what it used to be, but as a country of second chances — a story of redemption.”

Following the release of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project — which posits that the country’s real founding occurred in 1619, when the first slaves arrived on America’s shores — the Woodson Center launched its own project. 1776 Unites exists to inspire black Americans “to become agents of their own uplift and transformation, by embracing the true founding values of our country,” per the project’s website.

1776 Unites brought together a group of writers, thinkers and activists to author their own series of essays offering a more honest retrospective of black history in America.

Titled Red, White and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers, the book tells the stories of black Americans who “were able to achieve in the face of oppression,” Woodson notes. For him, it’s about giving black Americans a sense of agency.

The idea of agency is something that’s come up in Daniel Yudkin’s research as well.

Yudkin is founding director of the Beacon Project, an initiative of More in Common, an organization focused on developing evidence-based solutions to bring Americans together. He’s found that, for the most part, people fall into one of two categories: You either think people’s lives are shaped primarily by forces outside their control, or you think people’s lives are shaped by the decisions they make. These contrasting views ultimately translate to different styles of civic engagement. But, despite that major difference, Yudkin says there’s one notable commonality.

“People don’t want to just be passive recipients of experiences; they want to actually be involved, they want to contribute, they want to feel a sense of meaning and value and purpose,” says Yudkin. “And the way that people get a sense of meaning and value and purpose is by feeling as though they have something to offer, to engage in.”

As polarized as we are, as powerless as we may feel, we still want to contribute in some way. The popularity of Woodson’s book seems to support this idea.

Selling out in its first three weeks, Red, White and Black appeared to resonate with people. It did so well that the Woodson Foundation developed a curriculum from the essays, which are available to public schools; these have since been downloaded over 300,000 times. The organization also created an animated Youtube series and published a sequel.

“People are motivated to change and improve when you show them victories that are possible, not by always reminding them of injuries to be avoided,” Woodson says. “It’s healthy for us to receive information that reinforces the notion that we have the capacity to change ourselves, that we have agency.”

In our nation today, it’s not just black Americans who feel unheard, unrepresented and unempowered. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, more than 80% of respondents said they believe elected officials “don’t care what people like me think.” Findings were consistent across race/ethnicity, sex, age, education level and political party.

“This is the core problem,” Yudkin says. “If people don’t feel as though politicians reflect their concerns, they’re going to tune out from the political process.”

By going back to the “basic building blocks of a flourishing society,” The Beacon Project aims to build a new political philosophy, one that bridges personal and institutional responsibility.

“You need to ensure the government and civic institutions are providing people opportunities to flourish and thrive,” Yudkin says. “But you also need cultural reform to help people to see themselves as active participants in civic life.”

Yudkin refers to this idea as Potentialism.

“Potentialism starts with a basic assumption about human nature, which is that everybody has something to contribute,” says Yudkin.

He and his team are in the process of refining the prototype of a new civic vision via research and conversations with everyday Americans, as well as experts in academia and civil society. Once finalized, they plan to publish it and engage with who Yudkin believes will be early adopters: the exhausted majority (i.e., those “who don’t feel like their views are reflected in political discourse,” he says).

“Our ultimate aim is to create a new story for the country that can speak to the exhausted majority and address some of the major challenges we’re confronting as a country and as a society,” says Yudkin.

At present, disagreement and polarization are keeping us from doing just that. As Woodson notes, we have a choice to make: “America is at a turning point. It’s chaos or community.”

America’s story, after all, is one of not just redemption but of compassion for our fellow citizens.

When Smalls returned to Beaufort after the war and purchased the home of his former master, it was not just a symbol of his rectification but of his mercy. “He took in the destitute wife of his former owner who was suffering from dementia and allowed her to stay,” Woodson says.

“To me this is an act of radical grace that can only happen in the American context.”

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My kids are only two days into summer, and I’m already exhausted. With all of their end-of-the-school-year activities and now their living-room fort building and tattletaling and noises of some kind, I just can’t. Write that is.

I know I’m not the only one.

We’re all in varying but constant states of exhaustion, I feel like. Worn out by the news, the tattletaling, the reputation building and tearing down, the mindless barrage of content and information. The noise.

So, knowing that most people are rightfully about to head out for a long weekend, knowing that might involve long roadtrips or plane rides or time lounging by pools or in bed, I’ve curated a reading list for the exhausted majority and those thirsting for calm and connection. It includes what I’ve been reading as of late, some of my all-time favorite stories, and the latest from Spirit & Sword.

Who knows, maybe this will even become a monthly thing (unless the metrics tell me otherwise).

Let’s start with …

What I’ve been reading

On how stories teach us about human nature and offer a guide for how to live in the present:

The Library and the Pond
On borrowing lives and learning how to live one’s own.

Prohuman Pathways

The Library and the Pond

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of original essays by Prohuman Foundation advisor Dr. Michael Tobin. The truths he reveals in this piece about libraries—supplying refuge and reflection, connecting lives across time, sustaining the human story and shaping the moral imagination—speak vividly to the tenets that anchor our educational…

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3 months ago · 40 likes · 2 comments · Michael Tobin

On how to find and enjoy those small, unhurried moments of connection with ourselves and others:

If You Want to Build Community, You Have to “Waste Time” with People
And a handful of ways to find “unproductive” time
By Dr. Vivek Murthy

Staying Human with Dr. Vivek Murthy

If You Want to Build Community, You Have to “Waste Time” with People

What would change in your life if you stopped trying to use every minute well…

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5 months ago · 1212 likes · 138 comments · Dr. Vivek Murthy

Some of my all-time favorites

The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy
Swissair Flight 111 crashed on September 2, 1998 with 229 souls aboard. No one would ever put it all back together again.
By Michael Paterniti

I discovered this gem in my graduate school course Creative Nonfiction (shoutout to Professor Miles Harvey). I still have the hardcopy version he handed out to us in class, with underlined passages and notes scribbled in the margins, which I pull out to reread from time to time. In it, Paterniti captures the epic and tragic tale of the crash of Swissair Flight 111 in breathtaking detail. (Don’t be surprised if you cry.)

Like lovers who haven’t yet met or one-day neighbors living now in different countries, tracing their route to one another, each of them moved toward the others without knowing it, in these cities and towns, grasping Airline tickets. Some, like the Swiss tennis pro, would miss the flight, and others, without tickets, would be bumped from other flights onto this one at the last minute, feeling lucky to have made it, feeling chosen.

Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse

I first read Siddhartha decades ago, and it remains one the most consequential books I’ve ever read. Set in India, the novel follows a young Brahmin who leaves his life of privilege to embark on a spiritual journey of self-discovery.

The sun and the moon had always shone; the rivers had always flowed and the bees had hummed, but in previous times all this had been nothing to Siddhartha but a fleeting and illusive veil before his eyes, regarded with distrust, condemned to be disregarded and ostracized from the thoughts because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other side of the visible. But now his eyes lingered on this side; he saw and recognized the visible and he sought his place in the world. He did not seek reality; his goal was not on any other side. The world was beautiful when looked at this way — without any seeking, so simple, so childlike. The moon and the stars were beautiful, the brook, the shore, the forest and rock, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and butterfly were beautiful. It was beautiful and pleasant to go through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned with the immediate, without any distrust.

… All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.

The latest from Spirit & Sword

Most of us can agree on the beauty of the natural world. A mountainous landscape, a sunset, the ocean.

But our tendency to assign purpose to everything is causing a shift in the world of art and architecture. A trend of not creating beauty for beauty’s sake but for whatever utility it might serve.

But as late philosopher and writer Sir Roger Scruton said:

“Beauty is an ultimate value — something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”

When we can no longer agree on what’s beautiful, let alone take time to notice and appreciate it, how else then will we experience awe and the pull to something greater?

I explore this enigma and how natural beauty may be the link to the unity we lack in my latest story:

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“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.”
— Sir Roger Scruton

Long before cherry blossoms became a staple of Japanese culture, there were plum blossoms.

In late February, snow still blanketing the landscape, Japanese elites — nobles, government officials, scholars, Buddhist clergy and members of the imperial family — would gather together to admire and celebrate the blooming of the prunus mume, or plum blossom trees.

This practice, known as umemi, got its start in the 7th century following the import of these trees from China, where they were a symbol of resilience and refinement. But these late winter blooms took on even greater significance in Japanese culture.

To the Japanese, plum blossoms represented endurance, renewal and quiet strength. Elites would come together to not just observe the ume, or plum blossom, but to write and recite poetry and music about it. Poems from the 8th century describe its fragrance as well as the symbolism of its late winter bloom – the shift from hardship to hope.

From the umemi came the Japanese concept of mono no aware. Rooted in Buddhist principles, this aesthetic philosophy emphasizes the impermanence of beauty. Rather than seeing this as a sorrowful thing, the Japanese’s awareness that beauty is fleeting led to greater appreciation for it.

Cherry blossoms, which drop within days of blooming, came to encapsulate this philosophy even more and expanded the practice to the masses. People of all backgrounds and classes would come together once a year to admire and contemplate the beauty and transience of the cherry blossom.

Shared aesthetic experiences

For as long as humans and nature have coexisted people have been structuring their lives around the natural world, with rituals and practices focused on its beauty and rhythms. These shared aesthetic experiences provided stability and connection in an otherwise volatile world.

Natural beauty is one of the few things — particularly in today’s divided world — that enjoys such consensus.

“I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t think a sunset is beautiful or a mountain range is beautiful. Humans have a lot of agreement on beauty in nature,” says Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton, founder of the Scala Foundation, an organization committed to transforming culture through beauty, creativity and joy.

The evidence for this unanimity is not just anecdotal.

Dr. Oshin Vartanian is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto studying neuroaesthetics (i.e., how the brain processes and develops preferences for objects). He says experiences with beauty of all kinds — as well as flavors — have been shown to activate a common set of regions in the brain associated with reward.

“The underlying idea is that as humans have evolved and generated preferences for all sorts of things … the underlying system in the brain involved in forming those preferences has remained the same,” says Vartanian. This, he adds, points to a shared taste for “natural aesthetic domains” over man-made objects.

“There is a lot more consistency in what people tend to [prefer] when they’re looking at things from nature versus things that are human made. When people look at faces and natural scenes, there are more likely to be similarities in what they like. When you look at things that are human made – for example, architecture or artworks – you see a lot more individual differences in comparison.”

Our response to beauty, then, is much like that of fear or any other emotion we experience for that matter. When we feel fearful or threatened, our innate response is to flee or fight. So, what about when we see something beautiful – an alpine landscape, for instance?

According to Clayton, our natural response is awe — what she describes as “the beginning of curiosity.”

“We’re meant to approach the world with open eyes and open hearts, to see all that is there, and awe and beauty remind us that as human beings we are limited,” she says. “When we find something awesome and beautiful, we know something for certain, but … we also see that it points to something beyond itself that’s greater.”

Clayton sees this as a higher power.

“I understand beauty as God’s goodness radiating throughout the world; it’s a material expression of goodness in the world,” she says. “How do we know there’s goodness? Because we have beauty. But at the same time, beauty never fully satisfies us.”

Beauty therefore sparks in us the need to explore, to seek understanding. The restlessness it creates begs the question, what’s it all for?

It’s a question that even science can’t discount.

“[My view is that] when you look at a particular object you find beautiful, it resonates with you because it’s providing some kind of a signal to your brain that what you’re looking at is important or relevant for a reason,” Vartanian says. “In this sense, it’s clearly related to meaning. The fact that you’ve had this experience that you define as beautiful typically means there’s something more there to consider and that, for me, has a connection to meaning.”

Agreement over natural beauty has translated to human creations as well. When we create art or buildings, we’ve historically done so with this shared understanding of what’s beautiful.

“If we can agree that an open sky and a sunset are beautiful, wouldn’t we be able to subtract meaning from that — look at the patterns of nature and create objects in the world which replicate or imitate those in new ways?” Clayton says. That historically has been what was understood as creating something beautiful – observing nature and replicating its patterns.”

But that begs the question: What are we to make of modern art — which seems at times in direct opposition to the principles and patterns of nature?

Beauty as an ultimate value

On a recent Tuesday, I made a pilgrimage to my local art museum – the St. Louis Art Museum – a place I’ve been tens if not hundreds of times. Feeling uninspired, I was seeking a connection to something real.

There’s one painting I always gravitate toward that I knew would meet my need: Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting of a moonlit river. In it, a lone manned vessel sits at the river’s bend, illuminated by the moon and dwarfed by pines and a crumbling manmade structure that are silhouetted against the moonlit landscape. The serenity of the scene, the juxtaposition of the light and dark, the man-made world and the natural world, captivates me every time.

Eventually I walked on, turning left into a large room, vacant but for one piece on a round white platform in its center. My instant reaction was one of confusion. The artwork, if one can call it that, was made up of shiny metal rods angled in different directions, compressed cardboard shapes that have the look of having melted – like something out of Alice’s Wonderland – and bone-shaped fragments from which fabric fingers protrude.

It seemed less like something copied from nature and more like the product of a bad acid trip. My confusion was replaced by a feeling not of awe, but disgust.

Turns out, there’s a reason for it.

“Too often when people go from the natural order, the environment, to what humans create, there’s almost a sense that instead of just creating something we can all agree is beautiful, we have to make sure we create things that are so unique that they’re transgressive or edgy,” says Clayton, noting that the same is often true of modern architecture.

This focus on creating unconventional and subversive works may have something to do with our obsession with utility.

In the modern industrialized world, we have a habit of believing everything must have some practical function. Every human creation serves some need, therefore art must have some utility, too, right? Whether that purpose is to shed light on the injustices of the world, offer commentary on our capitalistic tendencies or represent the chaos of our modern lives is up to each independent creator.

Late British philosopher and writer Roger Scruton, however, argued against this idea. He believed beauty serves no purpose but its own.

“Beauty is an ultimate value — something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given,” he said. “Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”

Perhaps it’s because of this focus on function that we appear to be losing our connection to beauty. As Clayton explains it, we are increasingly becoming a society that favors ideology over mystery.

“Human beings are drawn to certainty, but whatever certainty we have always points to something beyond itself — that’s what I call mystery,” she says. “Ideology is when we break that process of questioning and settle for just one frame or one perspective; that closes down the questioning and ends the quest.”

Unlike the Japanese, who continue to live by mono no aware, much of the western world no longer shares a common understanding of what is worthy of reverence in the first place.

Still, I find hope in knowing that somewhere, someone else is watching the same sunset and feeling the same quiet ache — the combination of sorrow, gratitude and awe that comes from the awareness of the transience of it all.

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“Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting.”
—Vincent van Gogh

In December of 1878, a young Vincent van Gogh arrived on the streets of the Borinage region of Belgium. He wasn’t there to paint or sketch, nor was he there to study.

He had come to preach the gospel to coal miners.

By the age of 25, Vincent had tried a few professions, including teacher, art dealer and bookseller; he thirsted for purpose and meaning, yet none of these paths had provided. While he enjoyed art, he seemed to view it merely as a pastime, not a serious vocation.

The son and grandson of Protestant ministers, Vincent was deeply religious, with a deep desire to serve humanity. But his attempt to become an ordained minister was also unsuccessful. He failed his entrance exams at the Flemish Training School in Brussels – a school for aspiring missionaries – and, in November of 1878, the administration informed him he would not receive funding.

In a letter to his brother Theo, dated November 15, 1878, Vincent wrote:

“I spoke with the Rev, de Jong and Master Bokma, they tell me that I cannot attend the school on the same conditions as they allow to the native Flemish pupils; I can follow the lessons free of charge if necessary – but this is the only privilege – so in order to stay here longer I ought to have more financial means than I have at my disposal, for they are nil.”

Bringing light to those in darkness

Reading Vincent’s many letters to Theo, a picture emerges of a young man adrift in the world, desperately searching for purpose and a way to help those in need.

His affinity for the working class and the downtrodden was clear. Vincent would often observe laborers as they went about their work, sympathizing with them but also feeling a deep sense of respect for the dignity with which they accepted their toil.

In a way, he seemed envious of their sense of duty and purpose. And as in everything, he saw God in their struggle. In his November letter to Theo, Vincent recalled observing the street cleaners and their carts one evening and, as was so often the case, how it called to mind some work of art:

“They seemed sunk and rooted still deeper in poverty than that long row, or rather group of paupers, that Master de Groux has drawn in his ‘Bench of the Poor.’ It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that when we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation – of loneliness, of poverty and misery, the end of all things, or their extreme, then rises in our mind the thought of God.”

His love of God is evidenced by his letters, as is his passion for art. The two were often interwoven in his mind. In one letter to Theo, he wrote: “I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, the inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God.”

But despite his obvious adoration for and inclination toward art, he continued to keep it at a distance.

That November, after being denied entry into missionary school – the latest in a long line of failures – and facing some undefined crossroad, Vincent took to the streets of Brussels. There among the working class, he was reminded of why and whom he wanted to serve.

“When we had taken leave I walked back, not along the shortest way but along the tow-path,” he wrote to Theo. “Here are workshops of all kinds that look picturesque, especially in the evening with the lights, and to us who are also labourers and workmen, each in his sphere and in the work to which he is called, they speak in their own way, if we only listen to them, for they say: Work while it is day, the night cometh when no man can work.”

Vincent couldn’t escape the feeling that there was greater work to which he was called. He decided that if he wasn’t suited for a conventional job or allowed to serve in an official religious capacity, he could contribute in another way — as a lay preacher to those whom he believed needed God the most.

“You know how one of the roots or foundations, not only of the Gospel, but of the whole Bible is, ‘Light that rises in the darkness,’ from darkness to light. Well, who will need this most, who will be open to it? Experience has taught that those who walk in the darkness, in the centre of the earth, like the miners in the black coal mines for instance, are very much impressed by the words of the Gospel, and believe it too.”

Thus in January of 1879, Vincent began preaching the gospel in the southern coal-mining region of Belgium called Borinage, having been granted a six-month position as a preacher for the Belgian Evangelization Committee.

He committed himself fully to his work, not only preaching about the life of Jesus but living it. Vincent regularly accompanied miners into the mines, visited and helped care for the sick and injured, and eventually gave up his clothes and possessions – even his bed – to live as the miners did.

Despite the desolate conditions in which he lived, he remained fascinated by and passionate about his work and the region and its people, who despite their struggles seemed content. In a letter to Theo, he wrote:

“The country and the inhabitants charm me more every day. One has a homelike feeling here, like on the heath or in the dunes; the people have something simple and good. Those who leave are homesick for their country; on the other hand, homesick foreigners lose their nostalgia for their own country and adapt easily.”

Vincent continued to see the beauty in the harsh reality of the world around him. His letters are full of passages about art, the “picturesque” landscape and the people who worked its depths, as well as his occasional attempts to capture through sketches the raw magnetism of the region and its inhabitants.

“The miners returning home in the evening towards dusk in the white snow were a singular sight. These people are quite black when they emerge into the daylight from the dark mines, looking just like chimney sweeps. Their dwellings are usually small and should really be called huts; they lie scattered along the sunken roads, in the woods and on the slopes of the hills. Here and there one can still see moss-covered roofs, and in the evening a friendly light shines through the small-paned windows.”

But Vincent’s contentment would not last.

At the end of the six months, the Belgian Evangelization Committee commended Vincent’s devotion to the sick and injured but criticized his extreme self-sacrifice for “undermining the dignity of the priesthood.” They would not be extending his service, they informed him, and gave him three months to move on.

By the next month, Vincent had left. For nearly a year he wandered, returning home to the Netherlands for some time, after which he traveled around staying with different people. During that time, he and Theo stopped writing.

A longing for action

Who has ever felt the pull to give something back to the world, both the desire and duty to contribute? The person who knows he has so much to give but doesn’t know how or what — the weight of this paradox rendering him paralyzed.

As it’s been for many others, this was Vincent’s condition.

In what was the first letter to his brother following his dismissal from his preaching position, Vincent wrote:

“For there is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like, you may take me for one of those.”

Vincent made clear that he was the latter — that despite his defeats, he wasn’t giving up.

“Instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity. In other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress.”

Vincent’s letter conveys the sense that perhaps art was the last and only thing that could make his existence bearable and meaningful. And he alludes to his decision to finally commit himself to it.

His next letter, dated August 20, 1880, was filled almost entirely with talk of his art and accompanied by a sketch of some miners (see above).

Vincent continued to throw himself into his work, studying the great masters he spoke of and, over the next decade, producing over 2,000 works of art. But even his dedication and skill could not save him.

Vincent was focused on emotion and distortion in a world seeking technical precision. A post-impressionist in an era of realists. Also lacking the social and commercial savvy necessary to sell his art, Vincent continued to be plagued by self-doubt, which contributed to his mental struggles and, many believe, his death.

“Can you tell what goes on within by looking at what happens without? There may be a great fire in our soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it, all that passers-by can see is a little smoke coming out of the chimney, and they walk on,” Vincent wrote to Theo in July of 1880. “All right, then, what is to be done, should one tend that inward fire, turn to oneself for strength, wait patiently – yet with how much impatience! – wait, I say, for the moment when someone who wants to come and sits down beside one’s fire and perhaps stays on? Let him who believes in God await the moment that will sooner or later arrive.”

For Vincent, this moment arrived too late.

He didn’t live to see his own success. But today there is not a person who doesn’t know his name or who hasn’t seen his work. Yet not everyone knows his full story – one defined by passion and conflict, beauty and pain, a commitment to God and humanity.

Vincent’s life is proof that we can find meaning not in spite of but sometimes because of our suffering. He may have never overcame his own struggles, but what he did do was more impressive: He chose to act — to create — in the face of it.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe, comment and share with others. If you believe in the importance of thoughtful, nuanced writing and independent journalism, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber to help support the time and energy that goes into producing these stories.

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Raised in the Missouri Ozarks, Stephen Eidson grew up fishing its many rivers and streams and hunting its forests. And while, nowadays, he spends most of his hours pursuing his other passion — art — nature and wildlife still occupy much of his time.

Now retired, Eidson spends much of his time in his studio, Wayside Art Gallery & Studio in Macks Creek, Mo. There, he can be found working on up to four pieces at a time, creating paintings or drawings, often from photographs he’s taken of nature scenes or wildlife.

In the stark hills and hollows of the Ozarks, Eidson says he doesn’t have to go far to find inspiration.

“What I’ll usually do is take a camera and go driving around. Usually rivers and creeks are the best place — not always, but almost always,” he says. “Around here, in the Ozarks, we have a lot of atmosphere. That makes this a good area to do art in.”

As a child, Eidson was riddled with illness, beginning with measles, which he says took its toll on his immune system. Often stuck at home, sick and in bed, limited in his ability to go or even see outside, he began to develop an interest in art.

“From the bedroom and back, we had kind of a lazy curtain that I would look out,” Eidson recalls. “I taught my eyes to become more critical of what I’d see because I was very limited in what I could see and what I could do.”

Eventually, in 2000, he was diagnosed with Common Variable Immune Deficiency.

Perhaps a reaction to the battles he’s faced in his own life, with illness, Eidson says that what he is drawn to most in nature is the “struggle of life,” which he strives to capture in his work.

“Sometimes, it’s the struggle of nature’s curves, where you see the actual struggle of a tree to live — how the limbs curve, how gravity pulls them down and how they reach toward the light,” he says. “That’s what we admire. We don’t realize it, but that’s the reason we like it. It’s the same way with humans.”

Eidson often seeks out water — mostly creeks and rivers — as the subject of his artwork as he finds it both calming and intriguing. But no matter his focus, he always tries to view it with a discerning eye.

“Something catches my eye and then I analyze it: What part of that caught my eye and made me like it?” Eidson says. “Most of the time, people are just too busy [to notice those things.] When you can kick it out of gear and just be one with nature, then … you can see those things.”

Eidson admits that he also could be better about paying greater attention to his natural surroundings. Yet he thinks his ability to detect the small, magnificent details in nature is in large part due to his training as an artist.

But the same qualities that enable him to notice certain details are also important in other pastimes — which is why Eidson believes it’s something anyone can learn.

“You train your eyes to see something — certain colors, certain shapes,” says Eidson. “You train your eyes the same way you do with hunting.”

"To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence."
— Mark Twain

You don’t have to know much about something to do it, or to even do it well. In fact, sometimes the less you know the better.

After years of my dad talking about “getting me out there,” I picked up a rifle at the age of 37 and headed for the woods. I had always been around hunters — first my dad and grandpa, and later my husband — but I never had much interest in it. Perhaps it was the thought of cold mornings hunched in a blind or some treetop perch, waiting and watching for something that may never come when there was perfectly good meat sitting in my freezer.

It wasn’t that it seemed hard. What was there to know? Camouflage yourself, wear an orange hat or vest, be quiet, aim and shoot at your target.

With little knowledge of hunting or marksmanship, I shot a deer at the first opportunity.

It turns out there’s only one way to kill a deer, but many ways to fuck it up.

We humans often have a tendency to want to learn all there is to know about a subject or task before undertaking it. This is natural — a desire to not waste our time, to control the output of our efforts, to build confidence.

But what if this is counterintuitive? What if it can actually cause us to overthink and perform worse?

Trapped in the confines of how things are usually done, we plough ahead with what our training and teaching tells us is the most obvious and proven path. But instead of being freed by our knowledge, we end up being tied down by it.

This can apply to any person and to many different professions and hobbies.

For me, this is writing.

On each of my wrists are tattooed four words — on the left, I live to write, on the right, I write to live.

But this constant reminder and my years of education, training and experience don’t help me when it comes time to sit down and write. It’s not that I don’t know enough about or haven’t read enough good writing or writers. It’s not that I don’t know all the writing rules – the grammar and punctuation and stylistic canon, if you will.

It’s perhaps that I know too much, including the fact that there’s an endless number of ways in which any piece of writing can be configured, along with an endless array of preferences.

Is this any good? Will my audience like this? What will they like and respond to? Should I have used that word? These are just some of the thoughts — the gatekeepers — to my being able to sit down and spit out something that feels worth anything at all.

Writing, like any endeavor, can be exhausting … and defeating.

That’s why sometimes it feels good to put down the pen and pick up something else, something new. Something I won’t overthink. That might build my confidence just a little.

Like a rifle.

When I pulled the trigger that fired the bullet that killed my first deer — and my second — I could have waited hoping a larger deer would follow, I could have taken the time to ensure a more stable resting spot for my barrel, I could have let the rapidly approaching darkness or my fear of a bad shot stop me from taking it. I could have thought about the wind or the long distance or how difficult it may be to find her in the dark. But I didn’t.

Afterall, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Having little knowledge of hunting, I, upon spotting the deer, pulled the gun to my shoulder, rested the barrel on the precarious intersection of two rods on the window of my hunting blind and the sight on the kill zone, took a deep breath and slowly pulled the trigger.

I didn’t think. I did what felt right, let my body take over, and hoped for the best.

If only writing were that easy.

The commoditization of the news media

The politicization of the news media

Despite all the challenges and shortcomings of traditional news media, it continues to serve a vital purpose. Just as signal fires were critical to the survival of our distant ancestors, the news is essential to the survival of our democracy.

“If there’s not a free press,” says Johanna Dunaway, research director at the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship in Washington, D.C., “then all the information we get is coming directly from campaigns or office holders or candidates or interest groups. [All of them] have an interest, so they don’t have an incentive to tell the whole truth.”

For the roughly 63% of U.S. adults who follow the news only some of the time, now and then, or hardly ever, Dunaway emphasizes the need to instill the importance of keeping up with public affairs – even if the reporting is skewed. “All too often I think people are super unhappy with what’s happening in government, and they don’t know how we got here,” she says.

Instilling the significance of staying informed, however, mandates a return to the bread and butter of news reporting — that is audiences. As Picard points out, the first thing any news media outlet needs to know is who its readers, viewers or listeners are. This task, however, has been a challenge for journalists, who have traditionally cared little for their audience.

“Quite frankly, journalists historically didn’t pay very much attention to their audiences,” says Robert Picard, a specialist on media and communications economics and policy, and a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute. “Newspapers used to do lots of audience research, but it all went to the advertising department. They didn’t really like their listeners or their readers or viewers because all they ever did was call to complain and write nasty letters.”

But through all the industry’s turbulence, there’s one medium that’s continued to maintain a close relationship with its audience. Literally.

“What we hear over and over again when we look at readership studies is people want local news,” Picard says. “They want local information. They want to know what’s going on in their schools. They want to know what’s going on in their town halls.”

At its best, local news fosters not only trust between and among reporters and the public, but transparency and engagement as well. “One of the hallmarks is you have a sense of dialogue and connection between the news organization and the people in that community,” says Zachary Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University. “There’s a lot of trust, there’s a lot of dialogue, there’s a lot of openness – and you get coverage that speaks to the issues that people care about. You get coverage that’s helping people make decisions about how to go about their lives.”

The State of Local News Project is part of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism — an initiative focused on helping local news survive and thrive in today’s media landscape. “We’re interested in conducting research on local news, including what’s successful within the local news world and how the industry is changing,” Metzger says, “and then trying to apply that research to help different outlets pursue sustainability and innovation.”

In his role, Metzger tracks the history and evolution of the local news industry to understand the ramifications of different levels of access to local news — i.e., what varying levels of access means for communities and for us as a nation more broadly.

Despite maintaining a high level of trust – unlike most national media outlets – local news has faced its fair share of challenges over the years that have affected access to and the quality of the news it provides.

Because local newspapers’ readership is smaller by nature, some of the problems that have plagued the industry overall have hit local newspapers hardest. The Internet’s impact on ad sales – classifieds in particular – being one.

“There’s been an effective collapse of that revenue stream over the past 20 years,” Metzger says. “So most news outlets have had to try to pivot to a subscriber-based revenue model. The problem is that a subscriber-based model can’t hope to account for what you would have been able to charge for advertisements. This has been one of the driving factors behind why we’ve seen so many news outlets disappear over the last 20 years.”

In addition to closures, Dunaway – who wrote her dissertation on local news, with a specific focus on media ownership – points to mass acquisitions and consolidation as an outgrowth of these cash-flow issues.

“The bad boys on the block are the Alden Capitals of the world (i.e., venture capital firms) that buy these outlets, strip them for their parts and sell them — and they don’t even pretend to care about news,” she says. “They’re unapologetic that the only reason they’re buying the outlets is for whatever profit it can bring them.”

All of this has led to a reality in which “something like 70% of all dailies are owned by just 10 companies,” Metzger says, and in which there are significantly fewer outlets — “thousands in the last, say, 10 years,” Dunaway notes.

She’s largely correct.

Over the last 20 years, the number of local U.S. newspapers dropped from 7,325 in 2005 to 4,490 in 2025 — a net loss of more than 3,200 papers over two decades, per the State of Local News 2025 report. “Where previously you might’ve had 15 outlets in a given place,” says Metzger, “now you’re down to three because they’ve all been combined.” Some towns have it worse, with not a single local news source to speak of.

Coinciding with the decrease in outlets is the reduction in staff. Since 2005, there’s been a 75% decrease in newspaper jobs, according to the report. “This leaves a lot of local papers in particular really understaffed, where they might only have one or two reporters on staff who are now responsible for covering an entire county’s worth of news by themselves,” Metzger says.

At the same time, more and more people are going to news aggregators like Google or Apple News for their information. This draws readers away from local news sites where they might have seen advertisements or paid for a subscription.

“Instead they’re just seeing headlines, they’re seeing AI-generated summaries, and they’re not engaged in the same way,” says Metzger. “The ability for news outlets to attract new readers and turn them into reliable subscribers goes down when you have these walls of technology that create a level of separation between the readers and the product.”

This barrier coupled with the lack of resources for reporting the news means that the quality of local news is constantly at risk. As local newspapers continue to bleed subscribers and revenue, much of the content in suburban and rural newspapers becomes either fluff or recirculated content from the nearest city newspaper, Metzger notes. Thus these vital community resources end up losing the unique, local angle that attracted readers in the first place.

This, Metzger says, has ramifications for civic life.

“Part of the challenge when you lose local news is that local politics become national politics,” he says. “Everything starts being viewed through the lens of our national political discourse. But local news helps to cut through that; it helps to say, ‘This is the partisan discussion that’s happening around these national issues, but this is what the impacts would be for our community.’

“That level of nuance and that level of localized analysis is one of the things that local news does so well. In the absence of that, you’re only getting partisan political discourse, you’re losing that nuance, which is dangerous for credible information.”

As Metzger and Dunaway note, the decline of local news has larger behavioral and societal implications.

“When local news outlets disappear from an area, the voting behavior in that area becomes more polarized,” Dunaway says. “You get more straight-ticket voting, partly because people don’t get the information they need about down-ballot elections. So even if someone wanted to vote for a different party for mayor or the House, they don’t because they know nothing about the candidates.”

“Voter participation can go down, civic engagement can go down, incumbents tend to be re-elected more often,” Metzger adds. “Corruption can increase, police misconduct can increase, taxes can increase. So there are very real, measurable impacts.”

What people are looking for in their local news, he says, is pretty basic. “Candidly, what a lot of people want is a source of information about their community, what’s happening in their community — restaurant openings, events,” says Metzger. “They want to be able to see their kid’s name in Little League results. And I think there’s a lot of attention on the role of local news in holding people in power accountable — that’s an incredibly important function.”

Local news also serves an important function in reducing polarization, Dunaway notes, as the issues it focuses on help humanize the community and its members.

“It focuses on the issues that remind us what we all have in common,” she says. “A lot of local politics is more about schools and your garbage collection. Everything is less about these big ideological, conflictual issues that the two parties fight about all the time.”

For all the problems plaguing local news, however, a willingness to pay has not traditionally been one.

“People really value their local news source,” Metzger says. “The problem, and where we see some of the willingness to pay for local news start to disappear, is when their local news becomes extremely diluted – the quality and diversity and breadth of reporting is extremely diluted. That’s when we start to see the desire to pay for what has become a lackluster product really start to go down.”

Thus local news finds itself in a quandary: “We’re kind of in that challenging middle ground where there’s actually quite a bit of demand for strong, vibrant local news, but there’s not a whole lot of supply to meet that demand,” says Metzger.

The bright-ish side? Metzger says that some news organizations, acknowledging that the old model is no longer working, are making changes. He points to a “reorientation” back toward audiences – outlets actually engaging with and asking readers what they want, and the curtailment of national news reporting by local outlets.

Some, however, are taking a completely different approach, including re-organizing as nonprofits — a move that, as Metzger says, “provides some insulation from some of the market factors.” At the same time, however, “Nonprofit is a tax code,” he says. “It’s not a business plan. So a lot of these places still need to have some sort of revenue model. But, we are seeing some really successful nonprofit newsrooms emerge in cities around the country.”

While Metzger emphasizes there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges faced by local news, one overarching change he’s seeing is a shift back toward hyperlocal. This includes building connections and trust between reporters and members of the community — effectively acting as the “glue” that holds a community together. The smoke signals of the modern age.

At a time when trust in leaders and institutions — including national news media — is at record lows, local news still has an integral role to play in democracy’s survival.

“Local media are still more trusted than national media,” Dunaway says, “so if we think news should matter at all, if we have the one level of news that’s still trusted going away, that’s a problem.”

“Whether people are listening to the radio, whether they’re reading stories or watching videos on a website or on TV, regardless, the model is to keep people engaged,” says Syracuse University professor Johanna Dunaway.

Research Director at the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship in Washington, D.C., Dunaway studies the intersection of news media and politics. Her research has focused on the impact of changing communication technologies on public opinion, political behavior, polarization and civic engagement. And what she’s learned about the news media’s revenue model has implications for each of those areas.

“For-profit news media, especially those in a super competitive environment, are going to default toward covering politics in a more sensational way,” says Dunaway. “In the world of politics, especially in the U.S. right now, the way to do that is to cover the controversies between the two parties and between politicians.”

The news media’s current obsession with politics is rooted in both psychology and history — calling to mind the “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra of the yellow journalism era of the late 19th century. Characterized by newspaper magnets William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s prioritization of violent or tragic stories to boost readership, this sensational style of reporting was popularized by television news in the 1980s.

Today, however, politics has usurped violence and tragedy.

“The more vitriolic someone is, the more extreme they are, maybe even the edgier they are, the more coverage they’re going to get,” says Dunaway. The most obvious example she points to is President Donald Trump. “One reason he got so much attention from the media early on, even before the 2016 primaries, was because he’s great [for] the media because he says exactly what he thinks,” Dunaway adds. “He speaks in quotables and frequently says outrageous things, and that’s all really appealing fodder for media outlets that are dependent on attracting as many eyeballs as possible.”

In the competitive world of journalism, Trump is a microcosm of the conundrum that news outlets find themselves in. Through interviews with journalists, Dunaway has repeatedly heard the same thing: “Even when we, journalistically, don’t think we should necessarily cover something because we know he’s trying to manipulate us,” she recalls, “we can’t not [cover it] because we’ll lose those audiences.”

When journalism becomes a race to see who can report the most garish political remarks of the day the fastest, the potential for error and manipulation is high. The natural outgrowth of such sensationalistic reporting is tribalism and division, which brings its own set of problems.

“The more polarized everyone becomes, the more they are willing to believe anything the politicians on their side say,” Dunaway says. “That’s a real problem because if the people who are leading your party are not being honest or not representing all the facts, and you won’t even listen to anyone on the other side, you can really get led astray.”

But it’s not just politicians who are prone to misrepresenting or distorting the facts, it’s the news media itself. A little pressure from advertisers can go a long way.

“Because media companies are so dependent on money from advertisers, if [an advertiser] happens to represent a particular tribe, they can bring a lot of pressure to bear on the owners or operators of media companies to try to reign them in or to try to get more of the views they support into the media,” says Robert Picard, a specialist on media and communications economics and policy, and a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute.

The way in which we consume news has implications for our politics and civic life as well.

Despite the fact that the news is consumed by politics, we rarely engage deeply with it. The medium may be at least partly to blame.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, 56% of American adults often get their news from a mobile device. Additionally, 21% often get their news from social media, while about half (53%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media. These seemingly innocuous insights have major ramifications for not just how we engage with the news, but how we view and engage with the world and people in it.

Cellphones and social media, it turns out, are terrible for attention.

“It’s a cognitive bias problem where it’s harder to focus for longer periods of time when you’re on a tiny screen compared to a larger screen,” says Dunaway. “Social media also increases the tendency to jump around and look at stuff but not engage with it deeply. That’s probably even more true if you’re on your mobile device.”

Much like the root problems faced by traditional media, however, the greatest issue with social media is the way in which “the algorithms prioritize vitriol, hostility and sensationalism,” Dunaway says, noting that most people aren’t aware of the economic model behind that. “They don’t understand that the reason that stuff is getting preference in their feed is because it’s hostile and negative and sensational. They assume it’s naturally generated.”

The reason for this is the same as with all media – this type of content is head-turning. Not to mention, cheap to produce, Picard notes.

And although there’s no easy solution — some outlets have tried paywalls, others fundraising campaigns — both Picard and Dunaway agree that media literacy is at least part of the problem and, thus, the solution.

“I think media history is more important now than ever as we get more kinds of media,” Picard says. “People need to understand how to analyze the content they’re getting, where it’s from, how to use it and how to look for good information. This is becoming more and more important as we become tribalized. But also, as we’re diving into AI – which is making it much worse – [media literacy] should probably start by middle school and continue on from there.”

Dunaway, however, believes there’s something bigger at play that needs to be addressed if we’re to solve the issue of the warped news media.

“I think it’s broader than [media literacy] in the sense that there are plenty of people out there who are media literate, but who just can’t be bothered or are uninterested or turn away from politics for whatever reason. It’s almost like civic literacy is the issue. We need to be able to train and educate people to be more equipped to make these hard decisions about what’s truthful, or credible, and what isn’t.”

But there may be a silver lining to this dilemma. Independent journalists, as well as self-made ones, have been turning en masse to online platforms, such as YouTube, Substack, Patreon and Rumble, to share news and information – via articles, videos and podcasts – with audiences fleeing mainstream media.

“We’re seeing an awful lot of journalists, many of whom have been laid off from various media [outlets], who are doing exactly that,” says Picard. “They’re moving to where they can cover niche stories and do things that they want. So we’re getting a lot of specialties out there that are meeting the needs of smaller groups of people or people who are interested enough to pay for it — and I think that is a very healthy thing. … Those are replacing some of [what’s] been lost in legacy media.”

That’s not to say these new forms of media don’t also face challenges or pitfalls. They, too, can fall prey to the sensationalism, tribalism and conflicts of interest faced by more traditional news outlets.

When trust is low and polarization high, opinions and conspiracy theories run rampant. And these online platforms offer an ideal breeding ground.

“The bad side of it is … you’ve got people who don’t know as much about news or public affairs, who can’t tell the difference between an opinion-based podcast versus one that’s trying to retain some of the values of journalism – where they’re trying to be objective or look at things from all sides,” Dunaway says. “And your average citizen doesn’t have a very refined ability to distinguish between opinion and news, and that extends to these formats as well.”

The emergence of these outlets, however, points to the public’s desire for a return to more human-centered news.

Beyond their core content, many of these independent journalists, writers and creators offer robust online subscriber communities, which often include chats, livestreams and roundtables, but also in-person events. This type of connection, Dunaway points out, harkens back to the defining era of television news characterized by trusted reporters like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. And it may be one way to regain public confidence in this modern, monolithic media age.

“It’s almost like we’re cycling back to a model that looks more like [when] people used to follow the evening news,” Dunaway says. “If you always read this Substack or you always listen to this podcast, then you’re getting to where you trust the person doing the podcast or the person writing the Substack – and that’s [where you get] that brand loyalty.”

Check back next week for the third and final installment in this series about the demise of local news and the implications for communities.

Long before modern technology enabled us to know the results of an election in France or of an invasion in Ukraine or of a new policy out of Washington — before streaming platforms, cellphones, TV, radio, newspapers and even couriers — humans used smoke signals to share critical information long distances. Useful for conveying important one-word messages — danger!, help!, victory! — the medium had its limitations.

Beyond its inability for nuance, smoke signals depended on factors like weather, visibility, timing and vigilance for effective delivery. Thus messages were easily muddled, mistaken or missed altogether. A tribe or village’s proximity to the sender affected its receipt of a message; the closer you were to its creator, the more you could accurately decipher its meaning – so long as there was a shared understanding of the signal code.

Over time, as signal fires became the telegraph became newspapers became TV, the information delivered by these media moved beyond that which is critical for our immediate survival. No longer limited by carbon communiques, we can now know what’s happening around the nation and world instantaneously, using not fire and smoke, but light and waves. Every presidential tweet, the latest celebrity gossip, every conspiracy theory, the latest outrage.

Yet while our communication has advanced, what of our ability to decipher the meaning and motives behind it?

The result of the proliferation of the news media has been an amalgam of outlets and information — and fierce competition for our attention and dollars.

But when news becomes commoditized, what gets lost in the smoke?

In the 1970s — a decade defined by the Watergate scandal, the end of the Vietnam war, Roe v. Wade, high inflation and unemployment — the news media in the U.S. was more trusted than the government. Public confidence in mass media hovered between 68% and 72% during the decade, according to Gallup’s first measurement of trust in the media.

Since that time, that trust has dropped markedly. In a 2025 Gallup poll, just 28% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in news media to report the news fully, fairly and accurately.

Somewhere in the decades that gave rise to talk radio, cable news, the 24-hour news cycle, the Internet, cellphones and social media, Americans lost their faith in the news media. At the same time, trust in government and our willingness to vote across party lines has declined, while our negative views of the opposing political party have risen. Politics have become increasingly tied to a person’s personal identity, and bipartisan cooperation is nearly nonexistent.

So, is this the chicken or the egg? Did news media help create the problem or does it simply report it? How well do news media companies serve the needs of the public and our republic? And are all mediums and outlets created equal?

To begin to answer these questions, we have to go back.

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But that belief was solidified on Sunday when the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team defeated Canada 2-1 in sudden-death overtime.

At a time when I’ve been having trouble separating the people in power in this country (from those in the spotlight to those operating in the shadows — or, in Jeffrey Epstein’s shadow, that is) from the country itself, 25 men have reminded me what the USA is and means.

In watching the U.S. men’s hockey team defeat the undefeated favorite, Canada, and witnessing their patriotic revelry, I realized America is more than a single person or group, and more than the party or person in power — or operating in the shadows. It’s greater than our transgressions and more powerful than what divides us.

It’s an ethos unto itself.

And it’s something that even the most anti- or un-American among us can’t damage or destroy. Those who don’t get it don’t get it.

When asked about his thoughts on representing the U.S. in the 2026 Winter Olympics, freestyle skier Hunter Hess said he had “mixed emotions” given “everything that’s going on in the U.S.” In the days that followed, perhaps rattled by the media attention his remark garnered and Trump’s Trump-y response (he called him “a real loser”), Hess’ performance suffered.

His remark was one that, at best, demonstrated his lack of understanding of what America is — a nation not defined by a single president or his actions or one group’s reaction to those, but one built on values like liberty, self-reliance, determination and integrity. A nation that despite mistakes and setbacks continues to defy the odds, that keeps on keeping on even when everything seems stacked against her.

The contrast between Hess’ America — one built on angst and resentment — and the America of the U.S. men’s hockey team — one defined by grit and determination and collective optimism — couldn’t be more stark. And Sunday’s win couldn’t make that clearer.

In a sport where losing a few teeth and a pint of blood are all in a day’s work, where rivalries run as deep as comradery, the U.S. men’s hockey team showed what it means to prevail and to do so honorably. Forty-six years since its last Olympic gold, the team of 25 showed a nation of over 342 million what it means to be American.

Representing the best that the USA has to offer, 24-year-old Jack Hughes, bloodied and breathless, said to reporters following his game-winning goal, “That’s American hockey right there. We’re USA. We’re so proud to be Americans. Tonight was all for the country. We’re so proud to win for our country.”

There will always be those who are American in name only, who misrepresent what she is all about, who would use her to further their own interests and ideals. But we can take heart in knowing there are still people — at least 25 young men — who still believe in and embody the true spirit of America. The idea that won’t die and can’t be killed.

But I’ll let you be the judge of who the better team was and is.

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”
— Eric Hoffer

On July 14, 1918, William McCormick Blair addressed a crowd of moviegoers at one of Chicago’s many picture houses. He spoke passionately of the United States’ and France’s devotion to freedom and the reciprocity between the two “unconquered and unconquerable” nations.

A concerned citizen, Blair felt the weight of the moment.

Until the year prior, the United States had maintained its isolationist policy as Russia and France battled invading German troops. The 1915 sinking of British luxury ocean liner the Lusitania, which killed over 120 Americans, and the surfacing of the Zimmerman telegram, revealing an attempt by Germany to ally with Mexico, however, led President Woodrow Wilson to reconsider his position.

In April 1917, the U.S. joined the Allied Powers — which also included Great Britain, Italy and Japan — in their fight for sovereignty.

As Blair stood before the throngs of people, the war was still fresh on Americans’ minds, the date relevant.

“Liberty has two birthdays,” Blair declared, “one in the new world and one in the old. One is marked by the anniversary of our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776; it is the birthday of a nation in the new western world, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created free and equal; its cradle was Independence Hall in Philadelphia. …”

“The second cradle of Liberty was amid the ruins of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789,” he continued. “The people of Paris destroyed this great Mediaeval prison, the emblem to them of tyranny and oppression and autocratic government. They lighted the torch of liberty at its smoldering ruins and sent their armies forth from the first great European republic …”

“These two great republics are children of the same spirit,” Blair added.

In the four minutes it took the projectionist to change the reels, Blair had delivered to a captive audience of Chicagoans an impassioned and impromptu speech.

Or, at least that’s how it appeared.

In 1916, President Wilson won re-election largely for his commitment to keeping the U.S. out of World War I — diverging from his opponents Roosevelt and Taft in a campaign characterized by the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Even as late as January 1917, Wilson continued to advocate for neutrality — despite pleas from France and its allies — delivering his now famous “Peace without Victory” speech to the U.S. Senate.

Thus when Wilson reversed course two months later, in April 1917, to declare war on Germany – most Americans opposed the move.

Anti-war sentiment remained pervasive, impeding Wilson’s ability to fund the U.S.’s war effort. Thus the administration needed a way to bring the public onboard. The way to do it, Wilson thought, was to create a unified public narrative as to why the war mattered.

Within a week of Congress declaring war, Wilson signed an executive order creating the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a temporary independent federal agency focused on increasing public support for the war. To lead it, Wilson enlisted American investigative journalist George Creel.

But if the CPI’s efforts were to be effective, they had to appear organic.

Standing before the crowd of moviegoers on July 14, 1918 – France’s Fête Nationale, commemorating the storming of the Bastille – Blair wasn’t simply a patriotic American stirred by the occasion. The prominent Chicago banker and civic leader was also the National Director of the CPI-led initiative the Four-Minute Men (named for the length of time it took to change a film reel), and he was there to rally the cause.

On this day of remembrance for France — which, more than a century prior, had helped the U.S. secure its independence — Blair’s goal was simple: to convince people of the need to support our long-time ally. His ulterior motive was to increase the sale of Liberty bonds.

Blair was one of approximately 75,000 Americans who served as Four-Minute Men – considered one of the CPI’s greatest tools for swaying public sentiment about the war. These orators delivered speeches to audiences not just at movie theaters but at churches, union halls, parks, school assemblies and other public spaces and events across the country throughout WWI. These individuals were often business owners and clergy, lawyers and civic leaders, neighbors and friends, and were trusted in their communities.

Neither the CPI nor its Four-Minute Men were clandestine; the press often referred to the CPI as “the war information service.”

But while Americans were aware of the agency and its programs, they weren’t aware of its playbook.

Speeches were uniform and scripted, as well as nationally coordinated, and their timing strategic. The appearance of spontaneity was engineered and was central to the CPI’s effectiveness. From 1917 through the end of WWI, an estimated 400 million people heard speeches from the Four-Minute Men.

But the CPI’s efforts weren’t limited to impassioned sermons.

In its movement to “make the world safe for democracy,” the agency employed a small cadre of writers, advertisers, artists and filmmakers who all shared Wilson’s and Creel’s sense that democracy was under threat. Lending an air of legitimacy to the project were familiar national figures like journalists Ida Tarbell and S.S. McClure, and illustrators Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg (famous for the “I Want You” U.S. Army poster).

At a time when most Americans got their news from newspapers, the CPI engaged in a vast campaign to shape public perception by controlling coverage of the war. This included efforts to overwhelm, confuse, suppress and cajole journalists and the newspapers where they worked.

The CPI issued daily press releases (approximately 6,000 total during its two-year existence), provided ready-made stories (along with photos and cartoons) and offered “voluntary” guidelines on how to cover the war.

Reinforcing the CPI’s efforts was the Espionage Act, which made it a federal crime, during wartime, to interfere with military operations or the draft or to speak, publish or distribute material deemed disloyal, obstructive or harmful to the U.S. war effort. Effectively the propaganda arm of the Espionage Act, the CPI made the cost of dissent appear high.

With relentless amounts of information and doubt cast on non-CPI-approved articles, wartime editors often published the agency’s pre-packaged stories as is.

The CPI’s soft edge coupled with the hard edge of the Espionage Act led both citizens and journalists to self-censor, fearing prosecution. As Creel later admitted, the CPI’s task was to “create an atmosphere in which the law would rarely need to be invoked.”

The tactic was simple: persuasion through saturation.

And while the medium varied, the messaging was always the same — calculated and visceral.

Posters, pamphlets, films, ads and newspapers — including the CPI’s own daily, the Official Bulletin — framed the war as moral rather than political, depicting the Germans as barbaric and inhuman, and the Allies as righteous and heroic. WWI wasn’t simply a war between adversaries; according to the CPI, it was a battle between good and evil.

In this moral context, there was no need for enforcement. Peer pressure did the work — anyone who dissented was branded disloyal, or worse.

At a time when propaganda was not yet considered taboo and carried a neutral or even positive connotation, the CPI’s campaign worked. Americans didn’t just comply — they participated enthusiastically.

Not only did the CPI foster consensus around U.S. involvement in WWI, it’s also credited with helping bring in over $21 billion in Liberty Loans — an enormous sum at the time — as well as driving Red Cross enrollment, draft compliance and volunteerism. The CPI and its team of citizens, writers, filmmakers and artists had shown that public opinion can be engineered.

While many Americans later reported being shocked by how quickly support for the war grew, the CPI’s efforts show how easily a small, coordinated group can sway public opinion — for good or for bad. Influence, it was discovered, is most powerful when it’s visible enough to feel legitimate but subtle enough to feel natural.

The CPI proved that you don’t need to convince people of facts so long as you can shape the moral and emotional context in which they’re received.

This level of psychological sophistication is one we continue to see today.

As CPI volunteer Edward L. Bernays (nephew to Sigmund Freud) wrote in his book Propaganda in 1928, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”

The lessons of the CPI, however, aren’t confined to government or politics.

Following WWI, many of the agency’s tactics became commonplace in the advertising and public relations industries. Today they’re the weapons of activist movements, corporations, media companies and terrorists, as well as governments and political parties. The subtlety of their messaging as well as its placement and repetition — enforced by algorithms, tribalism and pressure to conform — make CPI tactics some of today’s most powerful weapons for exploiting the masses through emotional and social manipulation.

As Creel later wrote in his book How We Advertised America, “Public opinion is not based upon reasoning alone, but upon feeling and impulse.”

Sources:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-180963082/

https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2011/04/04/the-wilsonian-path-to-war/

https://woodrowwilsonhouse.org/election-1916/

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/when-wilson-asked-war/

https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/isolationism-and-us-foreign-policy-after-world-war-i

https://doughboy.org/committee-on-public-information-when-the-u-s-used-fake-news-to-sell-americans-on-world-war-i/

https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/world-war-i-american-experiences/about-this-exhibition/over-here/surveillance-and-censorship/four-minute-men/

https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/the-4-minute-men/

https://historicmissourians.shsmo.org/george-creel/

https://www.jackmillercenter.org/our-work/resources/espionage-sedition-acts

“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”
— Margaret Heffernan

President John F. Kennedy once said, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”

Kennedy should know afterall — his own ability to cope with conflict was informed by personal experience with volatile situations.

In October 1962, the U.S. completed its placement of intermediate ballistic missiles in Turkey as part of an agreement with the allied nation. Within a year, U.S. spy planes discovered nuclear missiles in Cuba — having been placed there by the Soviet Union in response to the U.S.’s own defensive military manuevering. Just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, these projectiles were capable of striking American cities within minutes.

The subsequent 13-day standoff between the U.S. and the USSR remains the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. Yet this disastrous outcome was avoided due to the willingness of both sides to engage in discussion.

Recognizing that addressing the problem militarily would risk igniting a larger war, Kennedy and Prime Minister of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev communicated via both public and private letters, as well as through secret backchannels — an approach that allowed them to save face publicly while compromising privately to avoid nuclear war.

By attempting to see the situation from Khrushchev’s perspective – understanding how the U.S. might respond if a foreign nation placed missiles in Mexico or Canada, for example – Kennedy was able to find common ground with Khrushchev.

The ability of two world powers to resolve their conflict via communication (at the height of the Cold War no less) is remarkable. To this day, the Cuban Missile Crisis is considered one of the most successful examples of crisis diplomacy and conflict avoidance.

It’s especially notable when considered in relation to the attitudes and inclinations of Americans today — many of whom, rather than engaging in dialogue in hopes of resolving conflict avoid it altogether, unable to sympathize or even converse with people with whom they disagree.

A 2025 YouGov study revealed that most Americans (65%) said they don’t engage in in-person or online political discussions with people who have different political opinions. Specifically, 33% said this happens to them not very often, while 32% said it happens not at all often.

It’s no wonder considering how people view these conversations.

In a 2023 Pew Research Center study, 61% of U.S. adults said that having political conversations with people they disagree with is “stressful and frustrating.” (Conversely, 36% said such conversations are “interesting and informative.”)

In that same survey, 81% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats (including those who simply lean one way or the other) said that too little attention is paid to important issues facing the country.

This seems to point to the fact that we may have more in common than we’d like to admit and that our unwillingness to communicate because of political differences may be stymieing the very progress we desire.

This is the premise of much of Michael Kardas’ work.

An assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Kardas studies the differences between the expectations and realities of social interaction. In a study he conducted with colleagues Kristina A. Wald and Nicholas Epley — published in Psychological Science in 2024 — Kardas discovered that people often walk away from political conversations feeling more optimistic than they anticipated. He believes this is due, in part, to the realization that they have more in common with people they disagree with than they expected.

Titled “Misplaced Divides? Discussing Political Disagreement With Strangers Can Be Unexpectedly Positive,” the study included 198 people across the political spectrum, including those of different races and ethnicities. Kardas and his colleagues divided participants into groups of two and assigned each pair a topic to discuss — ranging from immigration to abortion — with some agreeing and some disagreeing about the issue.

Participants then filled out surveys predicting how they thought the conversation would go. After discussing their topics alone with their partner for 10 minutes, participants reflected on how their conversations went.

What Kardas found was that there was a significant discrepancy between the expectations of those engaging with people with whom they disagreed about an issue and how their conversations actually played out in real life. Even more informative were the videos of the conversations, in which participants tended to stay on topic and rarely showed hostility.

“Seeing the data reveals that the conversations are positive, but seeing the conversations reveals it all the more vividly,” Kardas said in a statement. “These are cooperative conversations between people that don’t know each other but, at least once the conversation has begun, are surprisingly interested in understanding each other’s perspectives, even when the issues themselves seem contentious.”

No sane person willingly seeks out conflict — in fact, many people avoid it at all costs — but what Kardas’ research seems to suggest is that facing conflict may be the path to overcoming it … and that doing so is usually not as bad as it seems. Engaging with people with whom we disagree can not only be a positive experience, but also the means for avoiding greater conflict, like nuclear war, in the future.

We recently spoke with Kardas to learn more about the study and its broader implications, why Americans often shy away from these conversations and the harm that does to us, and how social media is contributing. To read the full interview, become a Spirit & Sword paying subscriber today.

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“Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

It’s no secret that Americans are finding it harder and harder to engage with people we disagree with politically.

This polarization is borne out by research. In a 2025 YouGov study, 65% of Americans said they don’t engage in in-person or online political discussions with people who have different political opinions. Additionally, 61% of U.S. adults said that having political conversations with people they disagree with is “stressful and frustrating,” per a 2023 Pew Research Center study.

But why is that?

Perhaps we assume the conversation will be unpleasant, that it will make us angry, that it will be fruitless, pointless even.

But what if we’re wrong?

That’s exactly what Michael Kardas, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, set out to discover.

During his time as a postdoc at Northwestern University, and then as an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business, Kardas and colleagues Kristina A. Wald and Nicholas Epley conducted a study to see if people’s expectations involving political disagreement around contentious issues aligned with reality.

“Misplaced Divides? Discussing Political Disagreement With Strangers Can Be Unexpectedly Positive” showed, per its title, that people often walk away from political conversations with strangers feeling more optimistic than they anticipated. Published in Psychological Science in 2024, the study included 198 people of varying races, ethnicities, religions and political ideologies.

We spoke with Kardas to learn more about the study, its broader implications and where Americans might go from here.

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“If you lose money, you lose much; if you lose friends, you lose more; if you lose faith, you lose all.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Early in 2025, when government cuts resulted in the loss of funding for refugee resettlement, a group of faith leaders in Northwest Arkansas worked together to raise money for a local refugee resettlement organization. By hosting a benefit concert, they were able to raise more than $10,000 to help the organization stay open.

Composed of people from various faith traditions and political ideologies, this group is a testament to the good that can come when we stop fixating on our differences and, instead, focus on what we have in common — and it’s part of a larger movement: the One America Movement.

An organization committed to reducing toxic polarization by working with faith leaders and faith communities, One America Movement is using the “wisdom of the faith traditions” to achieve its mission, says Chandra Whetstine, the organization’s chief operating officer (COO).

“We’re building a network of people of faith who speak and act against toxic polarization in accordance with their own faith traditions,” she says. “Our approach is that if we can support those Americans, to help them have healthy group dynamics inside and between their groups, then that becomes kind of a stabilizing force for the broader society.”

One America’s vision is “a resilient, strong and united country working together to solve our common challenges.” With nearly 110 million Americans (almost one-third of the country) who attend worship services regularly, the organization sees a tremendous opportunity to have greater impact — as its partnership in Northwest Arkansas illustrates.

“That’s an example of something that individually they would not have been able to do,” Whetstine says, “but because they were working together and crossing divides, they were able to have a bigger impact in their community than they otherwise would have.”

The movement’s approach – and the best tool against fear, anger and division, Whetstine says – is decidedly simple: building relationships. “There’s an old saying that it’s hard to hate up close,” she says, “so the more we can get people into real relationships with people who are different from them, the better off we’re going to be.”

Fortunately, despite all the differences between faith communities, there’s a core conviction that unites them: a belief in something greater than themselves, Whetstine notes.

But in a world that increasingly venerates Earthly power over a higher power, politics has displaced religion in the modern zeitgeist. As Whetstine says, “Our religious identity has been co-opted.”

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