Thank you for agreeing to be a participant in our Respectful Community Conversations.

Our overall purpose in these conversations is to draw together people from various social/political persuasions so that they can listen to and learn from each other in respectful conversations. Although we understand the conveniences of labeling beliefs, we think it is more productive to appreciate that we are not easily labeled. Rather, our beliefs and socio-political orientations are not linearly distributed along party lines. Our lives are simply more complicated than that.

Harvey Yoder has described a more robust orientation on his blog. We encourage you to read and think about his description of belief-systems before our first conversation on April 24 at _____ 7:00 pm.

Link to statement

This first conversation will start at 7:00 pm and end at 8:30 pm. We will have a facilitator whose role will be to encourage us to adhere to the following guidelines for respectful conversations:

• Try to limit your response to one minute.
• Do not interrupt a speaker.
• Do not argue with what someone else has said. Our purpose is to listen to and learn from each other.
• If you feel uncertain about what someone else has said, try to restate in your own words what that person has said and ask if your interpretation was right.
• Look for areas of common belief rather than difference.
• Avoid over-generalizations: “Everyone knows that . . . .”
• Be respectful of others and what they believe.

We are not in this project encouraging pablum conversations; rather, we are interested in conversations in which participants respect one another’s beliefs and work toward actions that would emerge out of that respect. If we are successful in our first meeting, we will try to expand this conversational format to others in the community.