It’s a sure sign of the times when any across-the-aisle friends that still exist out there in the wild tend to keep their friendship on the down low, in case they’d be accused of fraternizing with “the enemy.” From the halls of Congress to our hometown, this makes becoming or staying bipartisan friends an act of straight up rebellion against the toxic culture we find ourselves in. We’ll be joined

 Ready to fight back against the confusion, heartbreak, and madness of our dangerously divided times? Find the answers you need by talking with people—rather than about them—and asking the questions you want across the divides you want, curiously. Seeing where people are coming from isn’t just possible. It’s easier than you think. Monica Guzman is Director of Digital and Storytelling at Braver Angels, a nonprofit working to depolarize America, host

It’s an election year. Should churches have political candidates speak at Sunday services? Should clergy tell congregants how to vote? Should congregations organize political rallies or get-out-the-vote efforts? What are the proper lines for religious involvement in politics? And what are the consequences (to the body politic and to religious communities) when these lines get crossed? Learn more about the God Squad – talking faith and politics, because talking politics

Bridge building?!  (We’re not talking about the Golden Gate, people.)  An industry that was recently unknown and almost nonexistent has exploded in recent years, as average citizens begin to see the sharp growth in political divisions as an emergency that requires our attention. In the midst of a divisive election season, we’ll take a pause to chat with leaders in the bridge-building field about the outlook for cooperation across political

Airdate: October 6 2022 In celebration of The Village Square’s determination this year to celebrate what’s working and worth emulating (in a world in which much seems broken). God Squad will kick off their 13th season thinking about our fellow humans who have behaved heroically during these challenging times. But—beware—one’s hero might be the other’s villain in these divisive “us or them” times. If we can’t agree, we’ll imagine what

Airdate: September 22 2022 Dr. Robb Willer of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University has been working on understanding the moral underpinnings of this accelerating anger—and his research shows that we’re speaking different languages. Our conversation makes Robb, a movie buff, think of zombie apocalypse movies, and wonder if we’re acting just a little too much like “foot soldiers in the army of the undead” in the

Airdate: September 8 2022 “One day, here in America,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, “I hope that we will see this and we will become one big family of Americans.” More than 50 years and King’s death, it is an aching American tragedy that we find ourselves with issues of race, arguably, as emotional, divisive and consequential as in King’s time. The “Created Equal” series launched to address this

Airdate: August 2022 There is perhaps nowhere in our civic debate where the conversation has grown so calcified as the one about morality. Why don’t liberals seem to care about moral behavior and the moral communities that support it? Why don’t conservatives seem to care about rampant public corruption at the heart of our political system? If we care about doing the right thing, can’t we care about both? Retired

Airdate: June 2022 Until now, most of our knowledge about responses to demographic change has been based on studies of individual people’s reactions, which tend to be instinctively defensive and intolerant. But how can leaders shape the public response to the changes citizens are reacting to? In Majority-Minority, Gest looks at six of the world’s few societies that have already experienced a majority-minority transition to understand what factors produce different

Airdate: May 2022 At a time when complex technology of all sorts is exploding, and voluminous information about the world is at our literal fingertips, one commodity in oddly short supply is intellectual humility. And in these polarized times, we’ve become shockingly convinced that somehow our political allies can decipher reality with utter clarity, and it’s only our ideological foes who are thoroughly, utterly, and so very dangerously WRONG. Turns