Friends, fellow citizens, and partners in truth-seeking

“We have some deep points of agreement, profound points of agreements, despite our political differences. We’re committed to the life of the mind. We’re committed to truth seeking. We’re committed to ideas, to civil discourse, to freedom of speech, and so forth. And so we’ve formed a little evangelistic team for those principles and values.”

Robert P. George

“And so when we got a chance to just revel in each other’s humanity, it didn’t take too much time for us to see that we had something even deeper than civility, tolerance. We had a deep love and respect for one another that was in no way reducible to politics, that we had a deep brotherhood that no way reducible to disagreement on certain public policy. And we didn’t know that we were actually emerging at time which the whole American empire and the fragile experiment in democracy and American society, the culture was just being shattered by polarization, shattered by inability to revel in each other’s humanity, obsessed with identity rather integrity, obsessed with interest group politics rather than public interest and common good.”

Cornel West

“Do you have a close who is of a different religious faith, has a different set of moral opinions, belongs to different political party? If you don’t, go out and make one, and make one with a view not to converting that person, though who knows what will happen in the dialogue. Make one with a view to learning from that person. It doesn’t mean you’re pre-committed to change sides, but it means that you’re acknowledging your own fallibility. You’ve got the intellectual humility to acknowledge that you don’t know it all and you’ve got something to learn from somebody who will challenge you and encourage that challenge.”

Robert P. George