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Can we love one another, even when we disagree?!
![DW picture Dialogue Workshops](https://imgh.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/DW-picture.png)
About Dialogue Workshops:
Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston unites people in dialogue, collaboration, and service as part of The Dialogue Project, which includes Faith in Our City, Dinner Dialogues, Vital Conversations with Our Community, and now this off-shoot of our Dinner Dialogues called The Dialogue Workshops. Our hope is that through dialogue, collaboration, and service, we can foster understanding and collaboration that benefits our community.
Today, in communities across the United States, we find ourselves in a time in which we have an inability to talk about divisive issues or across various divides. We seem to no longer have the ability to engage in conversations with those we disagree with, and these divisions have bled into the sacred spaces of both our families and faith communities.
To help faith communities and their leaders navigate these trying times, Interfaith Ministries has partnered with the national, non-partisan organization Braver Angels. Launched in 2016, Braver Angels is a national citizen’s movement to bring liberals, conservatives, and others together at the grassroots level – not to find centrist compromise, but to find one another as citizens. Through workshops, debates, and campus engagement, Braver Angels helps Americans understand each other beyond stereotypes, form community alliances, and reduce the vitriol that poisons our civic culture.
To foster the skills for dialogue, Braver Angels uses the difficulties and complexities of political discourse to teach these skills. Please know, that the content of the discussions will not represent the views of Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston. As an agency we work to remain a nonpartisan agency in all of our work as we build understanding for various points of view. The Dialogue Workshops are our effort to provide thoughtful and timely resources in these times of division. Their purpose is to skillfully foster understanding of other perspectives, not by changing anyone’s mind, but rather by advancing skills for listening and discourse. This level of skill-building can only happen when people of differing mindsets are willing to be in conversation with one another. Braver Angels uses political/ideological discourse as the vehicle to teach these dialogue skills because it is these issues that at the heart of many disagreements.
Braver Angels workshops have become a great resource for faith communities of all varieties to help people of differing viewpoints talk to one another. As you consider registering for the workshops below, invite a friend or family member of a differing viewpoint from your own to sign up with you. We will do our part to make sure that each workshop has an equal number of “reds & blues” to facilitate constructive dialogue across the political spectrum.
This will be a virtual experience.
For more information, contact Kim Mabry at kmabry@imgh.org.
Upcoming Dialogue Workshops
Tuesday, November 9 from 6:00pm – 8:00pm
This workshop will show participants how to talk about politics with their loved ones in a way that brings us closer together — not farther apart. Although the focus is on family relationships, you can use strategies in this workshop with any loved one. You will laugh and have some fun in this workshop—it won’t be all serious.
The Families and Politics workshop is a hybrid workshops that requires participants to complete a 40-minute interactive course online before taking part in a group session that runs approximately 2 hours long.
Participants in this workshop can expect to learn the following:
- Insight into why family differences over politics are uniquely challenging.
- Recognition of common roles that family members play in political conversations (for example, the Gladiator, the Defender, and the Sniper)
- Strategies and skills for handling family political differences in a constructive way.
This is a two-part workshop combining an online eLearning course and an online, interactive workshop offered over Zoom. To participate in this workshop: Register here!
Interfaith Relations and Community Partnerships invites the community to join us for a Vital Conversation on December 7 from Noon to 1pm as we discuss, A Season to Care: Mental Health and the Holidays.
Email Gevetta Phillips at gphillips@imgh.org for more information.
This event is free.
Registration is required.