Randy Lioz

By combining the ideas of very different people—and organizations—to discover not only what each can contribute but what collectively we can create, we might finally accept that together, we’re greater than the sum of our parts. 

Each one of us can, and should always seek to, keep growing and changing for the better. But our only hope is for others to give us the space, and the grace, to do so.

We must go beyond the anger and vengeance of those who see us as the sinners, and focus on the narratives that create it.

And indeed, my feelings about the two issues are fairly similar. Given the numbers, I feel that both pit bulls and guns should be subject to fairly aggressive restrictions. But my certainty over these issues is weakened by my understanding of the good-faith concerns and beliefs of those on the other side.

There’s an inherent tension between this desire to enforce common values that we believe are important for creating a free and prosperous society and allowing individual communities within that society to choose their own values, to the exclusion of some chosen by others. So who gets to decide where this line is drawn?

I’ve heard several people declare that they are uniquely impervious to the human tendency toward emotionally motivated reasoning. But I tend to conclude instead that this person is the opposite of unique. They’re blind to the impact of their own biases, just like the rest of us.

If you take the time to watch not just the shootings themselves, but the preludes that lead up to them, even in the days preceding, you see a lonely, bullied kid who had sought acceptance and community with a group that claimed to be the allies of the police.

After some initial uplifting optimism that the common challenge we face might bring us Americans together to some extent, we have (entirely predictably) fallen back to being utterly divided in

As many organizations have, we’ve been engaged in an ongoing conversation about the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact it might and should have on Braver Angels. As we are so

In the younger days of the Internet, when Facebook was first hitting its stride, the world felt a boundless sense of optimism about the potential of this technology to bring

The ever-present debate about “identity politics” continues to rage. It’s a conversation that gained strength during the civil rights activism of the latter 20th century, but it truly became a

A few weeks ago, I was trying—feebly—to learn Vietnamese. My girlfriend is from Vietnam, and my first encounter with her parents was around then. It seemed like the very least

By Randy Lioz and Paul Norris Involvement in Braver Angels can be a highly rewarding endeavor, and each of us feels an increasing pull towards the organization, taking on more

The University of California, Berkeley, holds a distinct place in the history of political discussion in America. In fact, it’s practically synonymous with left-wing campus protests. In the midst of

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that we’ve been fostering a sense of fragility within an entire generation of Americans. I think they