Featured Essays

When it comes to his phrase “American carnage,” Donald Trump hit on something dark and deeply disturbing, but also something important and true.

The hearings on William Barr’s confirmation for U.S. Attorney General were conducted with the mature civility one would expect from a deliberative body of responsible adults.

The belief that we must create a more inclusive nation and world, which treats every person as worthy of the same rights and responsibilities.

When I read a recent account in The Cut recalling an incident with Joe Biden that made a young woman extremely uncomfortable, I wasn’t at all surprised.

I’m not a Democrat. But for all these reasons above and more, I like Joe Biden, a man and politician worthy of praise.

American politics has grown increasingly polarized over the past 20 years, degenerating after the 2016 election and in the Trump Presidency into all-out partisan warfare. Observing from the sidelines, a significant portion of the voting public has begun to sense a real danger in this fracturing of partisan politics, and are searching for solutions.

We need to make it acceptable again to see something, somewhere, that promulgates a worldview that’s different than ours, without immediately condemning it. 

Of the many virtues which we have long recognized in our culture – things like courage, humility, and integrity – an essential one that we’ve missed, maybe the essential one, is balance.

The language that the left and the right use is often very different. At Braver Angels, we recognize that a language barrier can lead to serious issues when it comes to communicating effectively, and this certainly hasn’t helped us to extricate ourselves from our present loggerheads between reds and blues.

When I first joined Braver Angels and had to claim my political leaning, it wasn’t easy. I’ve been registered as an independent my whole life, and have voted for Republicans, Democrats, and even third-party candidates. With our Founding Fathers, I’m skeptical of factions, and political parties themselves—especially in our current primary system—seem to be one of the main forces driving our polarization.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of forgiveness. As humans who regularly do plenty of awful things, we’re all in need of a fair amount of it. And our elected leaders are certainly no exception.

As I write this, President Trump has recently declared a national emergency in order to increase funding, beyond what Congress has already approved, for extending a physical barrier at the Southern border.

We at Braver Angels are on a mission to depolarize America. Usually, that means we try to help people have more productive conversations across the acrimonious political divide which currently separates us. It’s important to recognize, though, that the acrimony isn’t restricted to dialogue between members of different groups.

Growing up in the United States of America—a nation defined in many minds by its fraught racial history—and observing public life at a time when racial sensitivities are constantly prodded and enflamed, it is easy to think that there is no greater sin in the world than racism.

Among the many, many collateral damages caused by our current hyper-partisanship and political dysfunction, killing the notion of public service in the next generation will inflict the most lasting damage to our democracy.

Now is our time to remember who we are- now is our time to show America who we are, and what we can be together.

For the first time in American history this month, however, the Speaker of the House of Representatives specifically declined to invite the President to address the assembled houses of Congress on the state of the union.

Rupa Ray’s experiences at the Phish concerts are generally very positive, but every so often she catches a glimpse of a different undercurrent that runs beneath the outward openness.

Braver Angels Magazine The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was born January 15th, 1929. He died, still a young man, April 4th, 1968, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. The

With the current state of things, it seems like it’d be prudent to assume we don’t know as much as we think we do.

Can we be honest with each other about our feelings while protecting one another from the hurt that this honesty might engender?

The essence of building a political coalition is finding disparate elements who can find common ground – not on everything, but on something.

When times are good, when institutions are stable and prosperity abundant, it may be that we are less likely to ask fundamental questions about values in society. Their importance is

This past October I got the chance to attend Politicon, the recently annual conflagration of political junkies and pundits in California.

Sound politics used to be about wedding empathy and patriotism. We may want to start doing that again.

For the past two years, Thanksgiving has been one of the most painful times of year for many Americans. Even if we haven’t lived this story ourselves, just about every one of us has heard from a frustrated friend about their dread over returning home to share a turkey dinner with relatives.

Immediately after the 2016 presidential election, in the thick doldrums of what for me and many of my friends was a genuine tragedy, I started to talk about empathy. I had been finding it tough to come to terms with the beliefs of some of the people I cared about in my life, but I was at least having conversations with them.

Amos, Andy and Apu Facebook Reddit Twitter Email John looks at the reemergence of controversy surrounding the Simpsons character ‘Apu,’ along with a glance back at the history of stereotypical