Mónica Guzmán: One Step Closer | UNUM series
Village SquareCast
As we contemplated who we might invite for this post-election UNUM gathering, we were (temporarily) flummoxed. A week after the election would we be in need of an expert in election law, a therapist or an exorcist? Could we just place all three on speed dial? Then we realized that no matter what happens during – and after – the 2024 election, there will undoubtedly be some BIG feelings about it, so our task on November 12th is utterly clear even now: we’ll need to take one step closer to each other. That journey has a sherpa, and her name is Mónica Guzmán. Mónica is the...
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God Squad: Lost & Found
Village SquareCast
America’s young adults are telling us they’re not OK — in ways large and small. It’s high time to take a good, close listen and have a frank conversation about the spiking anxiety & depression among adults coming of age in this time of disruption and disconnection. We’re losing more young adults than we can bear. As successive generations move away from organized religion, perhaps there’s a longing for spiritual direction that we have in our souls for relationship, community and ritual. Can religious congregations help to address this problem? If so, how do they connect and...
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Tim Urban: What's Our Problem?
Village SquareCast
What, exactly, is our problem? Author Tim Urban, known for his extended riff on procrastination in his endlessly wise, sidesplittingly funny, stick-figure illustrated blog, emerged from a 6-year deep think with an answer that has the power to save humanity (from itself). In Urban’s analysis, the primitive mind is a furry orange monster holding a burning torch, big dumb looking genies called golems roam the land — and we’re going to need a resurgence of rival genies to save us. Oh and we're all moths wasting our lives circle the porch light. In this episode, Tim joins us to...
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God Squad: Church v. State
Village SquareCast
As we barrel toward America’s 250th, one could argue that if we crack up before we get there (some bad days we’d take even odds), it’ll have something to do with the complexity of being in charge of executing one of the founders’ biggest ideas — that the church and the state were to be separate in this new nation of theirs. (It had been so much “easier” when the king told all us peasants what religion we were.) Our framers, for the first time in history, asserted that a citizenry had “natural rights” as human beings, given to them only by God, to follow (and be responsible...
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Frenemies: Berny + Geston both love their country.
Village SquareCast
Friends since middle school, Berny Jacques and Geston Pierre are both children of Haitian political refugees who fled political instability that put their families at risk – with Geston’s parents arriving a little earlier than Berny’s. Despite their friendship and shared family immigration story, they have reached very different conclusions about politics and social issues in the United States today. What Berny and Geston have found in the space and differences between them, we believe, has a lot to teach the country they both dearly love. In the lead-up to a contentious...
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Wisdom from Conflict: Resetting The Table
Village SquareCast
Drawing on decades of experience addressing volatile disagreements surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, works to transform toxic polarization and destructive political conflict in the U.S. We’ll be joined by Resetting the Table’s Co-Founding CEO, Melissa Weintraub, a veteran peacebuilder and social entrepreneur who has spent her career building transformative communication across divides, overcoming dehumanization and distrust, and working toward a shared society in both the U.S. and Israel-Palestine. This program is part of the series in partnership with Florida Humanities...
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God Squad: Seeking High Ground in the School Wars
Village SquareCast
In a culturally, religiously and racially diverse society like ours — with a single public school system designed to educate America’s children — maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the culture wars have Officially Hit Our Schools. When you clear away the noise, at the core of the struggle is this: what should our schools teach our children—and who decides? Joining us for this conversation are special guests school board member Dr. Marcus Nicolas and Lea Marshall, a beloved high school theatre teacher. God Squad joining us: Father Tim Holeda of St. Thomas More Co-Cathedral,...
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Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation
Village SquareCast
We were honored to hang out with our intellectual hero, Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a few weeks before the release of his recent book Unsurprisingly, the book became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. If you have kids, if you know kids — heck, if you've ever seen a kid — you're just going to have to read this book. It gives us no less than a chance to rescue the coming generations from the devastating effects of an accidental social experiment run amok. Haidt argues we're overprotecting children in the real world — where they need to play, be exposed to challenge and freedom in order to...
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UNUM Series: The Soul of Civility
Village SquareCast
Find the program online here: https://tlh.villagesquare.us/event/soul-of-civility/ While our special guest Alexandra O. Hudson, author of “The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves,” finds the challenges to civility today dire, she thinks they’re not new — and they’re most definitely not about being more polite. Lexi brings a deep and fresh appreciation for the wisdom of the ages to the moment we’re in, from Socrates and Confucius to more contemporary thinkers such as Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Henry David Thoreau. She joins forces with these...
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Fragile Neighborhoods with Dr. Seth Kaplan
Village SquareCast
“Fragile Neighborhoods is an essential and engaging read for everyone who wants to better understand the challenges facing our cities, towns and our nation at large.” Richard Florida – Bestselling Author of “The Rise of the Creative Class” Find the full program online here — https://tlh.villagesquare.us/event/fragile-neighborhoods/ As we continue our “Join or Die” year—exploring how we build lives of connection and belonging inside a polarized America—we’d be remiss if we didn’t turn our attention to the neighborhoods and the city where we live our lives. Too many...
info_outlineWith our culture wars at a full rolling boil, apparently all it takes to send our enmity over the edge is…a good old-fashioned country song??
The furor over Jason Aldean’s “Try That in A Small Town” (and then there’s Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond”) is reminiscent of the old furor over The Dixie Chicks—only the “sides” have switched up. As The Village Square embarks on a pluralism project to build a hometown where everyone belongs, it’s possible that “round here we take care of our own” is a value we should all seek to restore to American civic life, but does it really need to come with all the guns? We’ll bring The God Squad into this musical fracas (they dove right into this one in our planning meeting), so that they can do their usual thing and go high instead of the usual low. Can we find a place where perhaps we can tolerate each other and just SING? (Dolly Parton has something to say on that front…)
Check out the “Try That In A Small Town” lyrics. And the lyrics to “Rich Men North of Richmond” are here.
Joining us for this God Squad are Father Tim Holeda of St. Thomas More Co-Cathedral, Josh Hall of First Baptist Church, Joseph Davis Jr. of Truth Gatherers Community Church, and Rabbi Paul Sidlofsky of Temple Israel. Stefanie Posner of Temple Israel will be facilitating.
Meet the God Squad, the brains behind our series “God Squad: Improbable conversations for people of faith and no faith at all (because talking politics wasn’t hard enough). Joining us for this edition of God Squad:
Find bios for our participants and a full program description online here.
The Village Square is a proud member of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.
Funding for this podcast was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of Florida Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.