I’m sharing with you some reporting from the front lines of the civic renaissance afoot in our country, this time from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last Friday, August 28, an auspicious day in the perils, cost and promis of the human condtion for reasons I will share with you below.

The below is also a first glimpse of something else I’ve been rather consumed with lately: the new anniversary paperback edition of *The Soul of Civility*, coming out this fall.

I’m sharing it with you for two main reasons.

First, because standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial next to my friend Daryl Davis, on the anniversary, and in the exact place, where Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, was healing and redeeming for me.

As many of you know, my time in Washington politics was rather soul crushing. It ultimately drove me to flee Washington and write this book.

Eight years later, I found myself flying back into the city and rushing straight from the airport to the Lincoln Memorial. There was something wonderfully full-circle about it. I left Washington to write a book about how we might live together better. Then I spent the years after its publication taking that argument out into the world, into cities and communities, legislatures and universities, workplaces and living rooms. And somehow, eight years later, that argument brought me back to where it began.

Second, I wanted to give you a first glimpse of the new anniversary paperback itself.

I have been buried in this manuscript lately, revisiting *The Soul of Civility* three years after it first came into the world. This is not simply the hardcover in paperback form. I’m cutting it, tightening it, updating it to reflect my current thinking, and adding what I’ve learned from three years of watching people actually try to put these ideas into practice.

The first edition made an argument. This edition gets to report back from the experiment.

But it is also the continuation of an intellectual journey. I have spent the last three years reading and thinking and traveling, talking with people across politics, geography, vocation, and worldview, and watching these ideas collide with the messiness of actual human beings and actual institutions. I understand some things differently than I did when I finished the original manuscript. I have encountered thinkers I wish I had known then, stories I could not have told then, and questions I did not yet know to ask.

So this is not simply *The Soul of Civility* with three additional years tacked onto the end. I want it to be the definitive edition of the book.

If you already have the hardcover on your shelf, thank you! You helped give this book its first life. But this is the edition I hope you will want beside it, dog-ear, mark up, lend out, give away, and return to.

The new paperback will include:

* **Dozens of new case studies from the front lines:** stories of how people in divided cities, legislatures, universities, workplaces, institutions, and communities are actually using *The Soul of Civility* and its ideas about human dignity and flourishing across difference.

* **Nearly 100 new quotations from thinkers across time and place** on the timeless principles of human flourishing. I’ve heard from a surprising number of public leaders, mayors and CEOs among them, who keep my book handy on their shelves when they’re writing speeches and essays, almost as a quotation reference book. I love that. So, more quotes for you!

* **New writing, ideas, and reflection** on what I understand now that I could not have known when I finished the original manuscript, after three years of reading, thinking, taking these ideas into the world, and watching what happens when they encounter real people and real divided institutions.

* **And a substantially streamlined book.** Only the good stories and content. No filler or fluff! I hired an editor and explicitly asked her to be merciless with me and the manuscript: if something isn’t useful, interesting, beautiful, or important enough to earn the reader’s time, it goes.

So if you have already read *The Soul of Civility*, there is plenty here that will be genuinely new. And if you haven’t read it yet, well, you waited for the leaner, wiser, definitive version. :)

I also want to invite you into what happens next.

**Would you like to help me send this new edition into the world?**

I’m putting together a group of early readers and paperback reviewers who would like an advance copy and are willing to read it, review it, write about it, or share it when it comes out.

But I’m also looking for people who want to **put the book to work**.

Maybe you want to organize a book club or community read. Maybe you think *The Soul of Civility* belongs in your workplace, classroom, church, library, university, association, or leadership program. Maybe your city or community could use a larger Civic Renaissance conversation. Maybe there is someone you think I should know, or somewhere you think I should go. Maybe you simply want to help spread the word.

Or maybe you have an idea I haven’t thought of at all. Those are often my favorite kind.

If any of this sounds like you, just reply to this email and tell me what you have in mind.

Part of what the last three years have taught me is that writing the book was only the beginning. The really interesting question is what happens after someone closes it. What happens when these ideas leave the page and enter a friendship, a workplace, an institution, a legislature, or a city?

That is increasingly where the work of Civic Renaissance lives.

I’ll share more below about where that work is taking me on the Civic Renaissance tour this fall. But first, here is a glimpse of what I’ve been making.

Renewing the The Dream

Last Friday, August 28th, eight years after I fled a toxic and dehumanizing Washington to write The Soul of Civility, I found myself flying back into America’s capital, rushing straight from the airport to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

My friend Daryl Davis, an African American jazz musician, had invited me to stand there with him on August 28, the anniversary of the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from that very spot in 1963. Daryl, whose father had been at the Lincoln memorial that day Dr. King delivered his famous speech, is known around the world for his passion (he calls it an obsession) for seeking out members of hate groups, including Neo-nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, and converting them away from their hateful views through friendship.

Daryl had spent years trying to get someone to notice that the marker denoting where King stood was fading into illegibility, worn smooth beneath the feet of millions of visitors, many of whom have no idea the significance of ground they are standing on.

That day, we were there with a crowd of thousands of people to announce a campaign to restore Dr King’s marker.

The marker had faded. In many ways, so had King’s dream.

King dreamt of a world in which human beings would not be reduced to the color of their skin, but judged by the content of their character. Daryl has spent much of his life testing what happens when you refuse to reduce even a person who hates you to his hatred, and King’s hope that re-discovering our shared humanity across difference still held the power to help us rise above hate.

For more than forty years, Daryl has sought out members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacist groups. He doesn’t pretend their ideas aren’t evil. He argues with them. But he also asks them questions and actually listens to what they say. He talks with them, eats with them, sometimes even attends their weddings, and often, befriends them. His working theory is, “How can they hate me if they don’t even know me?”

Once, after years of friendship with a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Daryl was invited to his wedding. The bride was a member of the Klan, too, and her father could not be there to walk her down the aisle.

So Daryl did.

A Black man walked a Klan bride down the aisle and gave her away to her Klan husband. A Confederate flag hung in the window behind them.

The story does not have the tidy ending we might want. Friendship does not magically cure hatred, and Daryl’s success will never be universal. What arrested me was something more basic: he refused to allow another person’s hatred to exhaust his desire to care for and try to understand the person.

On the steps of the Lincoln memorial that morning, Daryl told us something I hadn’t known. August 28 was not only the anniversary of King’s speech.

Eight years earlier, on August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had been murdered in Mississippi. His killing became one of the galvanizing horrors of the civil rights movement. King returned to Till throughout his life as an example of the evil of racial injustice. Eight years to the day after Till’s murder, King stood above the Reflecting Pool and summoned America toward another way.

That evening, speaking at the National Press Club, I added a third August 28.

On August 28, 430, Augustine of Hippo died while Vandals besieged his city of Hippo in North Africa.

Augustine had spent years thinking about why civilizations fail and what human beings are capable of doing to one another. In The City of God, written after the sack of Rome, he described an indelible part of the human condition, the in curvites in se, the inward curve upon the self. We have an ever-present tendency to put ourselves before others. An ugly expression of that perennial temptation is the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate.

The lust to dominate which can, as the wordplay in the original Latin suggests, become the dominating lust.

One date. Three glimpses of the human condition.

Augustine revealed something of the darkness of the human condition: the gravitational pull on the human spirit to think of ourselves before others, our recurring appetite to treat other human beings like things, to dominate one another. Emmett Till’s murder revealed the horrific cost of surrendering to that impulse, of allowing our appetite to dominate to eclipse the humanity of another person. And King revealed something else about the human condition: the greatness of which we are also capable. He summoned us toward another way, to recognize the dignity of every human being, to see character before category, and to build a world in which our differences need not diminish our shared humanity.

Standing there sixty-three years later, Daryl embodied something of King’s hope: that our capacity to dehumanize one another is not destiny, and that recovering our shared humanity might still help us rise above hatred. Restoring the physical marker was one small way of restoring attention to the idea of our shared human dignity that it marked.

I had felt so much despair during my years in Washington. Standing on those steps, for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt something closer to hope.

It wasn’t the first time. King had given me hopefulness once before, during my darkest year in Washington. Not on a national stage, but on retreat along Maryland’s Wye River, among a group of exhausted staffers trying to remember why any of us had come to Washington in the first place.

See the video below for my remarks at the National Press Club at the Renewing the Dream reception.

Support the Prohuman Foundation’s campaign to Renew the Dream here.

The Civic Renaissance Tour, Fall 2026:

What excites me most about the Civic Renaissance tour this fall is that so much of it is a continuation.

These are ideas, relationships, and dreams that have been years quietly in the making. Now, we get to invite you into it.

Last September, leaders from across the country gathered in Carmel, Indiana, around the ideas of The Soul of Civility for the first Civility Summit.

The premise was simple: People gathered to build around the ideas of my book.

• Civility is not politeness.

• Agreement is not the goal.

• Flourishign across differnce and recognizing the digntiy and humanity of other persons is the goal.

It was beautiful.

Throughout the weekend, leaders kept coming to me and saying some version of the same thing: I want this in my community.

So we began to build.

A year later, communities across the country are convening their own Civic Renaissance Summits, commomorating the work they have done through organizing community reads, gathering leaders across difference, forming ambassadors, and asking what it would look like to bring these ideas to life where they live.

This fall, I have the extraordinary privilege of returning to several of them.

And I want to tell you how these things happened, because almost every one began the same way:

One person decided to begin.

September

September 22 — Urbandale, Iowa

Urbandale began with one person.

The mayor of Urbandale attended the Civility Summit in Carmel last fall. He came home and said: I want this for my community.

So we began to build.

This spring, Urbandale launched *The Soul of Civility* as a community read. Now, this September, we will gather for their own Civility Summit, bringing the ideas people have been reading about off the page and into the life of the city.

The response has been rather astonishing. The gathering quickly filled, demand exceeded the original capacity, and organizers moved it to a venue that can hold up to 1,000 people.

There is an appetite for this.

Not necessarily because every community is in crisis. Many aren’t. Some are healthy and want to remain healthy. People can look at what is happening elsewhere and decide that they would rather cultivate the habits and relationships that sustain a community before they desperately need them.

September 23— St. Ambrose University, Davenport, Iowa

Shortly after The Soul of Civility came out, a political science professor at St. Ambrose reached out to me. He was troubled by the division he was seeing on his campus, and by its effect on the ability of people to bring forward ideas, encounter one another, and learn across difference.

He didn’t simply want to lament it. He wanted to help build something better.

So we began building a Civic Renaissance at St. Ambrose.

Today, he leads a growing cohort of Civic Renaissance Ambassadors drawn from across the university and its surrounding community, including students, faculty, administrators, donors, and community leaders. They are reading together, gathering together, and thinking seriously about the culture they want their university to embody.

This September, I’ll return to St. Ambrose to continue what we have already begun.

September 29 — Palmer Lake, Colorado

Palmer Lake offers a rather extraordinary case study in how and why this project of building a Civic Renaissance is working.

For years , this small Colorado town found itself consumed by a bitter public fight over a proposed Buc-ee’s development. The dispute was ostensibly about a giant travel center. But it became about much more: growth, land and water, conservation, transparency, local government, and what kind of community Palmer Lake wanted to become. Public meetings became contentious. The controversy contributed to a recall election and the resignation of the town’s mayor. Buc-ee’s ultimately withdrew its annexation application from Palmer Lake earlier this year.

But the question left behind is much more interesting to me than whether a Buc-ee’s gets built:

How does a community remain a community when its members disagree profoundly about its future?

Leaders there—both elected officials and citizens alike—found a resource for thinking about precisely that question n The Soul of Civility. It wasn’t by pretending disagreement doesn’t exist, and certainly not by insisting everyone agree, but by asking how people can preserve one another’s dignity and flourish across difference.

I’ll be in Palmer Lake on September 29 at the beloved local Covered Treasures bookstore to continue that conversation with them.

Watch the recap video of the Pikes Peak Region Civic Renaissance Leadership retreat, hosted by Palmer Lake and Monument, in June.

September 30 — Colorado Springs, Colorado

My relationship with Colorado Springs also began with people who simply reached out.

Two women with a heart for their community had read *The Soul of Civility* and had a vision for gathering people around its ideas.

We began building together.

I first joined hundreds of public leaders there this spring. I returned in June for a smaller Civic Renaissance Leadership Retreat, where leaders could go beyond talking about division and begin thinking about the relationships, practices, and institutions necessary for flourishing across difference.

And on September 30, I’ll return again, this time to gather more than 100 civic leaders and continue what we have begun.

That word, continue, matters to me.

The point is not for me to fly into a city, give a speech, collect my suitcase, and leave.

The point is for a book to become a shared language. For a gathering to become relationships. For relationships to become habits. For habits to begin shaping institutions and communities.

That is what I mean by a Civic Renaissance.

October

October 2–3 — Global Free Speech Conference, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

I’ll join the Global Free Speech Conference at Vanderbilt University, including a conversation with Nadine Strossen, continuing to explore what it means to maintain human dignity and pursue flourishing across profound disagreement.

October — Civic Renaissance Salons across Texas

Members of the Texas Legislature have been reading *The Soul of Civility*. This fall, ahead of the next legislative session, we will bring public leaders together across Texas for a series of Civic Renaissance Salons.

The salons are intended to do something more than talk about flourishing across difference. For an evening, we try to practice it: gathering people who might not otherwise sit around the same table, sharing a beautiful meal, encountering one another as whole human beings, and then sending them back into their institutions and communities ready to build.

October 25 — St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, Indianapolis, Indiana

This one began especially close to home.

A congregant gave the pastor of St. Luke’s a copy of The Soul of Civility. He read it, loved it, and decided that he wanted his church to be a source of healing in its own community.

So he reached out.

I love partnering with people in my own backyard, and I’ll be at St. Luke’s on October 25 as we consider what it means for a church, and the people within it, to help cultivate a community in which people can flourish across difference.

This is just a glimpse into the Civic Renaissnace Tour this fall. There are many more stops in the works.

These are also the kinds of stories I am gathering for the new anniversary edition of The Soul of Civility: case studies of people choosing to navigate division with grace and integrity, and using the book not merely as something to read, but as a resource for building the culture they want to inhabit.

And here is perhaps the most hopeful thing I have learned from watching all of this unfold:

It only takes one person to begin.

A professor. A mayor. Two women who love their city. A congregant who hands a book to a pastor.

One person reads something and thinks: *I want this for my community.*

And then they begin.

If that person might be you, write to me. Respond to this email with the subject line CIVIC RENAISSANCE.

Tell me about your city, university, workplace, church, association, or community. Tell me what you are seeing, what you hope might be possible, and what you want to build.

I would love to build a Civic Renaissance with you.

Thank you for being here.

Today we’ll explore:

• Exciting announcement: A 3rd-anniversary paperback edition of The Soul of Civility is coming!

• Who was St. Augustine, and why does he still matter nearly 1,600 years later?

• In Washington Today to Honor Dr. King’s Legacy, 63 Years After His “I Have a Dream” Speech

• Introducing The Great Conversation, Lived: What questions about civility and the good life do you wish I would answer?

Happy birthday to The Soul of Civility!

I have some exciting news: a new anniversary paperback edition of The Soul of Civility is coming this fall.

I don’t want simply to slap a paperback cover on the old book and send it back into the world. In the nearly three years since it first appeared, I’ve watched these ideas leave the page and enter classrooms and workplaces, universities and state legislatures, living rooms and communities across the country. I’ve learned a great deal about what works, what needs more explanation, where I said too much, and where I didn’t say nearly enough. So I’m going back in.

And before I do, I want to hear from you.

If you’ve read The Soul of Civility, hit reply and tell me just one thing:

What would you change?

Where did I lose you, confuse you, or leave you wanting more?

What question about civility do you wish I had answered?

Don’t worry about writing me an essay. A sentence is wonderful. I really am going to read these, and I want this edition to be as relevant and useful to you, as leaders and as human beings, as I can possibly make it.

I’ll be tightening and streamlining, adding new material, and finally explaining the story behind an oft-misunderstood joke in the introduction.

And if you’d like to be an early reader of the new edition, reply with PAPERBACK in the subject line and let me know.

I’m also newly able to create special and personalized editions for communities and institutions, something I’m ridiculously excited about. So if you’ve ever thought, *We should read this at our university / company / church / book club / city council / across our community*, tell me that too. I want to know how you would use it.

Three years later, I don’t simply want to make The Soul of Civility shorter. I want to make it better.

And I would love your help.

Remembering St. Augustine on the day of his death

St. Augustine of Hippo died on August 28, 430 AD, in Hippo Regius, in what is now Algeria.

That was 1,596 years ago.

It is difficult to overstate Augustine’s influence on those who came after him, especially in philosophy, theology, psychology, and many, many other disciplines. But that isn’t, on its own, a very good reason to read him. There are lots of historically important people whose books we are perfectly content to leave gathering dust.

Augustine is different.

The surprise of reading Augustine is not how ancient he seems, but how familiar.

Here is a man worrying about ambition and appetite, friendship and happiness, his career, his mother, what other people think of him, why he wants things that don’t make him happy, why he does things he knows he shouldn’t do, and what in the world is going on inside his own head.

Augustine understood something that we sometimes forget: **a human life is something we have to learn how to read.**

Who am I? Why do I do the things I do? What do I love? Are the things I love worthy of my love? Why can I know what is good and still fail to do it? Why am I restless, even when I seem to have everything I thought I wanted?

Augustine does not merely tell us the story of his life. He investigates it. He turns his attention inward and examines his own motivations, weaknesses, desires, contradictions and failures, sometimes at almost comical length.

Famously, he devotes an astonishing amount of attention to a rather unimpressive crime from his youth: stealing pears.

Augustine and his friends stole pears from a neighbor’s tree. They weren’t hungry. The pears weren’t particularly good. They hardly even ate them. They threw them to pigs.

And Augustine cannot let it go.

Why did I do that? he wondered, over and over again.

It is a tiny question that opens into an enormous one: Why do human beings do things that we know are wrong, sometimes without even particularly wanting the thing we are doing them for?

That is Augustine.

And perhaps the most compelling thing about *Confessions* is that Augustine’s examination of human nature begins with the human being he knows best, and still does not entirely understand: himself.

The restless Augustine

Augustine was born in what is now Algeria in 354 AD. Though his mother, Monica, was religious throughout his life, Augustine’s early adulthood was consumed by ambition, appetite and an intense search for answers.

He was intellectually restless as well as personally restless. He moved through different schools of thought, looking for an account of the world that satisfied him. He wanted professional success. He wanted pleasure. He wanted truth. And, like most of us, he was not always entirely clear about which of those things he wanted most.

In 384 AD, Augustine moved from North Africa to Milan to begin a prestigious post teaching rhetoric. Crucially, it was there that he encountered the renowned St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan.

Augustine began listening to Ambrose preach. He was also reading the Platonists, especially Plotinus, whose ideas helped him reconsider questions he had previously thought Christianity could not adequately answer. His mother was there. His friends were there. Books and people and ideas were working on him at once.

His conversion, in other words, was not a single instantaneous event. It was the culmination of a long intellectual, spiritual and personal struggle.

But there was a moment.

One day in 386, Augustine was in a garden in Milan, agonizing over his inability to relinquish his old life, when he heard the voice of a child repeating, Tolle lege, tolle legs, Latin for take up and read, take up and read.

Augustine opened a book of Paul’s letters and read the first passage his eyes fell upon, Romans 13:13–14: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

Augustine understood the moment as the culmination of his conversion to Christianity. The man who had spent so much of his life searching outside himself for happiness began the radical reorientation of his loves and values that would shape the rest of his life.

Years later, reflecting on that search in Confessions, Augustine wrote:

Late have I loved Thee, O Lord; beauty, so ancient and so new. And behold, Thou wast within and I without, and there I sought Thee. Thou was with me when I was not with Thee.

Thou didst call, and cry, and burst my deafness.

Thou didst gleam, and glow, and dispell my blindness. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for Thy peace. For Thyself Thou hast made us,

And restless our hearts until in Thee they find their ease. Late have I loved Thee, Thou Beauty ever old and ever new.

Confessions, X.27

Augustine’s great subject is this restlessness: the distance between what we think will satisfy us and what actually does, between what we know and how we live, between the person we are and the person we might become.

But Augustine also shows us that learning to read our own lives is not something we do entirely alone.

He needed other people. And he needed old books.

Augustine and the Great Conversation

Augustine is an essential figure in the Great Conversation, the iterative dialogue, the debate, even, of those who have come before us about the big questions in life.

Who are we? Why are we here? What is the best way to live?

Augustine was a Neoplatonist, meaning that he was greatly influenced by Plato through later writers, namely Plotinus. And you can see the influence of Plato throughout Augustine’s work.

Confessions itself is essentially about the examined life. Augustine surveys his conscience and explores the motivations for his actions at great length. He is intensely introspective because he believed that an essential way to know God was to intimately know oneself.

Augustine strove to understand his weaknesses and shortcomings so that he could better live a life of meaning and virtue and happiness.

But this is the part I find so important: Augustine did not invent these questions.

He inherited them.

Plato had been dead for more than seven centuries by the time Augustine was born, and yet Plato’s ideas helped Augustine understand his own life. Augustine received those ideas through other thinkers, wrestled with them, disagreed with some of them, transformed others, and then added his own voice to the conversation.

And Augustine himself went on to influence virtually all philosophers who came after him, even those who disagreed with him: St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and so many others.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, studied Augustine and invoked him in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail: “I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”

I love thinking about the journey of an idea like that.

Plato influences Augustine. Augustine writes in North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries. His ideas travel through monasteries and universities, theologians and philosophers, arguments and revolutions, until more than fifteen centuries later Augustine turns up in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, in an argument about segregation and justice in America.

This is the Great Conversation.

We can understand Augustine only if we understand something of those, especially Plato, who came before him. And we cannot fully understand many of the seminal figures who came after him, including Dr. King, without knowing something about Augustine.

In so many ways Augustine exemplifies why it is important to be familiar with the Great Conversation, and why the ideas of those who came before us matter to us today.

And a few years ago, I had the chance to follow this conversation not just through books, but through actual places.

In the footsteps of St. Augustine

My family and I spent time following in the footsteps of some of the great men and women who built our world, an idea that I plan to turn into a future book.

As part of our pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Augustine, we went first to Milan.

**SIDE NOTE:** Underneath the beautiful Duomo in Milan is an active archaeological site excavating the ruins of the original fourth-century Christian complex in Milan, which is open to visitors. Amazingly, the site includes the original baptistery of San Giovanni alle Fonti, where Augustine was baptized by St. Ambrose in 387 AD.

You can stand in the place where Augustine was baptized.

Thanks to Confessions, we know the significance of this place in Augustine’s life, which, especially for an ancient historical site, makes this a very, very special place.

But before Augustine was baptized, he spent several months somewhere else.

We traveled north to a small town in Northern Italy just south of Lake Como called Cassago Brianza.

This is an important place for Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual development.

In the months leading up to his baptism by St. Ambrose in Milan, Augustine, alongside his mother, his son and some close friends, retreated to a villa in the countryside owned by another friend.

The villa was called The Cassiciacum, and we had the chane to visit the original, currently unexcavated site of it.

[This is the kind of place I’d like to lead us for Civic Renaissance Tours, walking in the literal footsteps of the Great Converstaion, the men and women who asked big questions about the good life, and who build our world.]

There was something very moving about standing in the place where Augustine had spent this strange interlude between one life and another. He had stepped away from his career and from the life he had been living, but he had not yet been baptized. He had undergone an enormous intellectual and spiritual transformation, and Cassiciacum gave him time and space to make sense of it.

What he did there also tells us something about how Augustine thought a human being came to understand himself.

He did not go off alone.

Cassiciacum: friendship, leisure and the intellectual life

Augustine retreated to Cassiciacum with the people who were closest to him. It gave him a chance to reflect on who he was in light of his conversion experience, which of course represented a radical reorientation of his loves and values.

And importantly, that reflection happened in the context of conversations with others.

They read. They talked. They debated philosophy. Augustine wrote. Several of his early philosophical dialogues emerged from this period.

There is a tendency to imagine the intellectual life as something essentially solitary: one person, alone, reading and thinking great thoughts.

Augustine reminds us that intellectual life also happens in friendship.

Other people ask questions we would not ask ourselves. They expose our assumptions. They help us test our ideas against another mind. They give us books. They disagree with us. Sometimes they simply give us the pleasure of thinking aloud in the company of someone else who cares about the same question.

But Cassiciacum gave Augustine something else that seems increasingly rare today: leisure.

We’ve explored the Greek concept and word for leisure, *scholē*, the root of our modern word *school*, but the Latin word for leisure that Augustine would have used was otium.

Leisure, unstructured time to think, read, write and converse about big questions and the most important things, is an essential ingredient in the intellectual life and in the life well lived.

It is not simply idleness.

It is space.

Space in which a thought does not have to justify itself by immediately becoming productive. Space to read something difficult, to walk, to talk with a friend, to reconsider something you thought you knew, or to sit with a question long enough that it becomes a better question.

Cassiciacum offered Augustine friendship and leisure, but it was also a place of retreat, rest, hospitality and conviviality. It was a place where people lived and ate and talked and thought together.

I was enchanted by this idea.

So enchanted, in fact, that when we later bought our home in Indianapolis, we named it The Cassiciacum after Augustine’s retreat.

We had visited Augustine’s Cassiciacum before we owned this home. I had stood on the site in Cassago Brianza and become captivated by what this place had represented in his life: a place set apart for retreat and rest, friendship and conversation, hospitality and conviviality, healing and renewal.

When we later found ourselves with a home of our own, we wanted it to aspire to something similar.

We wanted it to be a place where people could gather and eat and talk, where friendship and intellectual life did not have to occupy different worlds, where people might retreat from the demands of ordinary life long enough to think about the things that actually matter.

And over the years, our Cassiciacum has become a place where we have had the privilege of doing just that, welcoming people into our home for meals, conversations, gatherings and retreats.

There is something rather wonderful to me about the fact that an idea embodied in a villa in northern Italy more than sixteen centuries ago could travel all the way into our own lives and change something as tangible as what we named our home and what we hoped that home might become.

But then, that is precisely the point of the Great Conversation.

Ideas travel.

They cross centuries and continents. They pass from one mind to another. And occasionally, if we let them, they change the way we live.

Tolle lege

Which brings us back to Augustine.

He was shaped by people who lived long before him. Plato and the Platonists helped him see things he had not seen before. Ambrose helped him reconsider ideas he had dismissed. Monica and his friends accompanied him through his transformation. Cassiciacum gave him the friendship and leisure in which to reflect upon it.

And then Augustine added his own voice to the conversation.

For nearly sixteen centuries, other people have been picking up his books and asking his questions.

King did.

I have.

And now I hope you will, too.

The point of reading Augustine is not simply to know what Augustine thought. It is to allow this strange, brilliant, restless man from fourth-century North Africa to turn some of his questions on us.

What do I love?

Why do I want what I want?

What am I pursuing because I genuinely believe it is good, and what am I pursuing simply because everyone around me seems to want it?

Who are the people helping me examine my life?

Do I have enough leisure to think about any of this in the first place?

The surprise of Augustine, nearly 1,600 years after his death, is not how foreign he is.

It is how familiar.

And perhaps that is why the words at the turning point of his own life remain such a fitting invitation to us:

Tolle lege. Tolle lege.

Take up and read.

In Washington Today to Honor Dr. King’s Legacy, 63 Years After His “I Have a Dream” Speech

Today marks sixty-three years since Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his I Have a Dream speech.

I’ve been thinking about that speech this week because I’ve been invited to Washington, D.C., to help honor Dr. King’s life and legacy, and to reflect on what his words ask of us now.

The occasion is Renewing the Dream, an initiative of the Prohuman Foundation that begins with something wonderfully concrete: restoring the physical marker at the Lincoln Memorial where Dr. King stood on August 28, 1963. But the larger ambition is to renew what that place represents, a commitment to equality, character, pluralism, and our shared humanity.

This evening, I’ll be speaking at the National Press Club about the enduring importance of I Have a Dream.

One of the remarkable things about King’s speech is that it did not ask Americans to abandon the American ideal. It asked us to live up to it.

King called the Declaration of Independence and Constitution a promissory note, a promise that the nation had made but had grievously failed to keep for millions of Americans. His response to that failure was neither cynicism nor abandonment. It was insistence. The promise was real, and therefore we were accountable to it.

Sixty-three years later, that challenge remains.

At a moment when it can seem easier to write one another off than to remain in relationship across profound difference, King reminds us that the answer to our failures is not to give up on one another. It is to keep enlarging the circle of who belongs, and to keep demanding that our institutions and our own lives honor the dignity we claim belongs to every person.

I’m honored to be part of this commemoration, and especially honored to help ask what it might mean not simply to remember the dream, but to renew it.

It’s fitting to rememebr Augustine and Dr. King on the same day, as King was highly influenced by Augustine. As King memorably wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963, “I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”

As noted, Augustine died on August 28, 430.

And 1,533 years later to the day, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his I Have a Dream speech. The coincidence feels especially fitting because King’s understanding of human nature was, in important respects, Augustinian. We are fallen and fallible creatures. We will fail one another, and the societies we build will always fall short of the ideals we set for them. But for Augustine, our imperfection was never a reason to stop striving toward the good. King understood this, too. The fact that we will never build the perfectly just society does not release us from the obligation to build a more just one. We try, we fail, we repair, and we try again.

If you’re in Washington, D.C., I’d love to see you this evening at the National Press Club.

The Great Conversation, Lived

I spend a lot of time talking about the Great Conversation, the centuries-long conversation about the questions that human beings have always asked: What makes a good life? What do we owe one another? What is friendship for? What makes a community flourish? How should we live?

But the Great Conversation isn’t just something that happened between Plato and Augustine and Confucius and Montaigne. We’re part of it, too. And the great questions don’t only arise in books. They turn up at the dinner table, in our marriages and friendships, at work, in our communities, and in those inconvenient moments when another human being simply refuses to behave as we think they should.

So I want to try something new: The Great Conversation, Lived.

Send me the questions you are actually wrestling with about civility, friendship, disagreement, forgiveness, family, ambition, community, meaning, the good life, or simply the strange business of being a human being among other human beings.

They can be big:

* What actually makes a life good?

* Can we flourish without community?

* Is ambition compatible with contentment?

* What do we owe people with whom we profoundly disagree?

* Can you forgive someone who isn’t sorry?

Or wonderfully specific:

* When should I speak up, and when should I let something go?

* How do I stay friends with someone whose politics I find abhorrent?

* How do you make real friends as an adult?

* What do I do when someone continually mistakes my kindness for weakness?

* How do we raise children who have strong convictions without teaching them to despise people who think differently?

* How do I disagree with someone at work when I’m genuinely afraid there will be consequences for saying what I think?

Each week, I’ll choose one question and answer it in the next issue of Civic Renaissance. Chances are, if one person is lying awake thinking about it, someone else is too.

So bring me your questions. Philosophical, practical, uncomfortable, peculiar. Nothing is too small if it opens onto something larger.

Reply to this email with the subject line QUESTION. You can include your name or remain anonymous.

Let’s bring the Great Conversation into everyday life.

Gracious reader,

Many of you know my admiration of Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and polymath who offers us much insight into the human condition, defined by the greatness and wretchedness of man, and our penchant for distraction, diversion, and ennui—the French word for existential boredom. I have written about him many times in other CR posts, which you can search the archive for, and here.

I also had the chance to disucss Pascal for a The Book Club Recently, which you can enjoy below.

Pascal was a keen observer of human nature and the human experience, which means he had insights into the peccadilloes of human manners. I thought they were worth exploring today, as Pascal is one of many great philosophers I explore in my book, The Soul of Civility, who paid close attention to the everyday interactions of human beings—and today is the day of his death. He knew the small things had big consequences, and were revelatory of our values, aspirations and shortcomings.

Pascal on manners

Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) knew that the human condition was defined by love of others, and love of self.

He wrote in his Pensées,

100. The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only oneself and consider only oneself. But what is a man to do? He can’t prevent this object that he loves from being full of faults and misery.

• He wants to be great, and sees himself small.

• He wants to be happy, and sees himself miserable.

• He wants to be perfect, and sees himself full of imperfections.

• He wants men to love and esteem him, and sees that his faults deserve only their dislike and contempt.

This fix that he’s in produces in him the most improper and wicked passion that can be imagined: he develops a mortal hatred against the truth that reproaches him and convinces him of his faults. He would like to annihilate it, but because he can’t destroy it he does his best to destroy his and other people’s knowledge of it. That is, he puts all his efforts into hiding his faults both from others and from himself. He can’t bear to have anyone point them out to him, or to see them.

It’s certainly bad to be full of faults; but it’s much worse to be full of faults and refuse to recognise them, because that adds the further fault of a voluntary illusion. We don’t want others to deceive us, and we don’t think it fair that they want us to admire them more than they deserve; so it’s not fair that we should deceive them, and want them to admire us more than we deserve.

So: when they discover only imperfections and vices that we really do have, they clearly aren’t wronging us, because they didn’t cause our faults. Indeed they are doing us a favour, by helping us to free ourselves from something bad, namely ignorance of our imperfections. We shouldn’t be angry at their knowing our faults and despising us: it is right that they should know us for what we are and despise us if we are despicable.

Those are the feelings that would arise in a heart full of fairness and justice. Then what should we say about our own heart when we see that it’s nothing like that? Isn’t it true that we hate truth and those who tell it to us, and that we like them to be deceived in our favour, and want them to admire us for being something that we actually are not?

One example of this horrifies me. The Catholic religion doesn’t require us to confess our sins indiscriminately to everybody; it lets us keep them hidden from everyone else except for one to whom we are to reveal the innermost recesses of our heart and show ourselves as we are. The Church orders us to undeceive just this one man in all the world, and requires him to maintain an inviolable secrecy, so that it’s as though this knowledge that he has didn’t exist. Can we imagine anything kinder and more gentle? Yet man is so corrupt that he finds even this law harsh. It’s one of the main reasons leading a great part of Europe to rebel against the Church.

How unjust and unreasonable is the human heart, which objects to being obliged to do in relation to one man something that it would be just, in a way, for him to do in relation to all men! For is it just for us to deceive them?

This aversion to truth comes in different strengths, but everyone can be said to have it in some degree, because it is inseparable from self-love. It’s because of this bad delicacy that people who have to correct others choose to do it in roundabout and toned-down ways, so as not to give offence. They have to lessen our faults, appear to excuse them, and stir into the mix praises and assurances of love and esteem. Despite all this, self-love finds such correction to be bitter medicine. It takes as little of it as it can, always with disgust, and often with a secret resentment against those who administer it.

That’s how it happens that if it’s in someone’s interests to be loved by us, he avoids doing anything for us that he knows we wouldn’t enjoy; he treats us as we want to be treated: we hate the truth, he hides it from us; we want to be flattered, he flatters us; we like to be deceived, he deceives us.

People are most afraid of wounding those whose affection is most useful and whose dislike is most dangerous, so every step up that we take in the world removes us further from truth. A prince can be the laughing-stock of all Europe and the only one who doesn’t know this. I’m not surprised: telling the truth is useful to those to whom it is told, but harmful to those who tell it, because it gets them disliked. Anyone who lives with a prince loves his own interests more than he does those of the prince he serves; so he keeps clear of doing anything that would benefit the prince while harming himself.

This wretched condition is no doubt greater and more common among the higher classes; but the poorest aren’t exempt from it, because it’s in any man’s interests to get others to like him. Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; all we do is to deceive each other and flatter each other. No-one speaks of us in our presence as he does behind our backs. Human society is grounded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each person knew what his friend said about him in his absence, even if he said it sincerely and dispassionately.

That’s what man is, then: disguise, lying, and hypocrisy, in himself and in relation to others. He doesn’t want to be told the truth; he avoids telling it to others; and all these dispositions—so far removed from justice and reason—have a natural root in his heart.

He knew there were dualities to our nature, greatness and wretchedness, love of others, love of self. He wrote,

417. This twofold nature of man is so evident that some have thought that we had two souls. It seemed to them that a single undivided subject couldn’t undergo such variations— such sudden variations—from inordinate self-satisfaction to a dreadful dejection of heart.

418. It is dangerous to make man see too clearly how greatly he resembles the beasts without showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to make him see his greatness too clearly, apart from his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both. But it is very advantageous to show him both.

Man should not think that he is on a level either with the brutes or with the angels, nor must he be ignorant of both aspects of his nature. He must know both.

419. I won’t allow man to rest content with either one of the aspects of his nature; I want him to be without a firm floor and without rest.

420. If he exalts himself, I humble him; if he humbles himself, I exalt him; and I always contradict him, till he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster.

Against the obsequious

Pascal thought vanity was a core symptom of man’s self-love, and rejected the way that manners—or as I might say in my book, politenesses— often puff up our vanity instead of respecting one another with candor and true civility. Pascal wrote,

57. I always feel uncomfortable with such civilities as these: ‘I have given you a lot of trouble’, ‘I’m afraid I am boring you’, ‘I fear that this is taking too long’. We either engage our audience or irritate them.

58. You are awkward: ‘Please excuse me’ you say. If you hadn’t said that I wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong....

65. What’s good about Montaigne must have been difficult for him to acquire. What’s bad about him—apart from his mœurs, I mean—could have been corrected in a moment, if he had been warned that he was telling too many stories and talking about himself too much.

Pascal is worth visiting and revisiting time and time again.

As T.S. Elliot wrote in his forward to the Pensees, “Pascal is one of those writers who can and must be studied afresh by men [and women] in every generation.”

Soul of Civility events and coverage

• Loved my visit to Austin and Bastrop, Texas to have a wonderful conversation with Ryan Holiday for the Daily Stoic Podcast. Listen to my conversation with Ryan here, and get your SIGNED copies of The Soul of Civility from The Painted Porch

• Thanks to Morning Joe for featuring The Soul of Civility at MS Now (formerly MSNBC)

• The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote a gracious review of The Soul of Civility. calling it, “unexpectedly compelling.” Arguing Alone: On Alexandra Hudson’s “The Soul of Civility”

Join me on the Civic Renaissance Tour this fall!

One of the greatest privileges of my life is watching something beautiful happen in communities across North America.

Leaders are no longer asking me to come give a speech and move on.

They’re asking a much better question:

How do we become the kind of community where people can flourish across difference?

That question is bringing together mayors and city councils, university presidents and students, pastors and congregants, business leaders and neighbors. They come from different political parties, different faith traditions, different professions, and different generations. They don’t gather because they agree about everything.

They gather because they believe their communities are worth building together.

That’s what Civic Renaissance is.

It’s not a program.

It’s not a conference.

It’s a growing community of leaders committed to cultivating the habits, relationships, and institutions that make human flourishing possible.

The Soul of Civility provides a shared language. But books alone don’t change cultures. People do.

When a city chooses to read together, when a university commits to forming students who can disagree with humility and conviction, when pastors, public officials, business leaders, and citizens begin imagining a healthier future together, something remarkable happens.

Ideas become habits.

Habits become culture.

Culture begins to change.

This September, I’ll have the joy of returning to three communities that are continuing that journey.

1. In Urbandale, Iowa, local leaders will gather again to deepen the culture they began building through a community-wide reading of The Soul of Civility.

2. At St. Ambrose University, I’ll spend time with a flourishing Civic Renaissance Ambassador community that is helping these ideas take root across campus through reading groups, conversations, and leadership.

3. And in Colorado Springs, I’ll return to continue partnering with public leaders after an earlier Civic Renaissance Leadership Retreat, this time convening more than 100 civic leaders committed to strengthening their capacity to flourish across difference.

What encourages me most isn’t that these communities invited me once.

It’s that they’re choosing to keep building after reading my book and beyond my visit.

That’s the vision.

Not a memorable one-off event.

Not another initiative that fades away.

A culture that becomes more generous, more courageous, more trusting, and more capable of living with deep differences without losing our shared humanity.

If that vision resonates with you, I’d love for you to be part of it.

Whether you’re a mayor, educator, pastor, business leader, student, philanthropist, or simply someone who loves your community, there’s a place for you in Civic Renaissance.

The future of our communities won’t be shaped by people waiting for someone else to fix them.

It will be shaped by ordinary leaders who decide to become architects of a healthier common life.

I’d be honored to build alongside you.

In this edition of Civic Renaissance:

• Embody the Florentine Renaissance with me: I am exploring a small Civic Renaissance journey to Florence this November. Write to me if you’re interested in joining us.

• Join us at the Cassiciacum: Our next Civic Renaissance Retreat—a feast for mind, body and spirit where I gather leaders across politics, geography and vocation to embody the renaissance and flourishing we’re trying to build, and then leaving comissioned to build it— is August 21–22 in Indianapolis, and we are nearly at capacity. Write to me if you’re interested in joining us.

• How to handle haters: What a neighborhood controversy, an angry contractor, and 300 Arizona city managers have taught me about criticism, leadership, and the decision to keep building.

Hi, everyone!

I hope you have had a wonderful summer.

I have spent several lovely weeks as offline as possible. After a keynote in London, I traveled through France and Italy with my family, ending in Florence. Then I came home and became very sick, which set me back several weeks. I am only now beginning to find my footing again, with just a few weeks of summer left.

But I returned with an idea.

Walk the Florentine Renaissance with me

I am considering hosting a Civic Renaissance journey to Florence this November, perhaps for a week or ten days.

We would walk in the footsteps of Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, the Medici family, and the remarkable patrons, artists, writers, statesmen, and thinkers who built the Florentine Renaissance.

The civic humanists of Florence returned to the wisdom of the ancient world to meet the needs of their own time. They did not study history as an escape from the present. They studied it to become wiser citizens, leaders, creators, and human beings.

I want us to do the same.

Each day, we might inhabit a different part of the city and encounter the lives and legacies of the people who made Florence what it became. We would explore the ecosystem that allowed Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Machiavelli, and so many others to flourish.

And we would not rush.

One of the gifts of Italy is il dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. It is related, in spirit, to the ancient Greek idea of scholē, leisure released from immediate necessity and available for conversation, study, contemplation, creation, and self-cultivation. Our word *school* ultimately comes from this Greek root.

I want the trip to contain that kind of spaciousness. We would do less, but inhabit more. We would sit, converse, read, walk, eat, rest, and let the city teach us.

If this sounds wonderful to you, reply to this email with Renaissance Tour in the subject line. I am curious how many of you might want to come. I hope to host an informational session in the next few weeks.

The next Civic Renaissance Retreat

Speaking of scholē, our next Civic Renaissance Retreat will take place August 21–22 at the Cassiciacum, our home in Indianapolis.

We are almost at capacity, but I may have room for a few more people who feel a particular desire to join us.

These retreats convene leaders from across politics, geography, and vocation. Together, we consider the kind of world we want to build, the conditions that allow human beings and communities to flourish, and what each of us is prepared to create when we return home.

I think of them as feasts for mind, body, and spirit.

Our April retreat gathered 50 leaders from across the United States and Canada, including Mitch Daniels and Daryl Davis. It was so hopeful and joy-filled that people immediately began asking when we would do it again.

These gatherings embody the multidimensional human flourishing we hope to cultivate elsewhere. We eat, think, rest, argue, laugh, and build friendships across real differences. Then we leave commissioned to create something in our own institutions and communities.

If you hoped to attend the last retreat and could not, reply with Civic Renaissance Retreat in the subject line. Tell me a little about why you would like to come, and I will let you know whether space remains.

Now, to the haters.

When people are determined to misunderstand us

Last week, I spoke to nearly 300 city managers in Arizona.

City managers are essentially the CEOs of communities. Mayors and city councils are elected, but city managers are career public servants and subject-matter experts responsible for the actual administration of a city.

Again and again, I heard some version of the same question:

What do we do about the one citizen, council member, critic, or online antagonist who seems impossible to please? The person who attacks every decision, assumes the worst, and appears far more interested in destroying than building?

I have been thinking about that question because I recently had my own small encounter with a public pile-on.

Earlier this summer, I agreed to host a neighborhood listening session with a mayoral candidate.

I was less interested in staging a campaign event than in gathering my neighbors. I wanted us to meet one another, talk about what we hoped for our community, and allow a potential mayor to hear directly from the people he hoped to serve.

This is increasingly what I do across the country. I am an author and speaker, but I have also discovered that I am a civic architect. I help local leaders gather people, recover a shared vision, and create practical ways of strengthening their communities.

I wanted to begin doing more of that in my own neighborhood.

So I made a little poster inviting people to a conversation about building a Civic Renaissance in Indianapolis. Then I posted it online.

That was my miscalculation.

People who opposed the candidate recast the gathering as a partisan campaign event. Someone screenshotted the invitation and posted it elsewhere. Strangers began searching through my history for evidence that I was secretly a political operative.

They found organizations I had addressed and treated a speaking engagement as proof of ideological allegiance.

But I speak to people across political parties, institutions, and vocations. I have traveled to 160 cities in six countries. I go where I am invited and where people are hungry to learn how to flourish across difference.

That did not matter.

In a pile-on, complexity becomes inconvenient. People need a villain simple enough to fit inside a comment.

Then a former contractor appeared in the discussion and accused me of failing to pay him.

I had paid him approximately $50,000. His work had also required costly repairs and correction by other people. I had invoices, photographs, text messages, and receipts.

I wanted to post all of it.

I wanted to explain the event. I wanted to list the ideologically diverse institutions where I have spoken. I wanted to correct every falsehood and expose every contradiction.

I also wanted to cancel the gathering.

These were people in my own community. Some of them knew where I lived. I felt attacked, misrepresented, and a little afraid. I wondered whether I had made a serious mistake by opening my home and attempting to serve my neighborhood.

We held the event anyway.

About 50 people came. Some were neighbors I had not spoken with in years. Others had seen the invitation online and arrived because they were hungry for precisely the kind of conversation we were offering.

It was hopeful, warm, substantive, and alive.

People met one another. They shared ideas. They spoke honestly about what they wanted for our community. A public leader listened to them.

I left grateful that I had not allowed the ugliest reaction to the invitation to determine whether the invitation had been worthwhile.

That experience clarified several things for me.

A pile-on is not a referendum

When hundreds of comments appear beneath a post, they can create the sensation that the public has rendered a verdict.

Usually, it has not.

A comment section is a self-selected group responding to a particular framing of an event. The people who are content, curious, busy, generous, or waiting for more information are less likely to participate. Anger recruits participation more efficiently than proportion.

Volume is not consensus.

A few dozen people repeating the same accusation can still represent a tiny and unusually activated fraction of the relevant community.

This does not mean criticism is false. It means we should examine the substance of criticism without allowing its volume to impersonate authority.

Your critics may be helping your people find you

The public invitation exposed me to people who wanted to distort what I was doing.

It also reached people I otherwise would never have met.

That is the duality of visibility.

The same open door that allows contempt to enter also allows friendship, discovery, and unexpected possibility to enter. We cannot make ourselves available only to the right people. Public life does not permit that level of control.

Sometimes criticism becomes a sorting mechanism. It clarifies who is interested in understanding, who is committed to misunderstanding, and who has been quietly waiting for someone to set a table.

The people criticizing the gathering were not its only audience. They were simply the loudest audience for a few hours.

The more important audience walked through my door.

The desire to answer immediately is usually about pain, not strategy

When someone lies about us, speed feels like strength.

It often is not.

The first draft of a defense is usually written by the wounded nervous system. It wants relief, vindication, and the restoration of control. But the internet rarely provides any of those things.

A rapid response can enlarge a controversy, introduce it to people who would never have seen it, and bind our reputation to the accusation we hoped to escape.

There are times when a public correction is necessary, especially when a falsehood threatens another person, an institution, a livelihood, or public safety. Silence is not a universal rule.

But the question should be strategic:

Will responding materially protect something important, or will it simply provide another round of entertainment?

Those are different goals.

Keep the receipts, but do not assume you must publish them

Restraint does not require helplessness.

I kept the records involving the contractor. I preserved the invoices, messages, photographs, and evidence. If the allegation ever entered a setting where it could cause material harm, I would be able to answer it.

But possessing a defense and deploying it are two different decisions.

This is one of the most useful disciplines in public life: prepare the response you may need, then decide whether anyone needs to see it.

The existence of evidence can give us the confidence not to perform our innocence for strangers.

## Some criticism should change us

There is a flattering version of advice about haters that says criticism proves we are important, brave, or successful.

Sometimes criticism proves that we communicated badly, exercised poor judgment, hurt someone, or failed to see what another person could plainly see.

The point is not to ignore critics. The point is to refuse to surrender discernment to them.

I try to ask:

Is this true?

Is any part of it true?

Is this coming from someone with knowledge, standing, or goodwill?

Is there a repair I should make, even if the accusation itself is unfair?

In this case, I could see that I had posted a neighborhood invitation in a forum much larger and more politically charged than the gathering required. That was useful information. I can make better decisions about context and distribution next time.

I did not conclude that convening my neighbors was wrong.

Maturity requires enough humility to learn from criticism and enough steadiness not to be remade by every critic.

Do not make your hater the central character in your story

This may be the most counterintuitive lesson.

Criticism makes the critic feel enormous. We begin organizing our decisions, writing, conversations, and imagination around the person who attacked us.

They become the invisible reader of everything we write.

That gives them far more power than their original criticism possessed.

The answer is to return our attention to the people we intended to serve.

Who came to the gathering?

What did they need?

What became possible because we continued?

What should we build next?

Attention is one of the primary currencies of leadership. We should be careful about spending most of it on people who have no intention of joining us in creating anything.

Let your life become your argument

I thought of Albert Schweitzer.

Schweitzer was an Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician who established a hospital at Lambaréné, in present-day Gabon. The hospital became his life’s defining undertaking.

His legacy is complicated, as nearly every serious historical legacy is. His writing about Africa sometimes reflected the paternalism of his era, and later scholars have raised substantial criticisms of his conduct and assumptions. We should not flatten him into a saint.

But one part of his example continues to arrest me.

He criticized European claims to civilization that coexisted with cruelty, exploitation, and indifference to human life. His answer was his philosophy of reverence for life, joined to concrete service.

He did not possess the power to reorder governments or end colonialism by decree. He could decide what his own life would contribute.

So he built Lambaréné.

There is a phrase associated with his example: each person can have a Lambaréné of his or her own. The exact textual source is uncertain, so I use it as a summary of the lesson rather than as a verified quotation.

Each of us has some place where conviction can take material form.

A classroom. A company. A courtroom. A city office. A kitchen table. A hospital. A neighborhood gathering. A retreat. A friendship across a division everyone else has accepted as permanent.

Online criticism feels powerful because it is immediate and visible.

Building is slower. Its results are not always legible to strangers. It asks more of us than language does.

But building is power.

Fifty people sitting together and considering what they could create in their own community mattered more than hundreds of comments made by people who were never going to attend.

The event was the answer.

The goal is not to defeat the hater

The goal is to remain free enough to continue.

Free enough to examine criticism honestly.

Free enough to apologize when we are wrong.

Free enough to remain silent when a response would only feed the spectacle.

Free enough to protect ourselves without becoming consumed by self-defense.

Free enough to keep setting tables.

Free enough to build our own Lambaréné.

That is what I hope Civic Renaissance will become: a community of co-creators who do more than consume ideas.

I want you to read *The Soul of Civility*. I want its ideas to inspire you. But I also want those ideas to change how you live, lead, host, speak, listen, and build.

Your critics may continue talking.

Let them remind you to examine yourself. Let them teach you where greater precision or wisdom is needed. Then return to the people you are called to serve.

Let your life be your argument.

I would love to hear from you. When have you been misunderstood or publicly criticized? What helped you discern whether to answer, repair, ignore, or keep building?

Reply to this email and tell me your story.

Warmly,

Lexi

What did spending three days with 300 city managers teach me about how to live, lead, or think differently?

Last week, I had the privilege of spending three days in Tucson with more than 300 city managers from across Arizona with the Arizona City/County Management Association (ACMA).

City managers are the unsung heroes of local government, the chief executives responsible for the day-to-day leadership of America’s cities and towns.

You might expect our conversations to revolve around budgets, infrastructure, housing, and economic development.

Those topics certainly came up.

What surprised me was how often the conversation returned to relationships and social trust, or more often, the absence of it.

A journalist determined to create conflict.

A colleague who made collaboration nearly impossible.

An elected official who seemed more interested in winning than solving problems.

A citizen who consistently made civic life more difficult.

These stories are familiar to anyone in leadership.

My challenge to these leaders was simple.

Don’t spend your energy trying to change other people.

You cannot make another person more charitable, more reasonable, more curious, or more willing to listen.

You can, however, govern yourself.

You can choose to become the kind of leader who listens first, assumes good faith before bad motives, extends respect before it is reciprocated, and responds with steadiness instead of contempt.

Strong leaders also understand something else.

They don’t wait until there is a problem to begin building trust. They don’t wait until a public meeting erupts to start listening. They don’t wait until controversy arrives to get to know the people with whom they’ll eventually disagree.

They know that once a crisis arrives, they are drawing on a reservoir of trust they have spent years cultivating.

Years ago, while writing The Soul of Civility, I discovered that civility is not merely politeness. It is the disposition of the heart to recognize every person as our equal in dignity and therefore worthy of respect. From that disposition flow the habits of citizenship that enable people with genuine differences to deliberate honestly, solve problems together, and pursue a shared future without demanding uniformity.

Listening to these leaders in Tucson, I was struck by how often that principle surfaced in practice.

A Civic Renaissance does not begin after trust has collapsed.

It begins years earlier, when leaders cultivate friendships across differences, strengthen local institutions, create opportunities for neighbors to know one another, and invest in the civic culture of their communities before division takes root.

Whether you are raising children, leading a business, serving your neighborhood, or managing a city, the principle is the same.

The relationships you build before a crisis will often determine what is possible when the crisis arrives.

Join the Civic Renaissance

One of the greatest privileges of my life is watching something beautiful happen in communities across North America.

Leaders are no longer asking me to come give a speech and move on.

They’re asking a much better question:

How do we become the kind of community where people can flourish across difference?

That question is bringing together mayors and city councils, university presidents and students, pastors and congregants, business leaders and neighbors. They come from different political parties, different faith traditions, different professions, and different generations. They don’t gather because they agree about everything.

They gather because they believe their communities are worth building together.

That’s what Civic Renaissance is.

It’s not a program.

It’s not a conference.

It’s a growing community of leaders committed to cultivating the habits, relationships, and institutions that make human flourishing possible.

The Soul of Civility provides a shared language. But books alone don’t change cultures. People do.

When a city chooses to read together, when a university commits to forming students who can disagree with humility and conviction, when pastors, public officials, business leaders, and citizens begin imagining a healthier future together, something remarkable happens.

Ideas become habits.

Habits become culture.

Culture begins to change.

This September, I’ll have the joy of returning to three communities that are continuing that journey.

In Urbandale, Iowa, local leaders will gather again to deepen the culture they began building through a community-wide reading of The Soul of Civility.

At St. Ambrose University, I’ll spend time with a flourishing Civic Renaissance Ambassador community that is helping these ideas take root across campus through reading groups, conversations, and leadership.

And in Colorado Springs, I’ll return to continue partnering with public leaders after an earlier Civic Renaissance Leadership Retreat, this time convening more than 100 civic leaders committed to strengthening their capacity to flourish across difference.

What encourages me most isn’t that these communities invited me once.

It’s that they’re choosing to keep building after reading my book and beyond my visit.

That’s the vision.

Not a memorable one-off event.

Not another initiative that fades away.

A culture that becomes more generous, more courageous, more trusting, and more capable of living with deep differences without losing our shared humanity.

If that vision resonates with you, I’d love for you to be part of it.

Whether you’re a mayor, educator, pastor, business leader, student, philanthropist, or simply someone who loves your community, there’s a place for you in Civic Renaissance.

The future of our communities won’t be shaped by people waiting for someone else to fix them.

It will be shaped by ordinary leaders who decide to become architects of a healthier common life.

I’d be honored to build alongside you.

Earlier this June, nestled in a magnificent, tranquil setting at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, something remarkable happened in the Colorado Springs region.

Leaders from three neighboring communities gathered for a Civic Renaissance Leadership Retreat. They came to step back from the urgent demands of daily life and public leadership. They came to reflect, to dream, to build relationships, and to imagine what a flourishing future might look like for the region they call home.

That kind of space is increasingly rare.

Most leaders spend their days reacting to problems, responding to crises, and navigating conflict. Yet renewal requires something different. It requires time to think. Time to listen. Time to cultivate friendship. Time to ask not merely what must be managed, but what might be built.

The setting itself was part of the argument.

Surrounded by mountains, gathered around beautiful tables, and nourished by extraordinary meals prepared by a Greek chef, participants experienced a vision of abundance. Beauty matters. Hospitality matters. Shared meals matter. They remind us that a richer, more human way of life is possible, and that communities can be shaped by something greater than scarcity, cynicism, and conflict.

That lesson felt especially significant in this region.

In recent years, Palmer Lake became the epicenter of a controversy surrounding a proposed Buc-ee’s development. The debate drew national attention, generated headlines in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, and exposed painful divisions within the community.

Buc-ee’s broke a small Colorado town

WSJ - How a rest stop divided

But the leaders who chosed to gather with us at the retreat understood something important: the past is not prologue.

Rather than allowing division to define their future, they chose renewal.

That is why it was so meaningful that the retreat was hosted in Palmer Lake itself. Together, local leaders chose to tell a different story. Not a story of polarization and conflict, but of friendship, trust, imagination, and a shared commitment to building something better.

Over meals, conversations, walks, and strategic planning sessions, participants explored what it would take to cultivate flourishing communities and create the conditions for people to thrive across differences. They left with new friendships, renewed hope, and practical plans for what comes next.

This video captures a glimpse of that work.

Thank you to the leaders in Colorado

Thank you to Andrew Gunning, Lisa Brandt, Lori Leander, Nancy Henjum, Kimberly Gold, Dennis Stern, Mitch LaKind, and so many others who chose to invest in a better future for their region.

You remind us that renewal is possible.

You remind us that we have more power than we realize.

Each of us has the ability to help shape the story of the places we call home. We can step back. We can gather others. We can cultivate beauty, friendship, trust, and purpose. We can choose to build.

Today, I am honored to share your story with 4,500 leaders at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference in London during my session on The Soul of Civility.

If you’re at ARC, come by the Civic Renaissane booth and receive a gifted packet of wildflower seeds to help remind us that we each have a role

You can’t miss us. We’re the only booth with fresh peonies and olive branches—naturally!

I hope this story of Colorado Springs inspires others as much as it inspired me.

This is what a Civic Renaissance looks like.

This morning, I was frustrated at my children for having cavities.

Four minutes later, I hit a stopped trailer with my car.

So this is an essay about grace.

There is so much I want to share with you from the last few weeks. I want to tell you about my weekend at the Aspen Institute’s Executive Seminar, where we read Plato and Aristotle and Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and other timeless texts, some I had read before and needed to read again, and some I had never encountered.

I also want to tell you about the leadership retreat I hosted in Palmer Lake, Colorado, a very small and beautiful community that has been divided for years over a proposed Buc-ee’s. We gathered 25 leaders from across the Pikes Peak region, including several mayors and leaders from half a dozen communities, to ask: How do we rebuild after years of division? How do we begin again after civic trust has been damaged?

I want to tell you all of that. And I will.

But today, let’s talk about grace—something I think we could all use a bit more of right now.

Grace

This morning, I got my kids up early for a dentist appointment. We rushed out the door, crumbs from half eaten croissant in our wake. My daughter was still in her pajamas. Everyone was tired.

And then the appointment did not go well.

There were cavities.

Again.

Last summer, my son had a mouthful of cavities, which meant extractions and crowns and thousands of dollars and a lot of suffering for my poor little six-year-old. So when I heard there were more cavities today, I felt my frustration rising.

I was mad at all the times that they had sneaked candy and sweets without permission. Mad that they had not brushed their teeth well. Mad that they would not even keep their mouths open long enough for the dentist to do a full exam.

Not my proudest mothering moment.

We loaded into the car, and I called my husband and had him on speakerphone to the car as I recounted to him what had happened. As I was talking, I could hear myself being pretty graceless toward my children.

And then, minutes later, I hit a stopped trailer in front of me.

Thankfully, everyone was okay. But I felt sick.

We pulled over. We exchanged information. I checked on the kids. And then I felt something else too: profoundly, painfully humbled.

I pulled my children aside and told them the truth.

Mama was being graceless with you. I was angry about your mistakes, about the cavities, about the brushing, about the dentist appointment. And then, almost immediately after being so graceless with you, Mama made a mistake too.

And now Mama needs grace.

Will you forgive me?

Graceful origins

One of the things I love about the etymology of words is that word origins often remember truths we have forgotten. Take the word grace.

Today, many of us think of grace primarily as a theological concept: God’s unearned favor toward us. And rightly so. But long before Christian theologians wrote about grace, the ancient world was already wrestling with the idea.

Our English word grace comes from the Latin gratia, which meant favor, goodwill, kindness, gratitude, beauty, and gift. From the same root we get gratitude, grateful, gratify, and even gratis, something given freely.

The Romans even personified grace. They called them the Gratiae, the Three Graces.

The Three Graces

In Greek mythology, The Three Graces, or Charites, are three goddesses in Greco-Roman art that represent the act of giving, receiving, and returning gifts:

• The generous giver: One of the three graces represents the giver of grace.

• The recipient: The recipient of grace is represented by another of the three graces.

• The recipient extending grace: The last of the three graces represents the recipient extending grace

The Three Graces personify virtues associated with grace. Their names are:

• Aglaea, meaning Splendor or Beauty

• Euphrosyne, meaning Joy or Mirth

• Thalia, meaning Blooming or Abundance

There is a beautiful, virtuous cycle with grace.

It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

The Roman philosopher Seneca discusses this in his work called On Benefits (De Beneficiis). He writes about the Graces as embodying the proper circulation of benefits and gifts within society. In his interpretation, one Grace gives, another receives, and the third returns the gift. The image becomes a visual lesson about generosity, gratitude, and reciprocity.

Seneca writes, “One bestows a benefit, another receives it, a third returns it.”

Renaissance artists and thinkers loved this reading because it transformed the Graces from decorative mythological figures into a meditation on the social fabric itself. Gifts are not meant to stop with the recipient. Grace is received and then passed on.

What’s especially interesting in Primavera is that Botticelli places the Three Graces immediately beside Venus. If Venus governs love rightly understood, then the Graces show what love looks like in practice: generosity, receptivity, and reciprocity.

For someone interested in hospitality, civility, and civic friendship, there is a rich connection here.

The Graces suggest that healthy communities depend on a continual circulation of gifts:

• Host and guest

• Teacher and student

• Neighbor and neighbor

• Citizen and community

One person gives. Another receives. The recipient then becomes a giver in turn.

Grace is not a possession. It is a movement, a lifestyle. And it makes our world go round.

The Renaissance scholar Leon Battista Alberti and others saw the Graces’ joined hands and circular dance as symbolizing that benefits should keep moving through society rather than becoming trapped by selfishness or pride.

That is remarkably close to your own language around hospitality and porching. The porch works because hospitality does not end with the host. Ideally, the guest becomes a future host. The recipient of welcome extends welcome.

The same is true of grace.

Whiplash

The whiplash (pun intended) of being graceless with my kids—and then being so in need of grace myself immediately after—caused me to remeber soemthing that the pastor and theologian that Tim Keller once said: “The unforgiving heart is the unforgiven heart.”

I take that to mean that when we forget how much mercy we ourselves have received, we become stingy with it toward others. We forget our own shortcomings. We forget the moments when we needed patience instead of judgment, help instead of condemnation, a second chance instead of someone keeping score.

Which is why Keller’s insight and Botticelli’s Graces fit together so well. If the unforgiving heart is the unforgiven heart, then perhaps the gracious heart is the one that remembers it has received grace and therefore passes it on.

I was stingy this morning.

And then I needed the very thing I had just failed to give.

That is the thing about grace. We tend to remember it best when we need it.

Not because mistakes do not matter; of course they do. Cavities matter. Car accidents matter. Our choices have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are expensive, painful, embarrassing, or inconvenient. But grace lets us tell the truth about the mistake without making the mistake the whole story.

That is what I want my children to learn.

And, if I’m being honest, what I still need to learn too.

So that is my word for today, mostly to myself: be quicker, more fluent, with grace.

Who needs grace from you today?

And maybe before answering that, it is worth remembering a time when you needed grace, and someone gave it to you.

Wishing you a grace-filled week!

In the news

• Thanks to the Aspen Times for the gracious interview on Flourishing Across Difference. Here is an excerpt you might enjoy:

Bryan: If the problem is deeper than politics or technology, where does the solution begin?

Alexandra: Hyper locally. Hyper individually.

I don’t believe there’s a silver bullet. Culture is built through millions of tiny decisions and interactions. My grandmother understood the importance of ordinary human encounters: Knowing your neighbor’s name, looking your grocery clerk in the eye, taking genuine interest in another person’s culture or experience.

Bryan: She sounds like a wise woman, what else did she leave you with?

Alexandra: That one gracious life can echo across generations. We hear a lot about cycles of trauma and cruelty, but we don’t talk enough about the opposite — that goodness compounds too. I call it “the mellifluous echo of the magnanimous soul.”

My grandmother treated every person she encountered as sacred. That shaped my mother. It shaped me. It now shapes my children. We underestimate how much power ordinary decency carries, the potential for it to echo through generations.

Bryan: You’ve started turning these ideas into actual civic gatherings and initiatives around the country. What have you learned from that process?

Alexandra: That people are starving for this. A few weeks ago, we hosted 50 leaders from across politics, media, education and public life in our home in Indianapolis. We brought together people who would likely never otherwise share a room together.

The purpose wasn’t agreement. It was flourishing across difference. That phrase is really important to me. The goal is not ideological uniformity. The goal is building a society where disagreement brings out the best in us rather than the worst.

Division is everywhere, and it’s easy to feel frustrated, overwhemed, powerless about what we can do to help.

But a recent experience caused me to wonder if one of the most powerful answers is far simpler, and far closer to home.

What if renewal begins with a front porch?

Or a dinner table?

Or a restaurant where the owner remembers your name?

A Simon in a world of Soup Nazis

We all know the Soup Nazi archetype from Seinfeld: the place where the product is so good that people tolerate being diminished and abused to get it. The joke works because it reveals something true. We have all encountered institutions where excellence becomes an excuse for contempt, where customers, patients, students, clients, or guests are treated as interruptions rather than human beings. The food may be extraordinary. The service may be efficient. The institution may be impressive. But the encounter leaves you feeling smaller. I had an experience recently that showed me

Last week, I was in Iowa to be the closing keynote at the Central Iowa Business Conference. It was a joy to be there and meet in person so many of the people I’ve come to know primarily virtually, includign those in Urbandale, Iowa. Urbandale is one community that has just announced The Soul of Civility as its community read, and leaders across Central Iowa—including those at St. Ambrose University and beyond—are beginning to ask what it might look like to take the ideas of the book off the page and into the life of their community.

After several days in Chicago with the Aspen Institute at their Social Trust Summit, I drove five hours to the Des Moines for the keynote. When I arrived, tired and hungry, I asked my hosts the most important question one can ask after a long drive: Where should I eat?

Their answer was immediate. You have to go to Simon’s.

Then they looked at the clock and reconsidered.

Actually, it’s probably too late. The line will be around the block. You’ll never get in.

Naturally, this made me want to go even more.

What fascinated me was not simply that Simon’s was popular. Lots of restaurants are popular. What fascinated me was the way people spoke about it.

They did not begin with the menu.

They did not begin with the cocktails.

They began with Simon.

He knows everyone.

He remembers your name.

He makes you feel like family.

One person told me that Simon makes strangers feel like friends, and friends feel like family.

So I called the restaurant.

To my surprise, Simon himself answered.

Then he immediately put me on hold—for several minutes.

Ordinarily, I might have found this annoying. But I found myself laughing, because while I waited, I could hear him doing the very thing everyone had described. He was greeting people as they walked in, saying goodbye as they left, checking on tables, laughing with guests, moving from one act of welcome to the next.

Even over the phone, I could tell that Simon was not simply running a restaurant.

He was creating belonging—the opposite of feeling like an imposition, as the Soup Nazi does, you feel like familty.

At Simon’s, excellence is not used as permission to disregard people. It becomes a reason to honor them. The food is good, yes. But the deeper gift is that Simon refuses to make people feel like nuisances in a place they came to enjoy. He makes the stranger feel received. He makes the regular feel remembered. He makes a crowded restaurant feel like a living room.

Later that evening, I found myself sitting at his bar.

Within minutes, complete strangers were passing dishes in my direction.

You have to try this.

No, try this one.

This is your first time here? Welcome.

His hospitality was contageous. It made his patrons hospitable, too.

Beauty begets beauty. Civility begets civiltiy. Warmth begets warmth. Hospitality begets hospitality.

I had already eaten dinner elsewhere, which made no difference at all. While everythign was delicious, the evening had stopped being about food. It had become about fellowship.

The people around me spoke about Simon with an affection I almost never hear people use about a restaurant owner.

One couple told me they had been coming for years.

The food originally drew them.

Simon keeps them coming back.

They told me stories that sounded almost unbelievable. On busy nights, when people have waited too long, Simon has been known to drive guests down the street and buy them dinner at another restaurant rather than leave them hungry.

From the standpoint of efficiency, this makes no sense.

From the standpoint of hospitality, it makes perfect sense.

Because Simon understands something many of us have forgotten.

People are hungry for more than food.

They are hungry to be seen.

They are hungry to be known.

They are hungry to matter.

The Latin word hospes gives us hospitality, hospital, hospice, host, and guest. I have always loved that host and guest share the same root, because embedded in the word itself is a beautiful and demanding idea: the stranger is not merely someone to tolerate or manage. The stranger is someone to welcome.

That is what Simon does.

And as I sat there, I realized I had seen this before.

Not in a restaurant.

On a porch.

Would you like to “porch” with us?

When I first moved from Washington, D.C., to Indianapolis, I was lonely. I did not yet know many people. Indianapolis did not yet feel like home.

Then one Sunday after church, a tall blonde woman named Joanna Taft introduced herself and asked me a question I had never heard before.

Would you like to porch with us sometime?

Porch, as a verb.

I was curious, and I said yes.

That afternoon changed the way I understood community.

On Joanna’s porch, people from different neighborhoods, professions, political beliefs, and walks of life gathered together, not for a structured dialogue, not to win an argument, not to perform unity, but simply to share life.

To talk.

To laugh.

To eat.

To be neighbors.

There was something almost subversive about it.

In a culture that so often trains us to encounter one another first as categories, Joanna had created a place where people encountered one another first as human beings.

Only later as Democrats or Republicans.

Only later as professionals or activists.

Only later as people who disagreed.

Joanna’s porch and Simon’s restaurant are different kinds of places.

One has cocktails and cake.

One has wicker chairs and neighborhood children running around.

But they do the same work.

They transform strangers into neighbors.

They remind people that they belong.

They create the conditions under which trust can grow.

And that matters because I do not think our deepest crisis is political.

I think it is relational.

We are living through a crisis of alienation, loneliness, and failing to see one another clearly, as beings with dignity and worth.

Much of the hostility around us is downstream from that.

People who feel unseen often struggle to see others.

People who feel disconnected often struggle to connect.

People who feel reduced to a label often learn to reduce others in return.

The antidote is not agreement.

The antidote is encounter.

Hospitality creates the possibility of encounter.

It gives us a place to meet one another not as abstractions, not as enemies, not as avatars of everything we fear, but as fellow human beings.

That is why hospitality is not peripheral to civic renewal.

It is central to it.

One of the great lessons of my work, especially after years of traveling to communities across North America and beyond, is that the people doing the work of renewal are rarely the people making national headlines.

They are people like Joanna.

They are people like Simon.

They are people who quietly create places where others feel welcome.

Places where strangers become friends.

Places where friends become family.

Places where people remember that they are not alone.

We cannot scale Simon.

There is only one Simon.

But we do not need to scale Simon.

We need more people to ask where they can become a Simon in their own life.

Where is your porch?

Where is your table?

Where is your garden?

Where is the place where you can make someone feel seen, known, and welcomed?

Every community has opportunities for hospitality.

Every one of us has more power than we realize.

The invitation matters.

The welcome matters.

The extra chair at the table matters.

Every act of hospitality pushes back against the forces pulling us apart.

Every gesture of welcome affirms the dignity of another person.

Every porch, every table, every restaurant, every gathering can become a small act of resistance against alienation.

In a world full of Soup Nazis, be a Simon.

Their hospitality, a high and noble expression of civility, will heal our broken world.

• May 19: Aspen Institute Social Trust Summit. Chicago, IL

• May 21: The Central Iowa Chamber of Commerce Business Conference, Altoona, IA

• June 22-25: ARC Conference, London, UK: I’ll be speaking at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship Conference this year, adding my voice to the global dialogue on rebuilding the habits of a healthy society. I hope to see you there!

In the news:

• C-SPAN Washington Journal: Lexi Hudson Discusses Civility in American Politics

  Alexandra Hudson discusses efforts to promote civility in American politics considering heated political rhetoric and its potential ties to acts of political violence.

• Art Life Faith Podcast: The Soul of Civility with Alexandra Hudson

  Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. In this episode I had the privilege of having a conversation with Alexandra Hudson, or Lexi, the author of “The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.” A number of weeks ago, she was passing through Tokyo on vacation with her family when she was gracious enough to sit down with me and talk about the various themes in her book and then lead an Art Life Faith event right afterward.

• Fox 21 News: Reclaiming Civility: Cultivating connection and respect in Colorado Springs

• Fox 59: 11th annual Fairbanks Symposium- Watch here

  A media interview about The Civic Renaissance Tour Launch in Indianapolis

• A podcast interview with Michael Lee of the University of Charleston, When We Disagree Podcast: The Soul of Civility, Tested

  What does civility demand when justice is costly and deeply personal? Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, shares a raw story about how being scammed sparked both a lengthy legal battle and a profound disagreement with her husband over whether to fight or walk away. Through that conflict, Hudson wrestles with whether civility means politeness or principled confrontation, and what it costs our families when moral crusades take over our lives. The episode explores civility not as courteousness or softness, but as disciplined respect for human dignity even when the stakes are high and the gloves stay firmly on.

• Review of The Soul of Civility in Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent surveyshared by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy reported that 72% of Americans want to see more civility in our nation’s politics. The same survey found that Americans are divided on their outlook for our nation’s future, split nearly in half over whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to come together.

• Review of The Soul of civility in Bitterroot Star: Disagree better

  Our community is full of independent people who don’t like being told what to think. That’s a strength. But independence only works if we can argue honestly without tearing each other apart in the process. This book doesn’t offer a program or a slogan. It offers a reminder of the habits that make self-government possible.

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

The Freedom of Limits

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

We live in a strange age of perfectionism.

We expect people to have never made a mistake, never changed their minds, never contradicted themselves, never hurt anyone, never spoken poorly, never failed publicly, never fallen short privately. We demand a kind of impossible moral and psychological coherence from one another that no human being has ever possessed.

And then we are shocked when people disappoint us.

But disappointment is inevitable if our expectations are built on a false view of what it means to be human.

Alexander Pope wrote in An Essay on Criticism:

“To err is human; to forgive, divine.”

That line has survived for centuries because it names something permanent about the human condition.

We are imperfect creatures.

Not occasionally imperfect. Constitutively imperfect.

As Blaise Pascal suggested in Pensées, the human condition is marked by both greatness and wretchedness. We are capable of astonishing beauty, sacrifice, ingenuity, tenderness, and love. We are also capable of cruelty, selfishness, cowardice, resentment, and destruction.

Both are true.

To deny either side is to misunderstand ourselves.

That’s why I titled this essay: How to be imperfect.

Two paths to imperfection

There are two ways to be imperfect.

1. The first is to deny our imperfection while continuing to be imperfect anyway.

This is exhausting.

It sets us up for constant disappointment in ourselves and permanent resentment toward others. Every mistake becomes catastrophic. Every failure becomes evidence that we are fraudulent. Every hurt becomes proof that another person is irredeemable.

If we insist on pretending that human beings should not fail, then ordinary human life will feel unbearable.

2. The second way to be imperfect is to embrace our imperfection honestly.

Not to justify it. Not to celebrate selfishness or cruelty or irresponsibility. But to recognize that failure is part of what it means to be human, and that our mistakes are invitations to repair, growth, humility, and reconciliation.

That posture changes everything.

It allows us to become less shocked by human limitation and more fluent in grace.

Wabi-sabi and kintsugi: the beauty of imperfection and the art of repair

Recently, I returned from Japan, where I spent time thinking about the aesthetic ideal of wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection and impermanence.

One expression of this philosophy is kintsugi, a 500-year-old art form in which broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold.

Instead of hiding the cracks, the cracks are illuminated.

The object becomes more beautiful because it was broken and repaired.

I cannot stop thinking about how countercultural that is.

Our instinct today is often to discard what is damaged.

A friendship ruptures, move on.

A marriage becomes difficult, replace it.

A colleague disappoints us, reduce them to their worst moment.

A person fails publicly, exile them.

We live in a culture with apps for replacement.

But kintsugi invites us to pause.

To repair.

To believe that healing can create something stronger and more beautiful than what existed before.

A repaired relationship carries a story. It contains memory, suffering, forgiveness, honesty, endurance.

It contains humanity.

That, in many ways, is the heart of the work I am trying to do through Civic Renaissance.

Helping us become more fluent in the human condition.

Helping us recover the language of grace and forgiveness.

Helping us remember that people are more than the worst thing they have said or done.

One of the ideas I return to often is this:

Unbundling people is the superpower of the 21st century.

To unbundle a person means refusing to reduce them to one opinion, one failure, one vote, one moment, one flaw, one wound, one act of betrayal.

It means seeing people in their fullness.

Seeing the irreducible dignity and worth of another human being while also acknowledging their failures honestly.

It means recognizing that human beings are infinitely complicated creatures shaped by fear, hope, exhaustion, insecurity, love, memory, trauma, longing, and contradiction.

It also means extending that same mercy to ourselves.

When we fail, the answer is not denial.

Nor is it self-annihilation.

The answer is honesty.

I lost my temper.

I spoke carelessly.

I was unkind.

I was defensive.

I was hungry and exhausted and angry about something else, and it came out sideways onto you.

I am sorry.

Please forgive me.

Those words are not signs of weakness.

They are signs of maturity—of inner confidence, self awareness, strength.

And paradoxically, relationships often become stronger after those moments of truth-telling. Not weaker.

The strongest families are not the families without rupture. They are the families where repair happens.

The strongest friendships are not the ones untouched by disappointment. They are the ones where people remain honest enough, humble enough, and courageous enough to rebuild trust after failure.

That is the kind of parent I want to be.

That is the kind of friend I want to be.

That is the kind of leader I want to be.

Not someone who never fails.

Someone who knows how to repair.

Someone who does not deny the fullness of what it means to be human.

Greatness and wretchedness, all.

And perhaps that is part of what a healthier society requires too.

Not perfection.

Not ideological purity.

Not relentless performance.

But citizens capable of truth-telling, repentance, forgiveness, humility, repair, and grace.

Your turn

So let me ask you:

• Where in your life have you fallen short recently?

• Where have you lost your temper, spoken carelessly, withdrawn, become defensive, or wounded someone you love?

• Is there a relationship in your life that you have quietly discarded instead of repairing?

• Is there someone you have reduced to their worst moment?

• Is there someone who has done that to you?

• What would it look like to practice kintsugi there?

What would it look like to say:

I was wrong.

I was hurt.

I was exhausted.

I was afraid.

I am sorry.

Please forgive me.

And what might become possible on the other side of that honesty?

Perhaps stronger trust.

Perhaps greater tenderness.

Perhaps a fuller understanding of one another.

Perhaps even beauty.

My invitation to you in the comments:

• Tell me about a time you repaired something instead of discarding it.

• Tell me about a moment when grace changed a relationship.

• Tell me about a crack where the gold entered.

Let’s become more fluent in the fullness of what it means to be human.

Greatness, wretchedness, all.

That restores the spirit of you

Kintsugi civis

A civilization fluent in kintsugi—the art of repair: that’s what I’d like to see us build.

A civilization that understands that cracks do not necessarily disqualify us from beauty.

Sometimes they are the very places where the gold enters.

Thank you for being part of the Civic Renaissance Community. I’m glad you’re here.

Lexi

ICMA Local Government Reimagined Conference: Democracy and the Public Trust

A complete joy to keynote for 300 local government leaders at the ICMA conference in Philadelphia while honoring America’s 250th through the stories of William Penn and Edward Coles, two men who broke false peace in service of human dignity. Penn defied polite hierarchies because he was civil and recognized the worth of every person. Coles challenged Jefferson, freed those his family had enslaved, and helped keep Illinois slave free. After the conference, I met a man who told me that in his birth country local government exists in name only and restoring it could cost him his life. I have not stopped thinking about that. As Tocqueville observed, self government must be practiced or it atrophies. American democracy lives or dies in local communities where trust is built and dignity is practiced. Agreement is not the goal. Flourishing across difference is.

Looking ahead:

• May 19: Aspen Institute Social Trust Summit. Chicago, IL

• May 21: The Central Iowa Chamber of Commerce Business Conference, Altoona, IA

• June 22-25: ARC Conference, London, UK: I’ll be speaking at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship Conference this year, adding my voice to the global dialogue on rebuilding the habits of a healthy society. I hope to see you there!

In the news:

• C-SPAN Washington Journal: Lexi Hudson Discusses Civility in American Politics

  Alexandra Hudson discusses efforts to promote civility in American politics considering heated political rhetoric and its potential ties to acts of political violence.

• Art Life Faith Podcast: The Soul of Civility with Alexandra Hudson

  Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. In this episode I had the privilege of having a conversation with Alexandra Hudson, or Lexi, the author of “The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.” A number of weeks ago, she was passing through Tokyo on vacation with her family when she was gracious enough to sit down with me and talk about the various themes in her book and then lead an Art Life Faith event right afterward.

• Fox 21 News: Reclaiming Civility: Cultivating connection and respect in Colorado Springs

• Fox 59: 11th annual Fairbanks Symposium- Watch here

  A media interview about The Civic Renaissance Tour Launch in Indianapolis

• A podcast interview with Michael Lee of the University of Charleston, When We Disagree Podcast: The Soul of Civility, Tested

  What does civility demand when justice is costly and deeply personal? Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, shares a raw story about how being scammed sparked both a lengthy legal battle and a profound disagreement with her husband over whether to fight or walk away. Through that conflict, Hudson wrestles with whether civility means politeness or principled confrontation, and what it costs our families when moral crusades take over our lives. The episode explores civility not as courteousness or softness, but as disciplined respect for human dignity even when the stakes are high and the gloves stay firmly on.

• Review of The Soul of Civility in Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent surveyshared by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy reported that 72% of Americans want to see more civility in our nation’s politics. The same survey found that Americans are divided on their outlook for our nation’s future, split nearly in half over whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to come together.

• Review of The Soul of civility in Bitterroot Star: Disagree better

  Our community is full of independent people who don’t like being told what to think. That’s a strength. But independence only works if we can argue honestly without tearing each other apart in the process. This book doesn’t offer a program or a slogan. It offers a reminder of the habits that make self-government possible.

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

The Freedom of Limits

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

I was thrilled when Town & Country me to comment on a question they had been reflecting on: the meanness growing at all levels of American life.

In Town & Country’s new reported piece on why America seems to have become so mean, I got to share why “unoffendability”—the super power of the 21st century— offers a third way between the two extremes that define modern life: cruel hostility and suffocating politeness.

Why we are trapped between hostility and politeness

One of the tensions of modern life that I explore in The Soul of Civility, and in my recent interview with Town & Country, is that many people feel trapped between two extremes: hostility on one side, and suffocating politeness on the other.

Both cruelty and fake niceness can become dehumanizing. One attacks people openly. The other papers over difference or manipulates people into agreement while avoiding honesty, respect, truth, and genuine engagement.

Our culture increasingly teaches people to interpret discomfort, disagreement, awkwardness, and offense as existential threats.

What can we do?

First, we can and must choose civility, which I define as:

1. The art of human flourishing.

2. The bare minimum of respect we are owed, and owe to others, by virtue of our shared humanity.

3. More than mere politeness, civility demands that we respect others enough to tell hard truths, and respect ourselves enough to speak our mind and set boundaries.

4. Not how we treat those we like, those we agree with, and those who can do things for us in return, but how we treat the other, the stranger, the person we don’t like, the person we disagree with, the person we may never see again, and the person who can never repay us.

Second, we can choose to be unoffendable, the superpower of the 21st century.

Unoffendability

Unoffendability means reclaiming the power we each have to choose how we respond to another person’s meanness.

We cannot control others. We cannot control what they say, how they behave, whether they understand us fairly, or whether they treat us with the dignity we deserve. But we can control ourselves. We can decide what we will do with our hurt, our anger, our embarrassment, and our desire to retaliate.

Unoffendability is not weakness. It is not passivity. It is not pretending that cruelty does not hurt or that injustice does not matter. Far from it. Unoffendability is refusing to surrender our agency to the person who provokes us. It is choosing ownership over our emotions and responses instead of letting another person’s failure determine who we become in that moment.

When we are misunderstood, provoked, criticized, or dismissed, we do not have to collapse into cruelty or fragility. We can maintain perspective, humor, proportion, and self-command. We can tell the truth without contempt. We can defend ourselves without becoming small. We can refuse to let another person’s meanness make us mean.

The relationship between civility and unoffendability is this: both require a secure sense of our own worth and dignity as human beings. When we know our worth to the marrow, we do not have to yell, scream, posture, dominate, or humiliate others to prove our significance. We do not need constant validation, nor do we collapse every time we are criticized, misunderstood, or slighted.

Civility is the outward expression of that security; treating others with respect because we are grounded enough not to see every disagreement as a threat. Unoffendability is the inward posture that makes civility possible; the refusal to surrender our peace, self-command, or humanity every time another person behaves badly.

As I told Town & Country:

“Unoffendability is the superpower of the 21st century.”

Questions for you to consider:

• Where were you unoffendable recently?

• Where, looking back, did you miss an opportunity to be unoffendable and want to do better next time?

I’d love to hear from you.

Each of us has far more power to be part of the solution than we realize.

Let’s choose to be part of the solution.

Thanks for being here.

Looking ahead:

• May 14: ICMA Local Government Reimagined Conference: Democracy and the Public Trust, Philadelphia, PA

• May 19: Social Trust Summit. Chicago, IL

• May 21: Central Iowa Business Conference, Altoona, IA

• June 22-25: ARC Conference, London, UK: I’ll be speaking at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship Conference this year, adding my voice to the global dialogue on rebuilding the habits of a healthy society. I hope to see you there!

In the news:

• C-SPAN Washington Journal: Lexi Hudson Discusses Civility in American Politics

  Alexandra Hudson discusses efforts to promote civility in American politics considering heated political rhetoric and its potential ties to acts of political violence.

• Art Life Faith Podcast: The Soul of Civility with Alexandra Hudson

  Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. In this episode I had the privilege of having a conversation with Alexandra Hudson, or Lexi, the author of “The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.” A number of weeks ago, she was passing through Tokyo on vacation with her family when she was gracious enough to sit down with me and talk about the various themes in her book and then lead an Art Life Faith event right afterward.

• Fox 21 News: Reclaiming Civility: Cultivating connection and respect in Colorado Springs

• Fox 59: 11th annual Fairbanks Symposium- Watch here

  A media interview about The Civic Renaissance Tour Launch in Indianapolis

• A podcast interview with Michael Lee of the University of Charleston, When We Disagree Podcast: The Soul of Civility, Tested

  What does civility demand when justice is costly and deeply personal? Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, shares a raw story about how being scammed sparked both a lengthy legal battle and a profound disagreement with her husband over whether to fight or walk away. Through that conflict, Hudson wrestles with whether civility means politeness or principled confrontation, and what it costs our families when moral crusades take over our lives. The episode explores civility not as courteousness or softness, but as disciplined respect for human dignity even when the stakes are high and the gloves stay firmly on.

• Review of The Soul of Civility in Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent surveyshared by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy reported that 72% of Americans want to see more civility in our nation’s politics. The same survey found that Americans are divided on their outlook for our nation’s future, split nearly in half over whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to come together.

• Review of The Soul of civility in Bitterroot Star: Disagree better

  Our community is full of independent people who don’t like being told what to think. That’s a strength. But independence only works if we can argue honestly without tearing each other apart in the process. This book doesn’t offer a program or a slogan. It offers a reminder of the habits that make self-government possible.

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

The Freedom of Limits

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

Gracious reader,

This past weekend, we gathered 50 leaders for the inaugural Civic Renaissance Retreat, a feast for mind, body, and spirit.

It was an invitation-only retreat for leaders across politics, geography, and vocation who are dissatisfied with the status quo and want to build something new.

Former governors, state representatives, journalists from The Free Press and The Atlantic, educators, school board leaders, superintendents, and practitioners joined us because they care about building an era of multidimensional human flourishing across difference, starting with ourselves.

That was the whole invitation of the weekend.

There were no preconditions and no litmus tests other than this: you cared about building something better, something that does not yet exist.

Why We Gathered

In our divided age, we vacillate between two extremes: hostility and politeness.

Hostility sees others as pawns to be steamrolled, silenced, and forced into agreement.

Politeness sees others as pawns to be managed, smoothed over, and kept comfortable rather than engaged honestly.

Both reflect something deeper: a crisis of dehumanization.

We are not seeing ourselves or one another clearly, as human beings with inherent dignity and worth.

This retreat was an answer to that crisis.

We did not gather to reduce division.

We gathered to flourish across difference.

What We Did

We began by embodying the world we want to build.

We embodied flourishing across difference, abundance, conversation, rest, and the possibility of seeing one another in the fullness of who we are.

I called the Civic Renaissance Retreat a feast for mind, body, and spirit because we are trying to recover a full sense of what it means to be human—mind, body, and spirit.

There was incredible food. Each feast, prepared by Chef Brandon and Chef Conor, carried us into a different golden age, from Ancient Greece at the opening reception to the French Enlightenment the next day, then Florence for Saturday lunch, and finally a Spanish golden age with a closing paella celebration. We had beautiful, intentional, curated meals and gatherings. We had time to rest. We had time to think. We had time to connect.

It was not only a space for reflection and renewal, but a living expression of joy, laughter, games, singing, karaoke, and toasts, a reminder that this work is meant to be embodied and shared together.

It was an unconference as well, with space for spontaneous conversation, because often the best part of a conference is the conversation over lunch, in the hallway, or in the quiet moments between sessions.

We wanted to structure an entire retreat around those moments.

Because we believe in the power of people getting in a room together and building.

What We Saw

One of the most powerful moments of the weekend was our evening with Daryl Davis.

Daryl is an African American jazz musician and a wonderful friend who has spent decades seeking out and befriending members of hate groups.

His whole premise is simple: how can they hate me if they do not even know me?

He told us about people who originally hated him, who denied his right to exist, and who, through friendship and curiosity, changed.

More than 200 members of these groups have given him their robes, flags, and memorabilia as a sign that they were leaving those views behind.

But not every story ends that way.

There are people Daryl has befriended who still hold hateful, dehumanizing views, and yet they remain in relationship.

Daryl said, I think you are wrong, and I am going to tell you I think you are wrong, but I am still going to see you in the fullness of who you are as a human being.

That is unbundling people.

It is seeing one part of someone in light of the whole of who they are.

We live in a strange era of perfectionism, litmus tests, and orthodoxies. We think that because we know one thing about someone, we know everything about them.

Daryl challenges us to reconsider that.

The goal of this work is not agreement.

We are going to disagree.

The question is whether we can maintain the humanity of one another through disagreement.

What We Learned

The next morning, we were joined by Mitch Daniels.

We asked how each of us can bring out the best in others at a time when many leaders bring out the worst.

One participant said something that stayed with me: our task is to relearn democracy.

In a democracy, the citizen is prior to the state.

We have more power than we realize to be part of the solution, not just by holding leaders accountable, but by getting to work ourselves.

We are building a renaissance starting with ourselves.

What Became Possible

In one session on education, something else took shape.

A homeschooling leader, a public school superintendent, and a school board vice president sat at the same table.

Different worlds. Different assumptions.

And yet, they found real agreement.

Education is about cultivating our humanity. It is about unlocking human potential. It is about ordering our passions, bringing forth what is most noble in us, and relegating the ignoble to its proper place.

It is about lifelong learning.

It is about forming human beings who know their own minds, who can serve others, and who can flourish.

And then the group agreed on something else.

No system is perfect.

Public, private, charter, homeschool. Each can be beautiful, and each can fail, because each is made of human beings.

We have to take this case by case, family by family, child by child.

There are no broad brushes here.

As Blaise Pascal suggested, the human condition is defined by both greatness and wretchedness.

That recognition made the conversation honest.

What We Are Building

This retreat was a glimpse of the world we are trying to build: a world of multidimensional flourishing across difference.

We are building it by gathering people who would not otherwise be in the same room.

We are building it by creating spaces where people can rest, think, speak honestly, and see one another clearly.

We are building it by refusing the two failures of our age: hostility, which steamrolls others, and politeness, which manages difference without engaging it.

We are building it by practicing civility instead.

Civility is not politeness. Politeness is technique. Civility is an inner disposition rooted in recognizing the inherent dignity of others.

This means we can disagree without dehumanizing. We can name what is wrong without reducing a person to one thing. We can build trust across difference without pretending difference does not exist.

We are building it in schools, where children are formed as full human beings, not merely prepared to be cogs in a machine.

We are building it in communities, where neighbors, mayors, educators, parents, journalists, and civic leaders can sit at the same table and ask what kind of world they want to leave behind.

We are building it in our own lives, by beginning with ourselves.

That is the work of Civic Renaissance.

What Comes Next

If you joined us for the retreat, share in the comments what you most enjoyed. If this sounds like something you want to be part of in the future, please reach out.

We began the weekend by embodying the world we want to build.

We gathered to embody a world of multidimensional flourishing across difference.

Then we left commissioned to build it.

That is the project.

A renaissance—starting with each of us.

In the news:

• Art Life Faith Podcast: The Soul of Civility with Alexandra Hudson

  Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. In this episode I had the privilege of having a conversation with Alexandra Hudson, or Lexi, the author of “The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.” A number of weeks ago, she was passing through Tokyo on vacation with her family when she was gracious enough to sit down with me and talk about the various themes in her book and then lead an Art Life Faith event right afterward.

• Fox 21 News: Reclaiming Civility: Cultivating connection and respect in Colorado Springs

• Fox 59: 11th annual Fairbanks Symposium- Watch here

  A media interview about The Civic Renaissance Tour Launch in Indianapolis

• A podcast interview with Michael Lee of the University of Charleston, When We Disagree Podcast: The Soul of Civility, Tested

  What does civility demand when justice is costly and deeply personal? Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, shares a raw story about how being scammed sparked both a lengthy legal battle and a profound disagreement with her husband over whether to fight or walk away. Through that conflict, Hudson wrestles with whether civility means politeness or principled confrontation, and what it costs our families when moral crusades take over our lives. The episode explores civility not as courteousness or softness, but as disciplined respect for human dignity even when the stakes are high and the gloves stay firmly on.

• Review of The Soul of Civility in Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent surveyshared by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy reported that 72% of Americans want to see more civility in our nation’s politics. The same survey found that Americans are divided on their outlook for our nation’s future, split nearly in half over whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to come together.

• Review of The Soul of civility in Bitterroot Star: Disagree better

  Our community is full of independent people who don’t like being told what to think. That’s a strength. But independence only works if we can argue honestly without tearing each other apart in the process. This book doesn’t offer a program or a slogan. It offers a reminder of the habits that make self-government possible.

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

The Freedom of Limits

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

The last 24 hours have left me with more hope than I’ve felt in a long time. In that time, I watched two communities—in the same state, yet acting completely independent of one another—reject our culture of dehumanization, division, and atomization, and actively choose a different way of life: one marked by flourishing across difference,…

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Japan is often held up as a model of social order and harmony. After two weeks there with my family, I understood why almost immediately.

When I first arrived, I loved nearly everything I saw. The streets were spotless despite a virtual absence of public trash cans. The trains were quiet, orderly, and astonishingly calm. Public life felt light because everyone seemed to carry their own weight. People were restrained, attentive, careful not to impose. It was not merely efficient. It was beautiful. It felt like living inside a society where people take responsibility for the shared world.

And then, after a little more time, after conversations with locals, after getting beneath the surface, I began to see some tradeoffs—ones that did not make me admire Japan less, but helped me understand it better. It also gave me a sharper way to think about one of the central arguments of my book, The Soul of Civility: civility and politeness are not the same thing.

Japan was, in that sense, the perfect place to test the theory.

Obedience to the Unenforcable

In an impromptu speech he gave at the Authors’ Club in London, later published in The Atlantic in 1924 as Law and Manners, Lord Moulton’s coined an important phrase that accurately describes Japan: the obedience to the unenforceable.

He used this term to described the vast sphere of life governed not by law, but by voluntary self-restraint. Obedience to the unenforceable is the quiet discipline of governing ourselves where no law can compel us, choosing restraint, honesty, and consideration even when no one is watching.

Japan is a supremely self-governing society, and one of the first examples of this that you notice in Japan is that there are almost no public trash cans. You buy something, finish it, and carry the wrapper with you until you get back to your hotel or find a place that will take it. And yet there is almost no public litter. The result is not just clean streets. It is a whole moral atmosphere. You become more aware of your own conduct. You are less casual with your waste, less entitled about your convenience, less inclined to assume that someone else will absorb the cost of your poor conduct.

That pattern repeated itself everywhere.

We took train rides all over Japan, including on the Shinkansen, and the whole system seemed to run on the assumption that of course you had paid. There were conductors and turnstiles, but the atmosphere was not one of suspicion. No one asked to see my ticket. Not once. The system did not seem braced against the expectation that people would cheat if given the chance.

One experience in particular stayed with me. Children six and under ride free, so on one leg of the trip we had not bought train tickets for our kids. But then it was so crowded that we decided to buy them tickets anyway so they would have seats and not be piled on top of us. As we went through, a woman came over, asked how old our children were, and then insisted on refunding us because they were eligible to ride free.

You can hardly imagine that happening at an American train station. There was no shrug, no well, you should have checked, no better luck next time. She corrected the overpayment because it was not right for us to pay what we did not owe.

That struck me as more than mere niceness. It revealed a deeper social logic. Japan felt, to me, like an adult society. A mature society. A society in which the system is not constantly tensed against the expectation that people will grab, evade, vandalize, or impose. It called to mind Lord Moulton’s old phrase, the obedience to the unenforceable. The health of a free society depends on a vast zone of conduct that no law can adequately regulate. It depends on people choosing to act well when no one is forcing them to do so.

Japan made that visible.

What I saw there was a society that had cultivated habits of self-command to a remarkable degree. Public life was pleasant not because there was a policeman on every corner managing every microsocial interaction, but because people had internalized norms of restraint and regard for others. I hardly saw law enforcement at all. I heard maybe one siren the entire trip. The order did not seem to be imposed mainly from outside. It seemed to be upheld from within.

And then we landed in New York.

Culture Shock

On the way home, three flights were canceled in one day, and we ended up stranded in Manhattan overnight. The cultural whiplash was immediate. In Japan, for two weeks, no stranger had tried to chat with me on the street. In hospitality settings people were attentive and thoughtful, but ordinary public life seemed governed by a simple norm: do not inconvenience anyone, do not intrude, do not impose.

Then, within minutes of walking in New York, a man complimented my shoes, asked if I needed directions, and then, in the same breath, asked me to donate to support his music career via QR code.

It was almost too on the nose.

After Japan, I could suddenly see American public life with fresh eyes. I noticed the trash piled high on corners. I noticed police officers everywhere, and felt grateful for them. I noticed the friction, the noise, the sense that public space was not exactly shared so much as continually negotiated. The contrast was clarifying, not because Japan is perfect and America is not, but because Japan had sharpened my awareness of how much freedom depends on self-government.

That, in turn, brought me back to a point I make in The Soul of Civility. If we do not sufficiently govern ourselves, governments will always be tempted to do it for us.

Obedience to the unenforceable, tested

Not long ago, Western democracies experimented rather openly with this temptation. In New York, under Mayor Bloomberg, public officials tried to regulate a whole range of rude and antisocial behaviors that are annoying, yes, but very difficult to police without drifting into pettiness and overreach.

In Britain, Tony Blair’s Respect campaign was animated by a similar impulse. The instinct behind these efforts is understandable. No one enjoys being surrounded by boorishness. But the problem remains: manners cannot be sustainably outsourced to the state. A free society needs citizens who can moderate their conduct voluntarily. Otherwise every irritation becomes a policy problem, and every bad habit invites bureaucratic correction. I explore both of these case studies—and a third experiment in Paris around the same tim—in Chapter Four of The Soul of Civility.

So far, Japan seemed to confirm my thesis.

And then came the more interesting part.

The Civic Renaissance tour Launch in Japan

Prior to our trip, I was connected by a friend to a local Japanese organization called Community Arts Tokyo, who invited me to partner with them on an event. After recording a podcast, we gathered around a table with Japanese guests for dinner and conversation, and there I had the chance to explore more directly the distinction I have long argued for between civility and politeness.

Politeness is manners, etiquette, technique. It is external. It concerns forms, signals, presentation, the visible grammar of respectability.

Civility is something deeper. It is an inner disposition of the heart rooted in recognizing the inherent dignity of others. It is a way of seeing others as they really are, beings with dignity and equal moral worth, worthy of a bare minimum of respect simply by virtue of our shared personhood.

Those things often overlap. They are not, however, the same.

That difference became much sharper in Tokyo.

We spent the first part of the evening trying to define the distinction between civility and politeness itself. Was there a word in Japanese that captured merely the external performance of respect, detached from inward regard? We struggled to find one. I do not want to make too much of a linguistic point I cannot prove with confidence. But the exercise itself was revealing. The distinction felt harder to isolate, harder to pull apart neatly.

Then our hosts began describing some of the costs of living in such a highly ordered and deferential society.

Several said that when they first went to America, they felt they discovered themselves there for the first time. I found that remarkable. America, to them, represented not only disorder but freedom. Japan was beautiful, coherent, refined. It could also feel constraining. The social order was strong, but so were the pressures of conformity.

I asked how people express dissent in relationships and in workplaces. How do they disagree? How do they challenge authority? How do they repair after conflict?

What I heard was sobering.

In personal relationships, sometimes people simply stop speaking rather than work through a disagreement directly. Silence is easier, and more socially acceptable, than open conflict. In professional settings, critiquing a superior can be difficult. Managing up is hard. Honest disagreement does not move easily in a society that places such a high premium on deference and harmony.

That was the point at which the whole trip came into focus for me.

Japan had shown me, in extraordinary detail, what public life can look like when people exercise restraint, take responsibility, and refuse to make every private impulse everyone else’s problem. It had also shown me that outward harmony can coexist with inward compression. A society can be exceptionally well-mannered and still struggle with truth-telling. It can be orderly and courteous and still make dissent costly. It can smooth the surface of social life while leaving less room for candor, confrontation, and repair.

That is why the distinction between civility and politeness matters.

Politeness can make life more pleasant. It can reduce friction, produce order, and make shared spaces more livable. Anyone who has spent time in Japan can see that. But politeness alone does not solve the harder human problem. It does not tell us how to disagree honestly. It does not tell us how to challenge bad authority. It does not tell us how to remain in relationship when something true and difficult needs to be said.

A flourishing society needs restraint, yes. It also needs candor. It needs consideration for others, and it needs the courage to tell the truth without treating the other person as disposable. It needs forms that make daily life humane, and it needs an inner disposition strong enough to bear disagreement without dehumanization.

That, to me, is the lesson.

What I brought home from Japan was not a blueprint, but a sharper question. Can a society cultivate restraint, order, and responsibility in public life without drifting into conformity, deference, and silence? Japan shows what is gained when people govern themselves well. It also suggests what may be lost when harmony becomes too costly to disturb. America needs more discipline in public life, but not at the price of honesty. The challenge is to build a culture that can bear both.

But we should not confuse surface harmony with the whole of human flourishing. A society that cannot say hard things will pay for that silence somewhere. If truth has no honorable place to go, it does not vanish. It goes underground.

Beyond politeness and hostiltiy, toward civiltiy

I came home more persuaded than ever that we need both what Japan has cultivated so well—a shared sense of duty to neighbor. We need more responsibility, more restraint, more regard for the shared world. But collective consciencousness is not enough. We also need forms of honesty robust enough to survive discomfort, disagreement, and difference.

That is our task: to move beyond the two dehumanizing extremes between which we are stuck, American-style hostility shrouded in honesty and Japanese-style politeness. One treats the other person as an enemy to be crushed. The other can treat the person as a problem to be managed rather than someone to be truly known. Neither sees the person clearly. Civility, grounded in human dignity, offers a better way: telling the truth in a manner the other can hear, and grappling with difference directly out of respect rather than smoothing it over or turning it into war.

Japan did not make me want America to become Japanese. It made me want us to grow up a little. To not litter, certainly. But also to carry the heavier burden of freedom—to choose liberty, not license—which requires that we see others as they really are, treat them with the resepct thye are due and modulate our conduct accordinyly… ideally without needing the state to regulate every corner of our common life.

Good manners can keep a train quiet. They cannot, on their own, build a free people.

Discussion questions

1. What do we gain when a society cultivates restraint, order, and consideration for others, and what can be lost if those norms become too rigid?

2. Where, in our own communities, do we see a failure of what Lord Moulton called obedience to the unenforceable—the self-governance that makes democracy work?

3. How do you create a culture where people are considerate without becoming timid—honest but not hostile?

4. For further reading, see this amazing essay I read this morning explroing what Simone Weil’s A Poem of Force says about our crisis of dehumanizing hostiltiy. I absolutely loved it!!

Share your thoughts in the comments!

In the news:

• Fox 21 News: Reclaiming Civility: Cultivating connection and respect in Colorado Springs

• A media interview about The Civic Renaissance Launch in Indianapolis last week - Fox 59: 11th annual Fairbanks Symposium- Watch here

• A podcast interview with Michael Lee of the University of Charleston, When We Disagree Podcast: The Soul of Civility, Tested

  What does civility demand when justice is costly and deeply personal? Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, shares a raw story about how being scammed sparked both a lengthy legal battle and a profound disagreement with her husband over whether to fight or walk away. Through that conflict, Hudson wrestles with whether civility means politeness or principled confrontation, and what it costs our families when moral crusades take over our lives. The episode explores civility not as courteousness or softness, but as disciplined respect for human dignity even when the stakes are high and the gloves stay firmly on.

• Review of The Soul of Civility in Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent surveyshared by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy reported that 72% of Americans want to see more civility in our nation’s politics. The same survey found that Americans are divided on their outlook for our nation’s future, split nearly in half over whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to come together.

• Review of The Soul of civility in Bitterroot Star: Disagree better

  Our community is full of independent people who don’t like being told what to think. That’s a strength. But independence only works if we can argue honestly without tearing each other apart in the process. This book doesn’t offer a program or a slogan. It offers a reminder of the habits that make self-government possible.

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

Paideia, Humanitas, Civility and Education

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

I’m looking forward to seeing you at our monthly meeting tonight at 7:30 Eastern. You can access the meeting here.

I’m excited to share a few updates with you, including what we learned from testing the distinction between civility and politeness during our Civic Renaissance tour in Japan, reflections from …

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Gracious reader,

Over the past several weeks, the Civic Renaissance Tour has taken shape in a way that clarifies both the need and the opportunity in front of us.

In Colorado Springs, I saw something that is becoming a pattern across the country, one that gives me hope for the future of our country and our world. The Soul of Civility in Action, a Civic Renaissance Playbook, is no longer theoretical.

Across the country, communities are beginning to move through four phases— Discover, Ignite, Embody, Celebrate—that position them to be hubs of renewal.

Last week in Colorado Springs, I watched this process take root in real time.

Discover

A few years ago, two local leaders, Lori Leander and Lisa Brandt, encountered The Soul of Civility. They did not treat it as an interesting set of ideas. They treated it as a starting point. They began placing the book into the hands of mayors, council members, and civic leaders across their region, not as a gesture, but as an invitation to build something shared.

That is where this work always begins.

A community must first develop a shared language. Not politeness as surface technique, but civility as an inner disposition, a way of seeing others as they are, human beings with dignity, equal moral worth, and claims on our respect. Without that foundation, nothing durable can be built.

Ignite

From that foundation, Colorado Springs moved into what I call the Ignite phase.

Over two days, we convened leaders across the region. The mayor, members of city council, school leaders, philanthropists, and institutional heads gathered in the same room. We partnered with Braver Angels, and I was in dialogue with Maury Giles.

What emerged was not theoretical.

The region is facing real strain. A recent controversy over a proposed Buc-ee’s development revealed something deeper than a zoning dispute. It exposed a breakdown in how disagreement is carried. Residents, leaders, and stakeholders were not merely divided. They were wounded by the way conflict unfolded.

This is not unique to Colorado Springs.

How to flourish through disagreement

Across the country, the issue is not whether disagreement exists. It is whether we know how to carry it without dehumanizing one another, and whether we know how to repair relationships afterward.

Those two variables—how we engage conflict and whether we reconcile after it—determine whether difference strengthens a community or fractures it.

In Colorado Springs, leaders named the problem clearly. Then they asked the right question:

What would it look like to build a city where difference becomes a source of strength rather than strain?

That question moved us into action.

The following day, we convened a leaders’ roundtable with roughly forty decision-makers across sectors. This was not a discussion for its own sake. It was a working session. The goal was to leave with direction, ownership, and a path forward.

Embody

From that session, an Embody phase has now begun. Leaders are taking responsibility for carrying this work into schools, workplaces, civic institutions, and local networks. They are identifying who else must be at the table and what must be built next.

Parallel to this, philanthropy stepped in.

A few months ago, after I shared about the Colorado Springs Civic Renaissance launch, Will reached out to me independently. He leads a foundation in Colorado Springs and said he wanted to be part of what is being built there. He is now a Civic Renaissance Ambassador—a program I built to invite local leaders to be co-creators as we bring the ideal of flourishing across difference to life. This is how this work moves from conversation to capacity building locally.

Will then hosted a lunch at his foundation with regional philanthropic leaders. He gifted each of them a copy of The Soul of Civility in advance, and many arrived having read it and participated in the convening the day before.

The conversation centered on a question that history answers clearly:

What is the role of patronage in moments like this?

From Renaissance Florence to other periods of renewal, the answer is consistent. Cultural and civic transformation requires people who are willing to invest in the conditions that allow it to take root.

Colorado Springs is now moving in that direction.

Celebrate

This work is being built and positions the region clearly as a hub of renewal. I will be back in September in Colorado Springs to help consolidate and perpetuate this work.

But this is not a linear progression.

Discover, Ignite, Embody, Celebrate is not a sequence you complete. It is a cycle you return to, bringing new people and voices into the fold each time.

A community must continually rediscover its shared language, reignite its commitments, embody them in practice, and celebrate what is taking root.

This is what the Civic Renaissance Tour is designed to do. Not to host events, but to help communities move from language to structure, from insight to practice, from aspiration to something that can endure. This work helps communities move from shared language to durable civic architecture.

I serve as a civic architect: my book a canvas, myself a catalyst, empowering local leaders to decide what they want to build, and then to build it.

There is a place for you here

This work is already underway in multiple regions across the country. The pattern is becoming clearer. When leaders are given shared language, a structured convening, and a path to implementation, they begin building.

Share

If you are responsible for shaping a community or institution, and you can see the cost of division firsthand, whether in government, education, philanthropy, or civic life, and you are looking for a way to move beyond managing conflict toward building something stronger, I would welcome the conversation.

Later this month, we will gather a small group of leaders for a Civic Renaissance Retreat here in Indianapolis. This will be an invitation-only working convening, including Mitch Daniels and Daryl Davis, whose work offers a concrete example of what it means to engage difference without dehumanization.

The aim is to leave with work that will be carried forward, not ideas that stay in the room.

To bring together people who are ready not only to discuss these ideas, but to carry them into the institutions and communities they are responsible for shaping.

If that is the kind of work you are trying to do, there is a place for you in this.

Thank you for being here.

Warmly,

Lexi

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In the news:

• Fox 21 News: Reclaiming Civility: Cultivating connection and respect in Colorado Springs

• A media interview about The Civic Renaissance Launch in Indianapolis last week - Fox 59: 11th annual Fairbanks Symposium- Watch here

• A podcast interview with Michael Lee of the University of Charleston, When We Disagree Podcast: The Soul of Civility, Tested

  What does civility demand when justice is costly and deeply personal? Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, shares a raw story about how being scammed sparked both a lengthy legal battle and a profound disagreement with her husband over whether to fight or walk away. Through that conflict, Hudson wrestles with whether civility means politeness or principled confrontation, and what it costs our families when moral crusades take over our lives. The episode explores civility not as courteousness or softness, but as disciplined respect for human dignity even when the stakes are high and the gloves stay firmly on.

• Review of The Soul of Civility in Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent surveyshared by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy reported that 72% of Americans want to see more civility in our nation’s politics. The same survey found that Americans are divided on their outlook for our nation’s future, split nearly in half over whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to come together.

• Review of The Soul of civility in Bitterroot Star: Disagree better

  Our community is full of independent people who don’t like being told what to think. That’s a strength. But independence only works if we can argue honestly without tearing each other apart in the process. This book doesn’t offer a program or a slogan. It offers a reminder of the habits that make self-government possible.

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

Paideia, Humanitas, Civility and Education

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

Subscribe now

Gracious reader,

Shortly after The Soul of Civ…

Read more

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Gracious reader,

In so many of the conversations I have been ha…

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Today in Tokyo I had the privilege of taking a kintsugi class, learning an art form that dates back to 15th century Japan.

Kintsugi is the practice of repairing broken pottery and highlighting the cracks with gold. Instead of hiding the break, the repair is made visible and honored. The result is often more striking than the original piece.

It reflects a Japanese aesthetic ideal called wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection.

As I learned from a master kintsugi artist, I kept returning to three simple truths: we are imperfect; we can be repaired; and sometimes the repaired thing is more beautiful than before. Our brokenness does not have to be hidden. It can become part of what makes us better, and more beautiful.

Where have you seen the beauty of imperfection in your own life?

How might embracing the beauty in our own imperfections, and in the imperfections of others, make us more gracious with one another?

Could it make our families, friendships, and communities more patient and more humane?

What would it look like if we approached disagreement and conflict with the same spirit, not hiding the cracks, but repairing them with care?

Share

I invite your reflections in the comments below.

Thank you for being part of this project of help us cultivate flourishing across difference — starting with ourselves

Warmly,

Lexi

Subscribe now

You’re Invited: Civility in the City

Featuring Maury Giles (CEO of Braver Angels) and best-selling author Alexandra Hudson

On March 30, Reclaiming Civility is hosting an expert-led evening, Civility in the City, at UCCS, featuring Maury Giles, CEO of Braver Angels, and Alexandra Hudson, best-selling author of The Soul of Civility.

Join us!

This event is an opportunity to hear directly from leaders working at the front lines of civic and cultural repair — sharing what they’re seeing across communities, what’s helping people stay human in the midst of disagreement, and why these skills matter far beyond politics.

Maury and Alexandra will explore:

• What’s driving the breakdown of civil dialogue

• The human skills that help communities rebuild trust

• How these skills apply not only in public life, but in workplaces, families, and everyday relationships

If you’ve felt discouraged by the tone of public life, or curious about what it looks like when people choose dignity over dehumanization, we’d love for you to join us.

Join us!

In the news:

• A media interview about The Civic Renaissance Launch in Indianapolis last week - Fox 59: 11th annual Fairbanks Symposium- Watch here

• A podcast interview with Michael Lee of the University of Charleston, When We Disagree Podcast: The Soul of Civility, Tested

  What does civility demand when justice is costly and deeply personal? Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, shares a raw story about how being scammed sparked both a lengthy legal battle and a profound disagreement with her husband over whether to fight or walk away. Through that conflict, Hudson wrestles with whether civility means politeness or principled confrontation, and what it costs our families when moral crusades take over our lives. The episode explores civility not as courteousness or softness, but as disciplined respect for human dignity even when the stakes are high and the gloves stay firmly on.

• Review of The Soul of Civility in Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent surveyshared by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy reported that 72% of Americans want to see more civility in our nation’s politics. The same survey found that Americans are divided on their outlook for our nation’s future, split nearly in half over whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to come together.

• Review of The Soul of civility in Bitterroot Star: Disagree better

  Our community is full of independent people who don’t like being told what to think. That’s a strength. But independence only works if we can argue honestly without tearing each other apart in the process. This book doesn’t offer a program or a slogan. It offers a reminder of the habits that make self-government possible.

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

Paideia, Humanitas, Civility and Education

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

Civic Renaissance is no longer merely an idea, a publication, or an aspiration.

It is now a transformation that is well underway, taking root in real communities with real leaders who are choosing to build.

• In Shelbyville, IN, a divided community gathered and left with tools.

• In Texas, legislators are using The Soul of Civility to strengthen their institution.

• Last week in Indianapolis, 150 leaders filled a room with a single shared conviction: we cannot change our neighbors, but we can change ourselves, and that is where renewal begins.

• In 2026, we have the privilege of bringing The Civic Renaissance Tour to several dozen communities, countries, and institutions on the Civic Renaissance Tour, a place-based effort to come alongside local leaders and help them move from conversation to construction, bringing the ideas of The Soul of Civility off the page and into lived, institutional practice. Phoenix, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Urbandale, California, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Denver, London, Rome, and many others. In each place, there are Civic Renaissance Ambassadors who care about their cities and are committed to building durable civic architecture that helps their communities flourish across difference. I am grateful to come alongside them and support the work already underway.

Share

Over the past two and a half years, I traveled to 145 cities and five countries sharing the ideas in my book.

That was the season of discovery and observation. How are these ideas being used and brought to life? I watched and I listened.

Now, we are in the season of construction.

Across the country, people are asking the same question: now what? How do we move from reading about civility to building institutions shaped by it? How do we translate conviction into daily practice?

The Civic Renaissance Tour and Retreat are our answer.

The Civic Renaissance Retreat

On April 24 and 25, we will gather at my home in Indianapolis for two days devoted to civic architecture, not abstraction. You will not leave with inspiration alone. You will leave with a defined Embody plan, relationships with fellow builders, and a shared path forward. We will decide what this movement is, define what it can become, identify who must be at the table, and determine how it grows from here.

This will be serious work. It will also be joyful: A feast for mind, body, and spirit. We will cultivate space to think, space to plan, space to play, and space to remember that civic life can be ordered toward dignity rather than division.

Tomorrow, Sunday, March 1, at 5 p.m. Eastern, I am hosting a vision session—both for the retreat and for this movement. I will lay out the structure of the retreat and the outcomes we are building toward. Then I want to hear from you. What are you facing in your city or institution? What would make this gathering catalytic—one that you would be excited to join?

If you sense the division in our world, if it is palpable in your workplace, your school, your church, or your community, and you want to be part of the solution rather than another spectator to the problem, I invite you to gather with me and others who care just as much about rebuilding what feels fractured.

Voices of Experience: Learning from Mitch Daniels & Daryl Davis, Leaders Who Have Done the Work

At the retreat, we will be joined by world class statesman Mitch Daniels, whose leadership as governor of Indiana and president of Purdue University demonstrates how serious institutions can be guided with steadiness and long-term vision.

We will also be joined by Daryl Davis, who has spent decades engaging members of the Ku Klux Klan in conversation and has persuaded many to renounce hatred, offering a living example of what patient, principled engagement can accomplish.

If you already know that The Civic Renaissance retreat is a weekend retreat you want to be part of, claim your spot here. We are capping registration, and space is EXTREMELY limited. (Few scholarships available—write to me with your questions about this.)

Claim your spot here

Whether you’ve already registered or are still discerning, if you feel the fracture in our culture and refuse to step back from the work of repair, this is for you.

The link to register for tomorrow’s (Sunday) vision session is here.

The work has begun. It is making a difference.

Join us.

Warmly,

Lexi

Subscribe now

In the news:

• A media interview about The Civic Renaissance Launch in Indianapolis last week - Fox 59: 11th annual Fairbanks Symposium- Watch here

• A podcast interview with Michael Lee of the University of Charleston, When We Disagree Podcast: The Soul of Civility, Tested

  What does civility demand when justice is costly and deeply personal? Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility and founder of Civic Renaissance, shares a raw story about how being scammed sparked both a lengthy legal battle and a profound disagreement with her husband over whether to fight or walk away. Through that conflict, Hudson wrestles with whether civility means politeness or principled confrontation, and what it costs our families when moral crusades take over our lives. The episode explores civility not as courteousness or softness, but as disciplined respect for human dignity even when the stakes are high and the gloves stay firmly on.

• Review of The Soul of Civility in Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent surveyshared by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute’s Center on Civility and Democracy reported that 72% of Americans want to see more civility in our nation’s politics. The same survey found that Americans are divided on their outlook for our nation’s future, split nearly in half over whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to come together.

• Review of The Soul of civility in Bitterroot Star: Disagree better

  Our community is full of independent people who don’t like being told what to think. That’s a strength. But independence only works if we can argue honestly without tearing each other apart in the process. This book doesn’t offer a program or a slogan. It offers a reminder of the habits that make self-government possible.

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

Paideia, Humanitas, Civility and Education

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com