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, by the rehumanization of public life starting with ourselves, and by reclaiming the gift of being human in ourselves and others.

In both communities, two individual citizens—the mayor of Urbandale and a professor at St. Ambrose—decided that the status quo wasn’t enough and wanted to be part of the solution. They turned to The Soul of Civility and found not just inspiration, but guidance for where to begin.

Monday evening, we launched the Civic Renaissance Tour at St. Ambrose University in Iowa. A growing cohort of 15+ Civic Renaissance Ambassadors is now reading The Soul of Civility together—not just to discuss it, but to live it, apply it, and begin building something real in their own communities.

Then, last night, the City of Urbandale—with a population of 46,000 people—chose The Soul of Civility as its community-wide read. Over the coming weeks, residents will take up a shared set of question: what would it look like to build a culture of flourishing across difference, starting with ourselves? What might a civic renaissance look like here?

In both cases, Urbandale and St. Ambrose have entered the Discover phase of the Civic Renaissance Playbook. This is a guide to civic renewal I developed through close study of two things: 1) of eras of multidimensional human flourishing across history, and 2) through careful attention to how communities are using The Soul of Civility in their own contexts.

The goal of this phase is for them to cultivate their vision of flourishing in their own community through a shared reading of my book. The invitation to them is then to build it—and sustain it themselves.

In both rooms, I offered the same vision:

• What might it look like to live in a world where our differences don’t bring out the worst in us, but bring out the best?

• Where disagreement does not erode relationships, but refines them?

• Where we learn to see one another as we really are—human beings with dignity—and build from there?

That is the vision. This is our shared task.

Leaders across politics, geography, and vocation are turning to The Soul of Civility as a handbook for navigating divided and dehumanizing times, and for building something better in their own communities. Watching that take root on the ground, in real places with real people, is the very reason I wrote the book in the first place.

The Civic Renaissance Retreat

Something else giving me hope this week is this: This weekend, we will gather more than 50 leaders from across the country and world in our Italian Renaissance–style home for the Civic Renaissance Retreat—a feast for mind, body, and spirit.

We’ll be joined by Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana and a widely respected leader, and Daryl Davis, an African American jazz musician who has spent more than four decades seeking out and befriending members of hate groups, and has helped more than two hundred people leave those views through curiosity, conversation, and leading with a commitment to our shared humanity.

They are two extraordinary practitioners of flourishing across difference that we have the privildge of learning from throughout the weekend and our “unconference,” Socratic-style sessions. Together at the retreat, we will embody the world we want to build—one of flourishing and abundance—and then design a blueprint for how to carry it forward. We build a civic renaissance in our world—starting with ourselves.

If you are registered and attending the retreat this weekend, comment below and tell me what you’re most looking forward to.

If you’re not planning on going with us but want to, don’t worry.

While we are at capacity for this retreat, this is just the beginning. We wil host more in the future.

If this work resonates with you—if you want to help build a culture of flourishing across difference in your own community—please reach out.

Or, start where many of these leaders have started: read The Soul of Civility with a friend, a team, or a community, and ask what it would look like to live it.

This is how a civic renaissance begins: with one person deciding to double down and make their community better. That one person grows to a handful of people, and a handful of people can make a powerful difference in one community—and in our country. We each have far more power to be part of the problem—or part of the solution—than we realize.

Let’s build a civic renaissance.

Warmly,

Lexi

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

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 …

Read more

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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.

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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

Subscribe now

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…

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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?

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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.

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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

Gracious reader,

This line from Lady Mariko, a protagonist in the 2024 Hulu series about the Japanese Shogunate, Shōgun, has been echoing in my mind as we pack for Japan.

In case you’re new here: My name is Alexandra Hudson. I am the author of The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Civic Renaissance is my public humanities project and intellectual community dedicated to reviving the wisdom of the past to help us lead better lives here and now. We are animated by one question: How do we flourish across deep difference?

Japan is widely regarded as one of the most polite societies in the world. It is coherent, ordered, attentive, beautiful. That makes it a fascinating place to test the core distinction at the heart of my work: the essential difference between civility and politeness.

Politeness is technique. Manners. Etiquette. Surface harmony. It comes from polire, to polish or smooth.

Civility is an inner disposition of the heart rooted in recognizing the inherent dignity of others. It comes from civitas, the root of citizen, city, civilization. Civility is the duty of citizens who must live and disagree together.

As we prepare for this trip, reading The Tale of Genji with the children and immersing ourselves in Japanese film and history, I am carrying four working hypotheses with me. They are provisional. They are drawn in part from dramatized history and early reading. I expect them to be refined, complicated, perhaps overturned. But they are honest starting points.

First: Outer politeness can conceal true feelings.

In Shōgun, Lady Mariko tells John, an English outsider, not to mistake bows and rituals for intimacy. Beneath them, she says, one may still be alone. She calles this the “Eightfold Fence,” a metaphor for emotional and social restraint.

She explains that in Japan, people build an “eightfold fence” around their hearts. The idea is that a person can perform perfect composure, loyalty, and politeness on the outside, while their inner thoughts and feelings remain sealed off behind multiple layers.

It is not a literal fence. It is a cultural metaphor. This concept is not a recognized historical concept, philosophical school, or codified element of Japanese social theory.

But this notion that there can be a disconnect between our outer conduct and inner feelings is an observation is not uniquely Japanese. It is human. A society can perfect the form of respect while neglecting the inner orientation that gives it meaning. One can perform deference while inwardly resenting. One can execute ritual flawlessly while feeling nothing at all.

There is another cultural echo of the distinction between civility and politeness. In Confucian philosophy, Confucius distinguishes between Li—manners, ritual, and propriety— and Ren—often rendered as common humanity.

Li refers to ritual and propriety, the outward forms that structure relationships and preserve social order. Ren refers to common humanity, the inner disposition of humane regard toward others. Ideally, li is meant to express and cultivate ren. Right action can, after all, re-enforce right belief and feeling.

Correct form can and sould should train the heart. But this tradition itself recognizes the danger that ritual can become hollow. One can perform the rite and miss the person. Confucian thought shaped Chinese civilization and, through centuries of cultural transmission, profoundly influenced Japanese political and social norms, especially around hierarchy, harmony, and role-based duty.

What interests me is the fault line between outer correctness and inner recognition. When propriety is severed from humane regard, the bow remains, but the bond does not. That disconnect between form and inner truth is the tension my work seeks to name.

We do this in the West as well. We smile at neighbors we quietly despise. We say yes to our boss, politely, through gritted teeth. We send carefully worded, pleasant emails while nursing contempt. We confuse the appearance of harmony with the presence of it.

Civility asks more. It asks not only that I say the correct words, but that I see you as a person whose dignity does not depend on my agreement.

Second: Rule-following is not the same as moral responsibility.

In one vignette, a gardener removes a rotting pheasant that has been left hanging outside a home. The stench is unbearable. He knows he is technically disobeying an order. He does it anyway for the good of the household. He is executed.

John, the Englishman, is horrified. He meant the spirit of the command, not blind compliance. He is stunned that obedience to hierarchy outweighs discernment about what is humane.

It is easy to treat this as dramatized, medieval excess. But the underlying question is perennial. When does fidelity to rules eclipse responsibility to persons? When does hierarchy replace judgment?

Civility, as I define it, requires moral agency. It requires that we do not hide behind structure or authority to avoid thinking. Respect for persons cannot be eclipsed by procedural compliance. (For more about this idea from a different cultural context, see Hannah Arendt on the Banality of Evil.)

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Third: Social order can silence necessary dissent.

Early in the series, a samurai speaks out of turn in a council meeting. The punishment is ritual suicide. His infant son is also killed, because the father’s impropriety stains the family line.

The scene is harrowing. It dramatizes a culture in which preserving order outweighs preserving life. The town grieves, yet still insists that the penalty was required. The rule was broken. Therefore, death.

Again, this is historical drama. Still, it raises a live question. In any highly ordered society, what happens to dissent? What happens to the person who challenges authority without formal permission?

Democracy depends on disagreement. Disagreement is not a glitch in the system; it is evidence that citizens are thinking. But disagreement must be anchored in recognition of equal dignity, or it devolves into dehumanization.

If a culture overvalues politeness and ritual harmony, it may struggle to surface injustice. If it overvalues bluntness and individual assertion, it may fracture into contempt.

Which brings me to the fourth hypothesis.

Every culture has blind spots, including ours.

If Japan risks elevating form over interiority, the West often risks the opposite. We valorize disruption. We reward outrage. We confuse cruelty with candor. Social media incentivizes public shaming more than patient argument. Political discourse frequently slides from disagreement into character assassination.

Our problem is not that we are too polite. It is that we often disagree in ways that deny the humanity of those across from us.

Politeness without inner regard becomes hollow.

Candor without respect becomes corrosive.

Civility is neither avoidance nor aggression. It is an inner disposition that recognizes equal dignity, and then expresses that recognition through speech and action. It means I respect you enough to tell the truth as I see it. It means I respect myself enough to speak, and you enough not to patronize you by pretending we have no differences.

That is the experiment I am bringing with me to Japan. Not as a critic, but as a student. I want to visit schools. Observe classrooms. Learn about sake from those who craft it. Watch how table manners encode meaning. Notice how hierarchy functions in practice. Pay attention to when disagreement is voiced and when it is deferred.

If you know individuals or institutions in Japan who would want to explore these questions with us, reply and introduce us. I am eager to listen.

I am going for myself. I am also going for you. Many of you are not passive readers but intellectual sparring partners. The Civic Renaissance ambassadors among you are co-creators, leaders who have read the book and asked what it looks like to live this where they are.

If that is you, there is a place for you in this work.

Become a Civic Renaissance Ambassador

When I return from Japan, I suspect I will have more questions than answers. I will bring stories. Some will confirm my hypotheses. Some will undo them. That is the discipline of travel.

There will be bows. There will be ritual. There will be order.

The question, for Japan and for us, is whether beneath the form there is recognition. Whether beneath the ritual there is regard. Whether beneath the harmony there is the courage to see and to speak.

Not whether we polish our interactions, but whether we practice equal dignity.

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 survey shared 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

Last evening, we gathered in our home for the inaugural Civic Renaissance Salon, a feast for mind, body, and spirit.

The intention was not entertainment. It was restoration.

Those of you who joined us are faith leaders in our city. You spend your lives carrying the burdens of others, tending souls, mediating conflict, offering consolation, speaking hard truths. For one evening, we wanted to reverse the direction of service. To nourish those who so often nourish everyone else.

Hospitality, rightly understood, is not ornamental. It is civilizational. In Homer’s Odyssey, the practice of welcoming the stranger, xenia, functions as a moral test. Civilized people receive the guest before interrogating him. Disorder begins when hospitality collapses. The table, in that sense, is political.

Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, wrote that friendship holds cities together. He did not mean sentimentality. He meant that political life depends on habits of regard that prevent disagreement from becoming dissolution. A city without civic friendship fragments.

That was our aim.

Not to harmonize our differences into a thin consensus. Not to reduce Hindu, Jewish, Christian, LDS, and other traditions to a lowest common denominator. The goal was robust pluralism. Bring your convictions to the fore. Articulate them without embarrassment. Listen without fear. Remain friends.

Agreement was not the objective. Politeness was not the objective. Civility was.

Civility is an inner disposition rooted in recognizing the inherent dignity of others. Politeness is a set of manners and techniques that smooth the surface of interaction. Politeness papers over tension. Civility permits tension while refusing dehumanization. It respects oneself enough to speak honestly and respects others enough to hear them fully.

Several of you asked why I shared Chapter Two and the final chapter of The Soul of Civility.

Chapter Two traces a pattern observable across philosophical and religious traditions: independent thinkers, separated by centuries and continents, repeatedly arrive at similar conclusions about what strengthens human communities and what corrodes them. The question they are asking is not sectarian. It is anthropological. What kind of person makes flourishing possible? What habits destroy it?

The final chapter, on misplaced meaning and forgiveness, confronts a more contemporary distortion. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke argued that the magistrate’s authority concerns civil interests, while the care of souls belongs to a different sphere. When we collapse those domains, when politics becomes the vehicle for ultimate meaning, we overload the democratic process with expectations it cannot bear.

No election can answer questions of origin, purpose, and destiny. When we demand that it do so, politics becomes salvific, and disappointment becomes existential.

Faith leaders therefore have a distinctive role in stabilizing a democracy. Not by baptizing party platforms. Not by retreating from public life. But by restoring proportion. By reminding communities that the state is limited, and that ultimate meaning cannot be legislated.

Several of you have written since last night asking, what now?

Here is a concrete path.

First, I am attaching the free reading guide that communities across political, geographic, and vocational lines have used to read The Soul of Civility together. I invite you to gather your congregations and read it with an explicit orientation toward practice. Not as abstraction. Not as theory alone. Ask: What would flourishing across difference look like here, now, in this community?

Download the reading guide!

Second, let us reconvene in six to twelve weeks. Return with observations. Where did your communities resonate? Where did they resist? What new possibilities emerged? From there, we ask together: what institutional forms might embody these principles?

Third, expand the circle. Who else belongs at the table? Civic leaders. Educators. Elected officials. Nonprofit directors. Invite them. Renewal spreads through concrete relationships.

This is not a request for spectators. It is an invitation to co creators. Civic Renaissance will only take root if local leaders adapt these principles to their own contexts and build durable structures around them.

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Across the country, similar conversations are unfolding in legislatures, universities, and cities. But renewal is always local. It begins in particular homes, among particular people, around particular tables.

If last night felt like the beginning of something, that is because it was.

If this was the first course, there is much more to come.

Warmly,

Lexi

Join the Ambassador Program

In the news:

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

• 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.

• Indiana Capital Chronicle: With all due respect

  Hudson is not alone in her pursuit for civility. A recent survey shared 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.

• 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:

When does an intellectual failing become a moral one? Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

I wanted to share more with you about the launch of the Civic Renaissance Tour launch in Shelbyville, Indiana, in late January.

Rather than narrate it myself, I want to pass the microphone to pastor of First Church Shelbyville, Rev. Ralph Botte, who initiated this effort in Shelbyville. He carried a clear vision for his church to help le…

Read more

I want to share with you a chapter from my children’s book project: Heroes and Villains. I very much welcome your feedback. If you’d like to read early chapters and share them with your little ones or in your classroom or homeschool setting, I would be grateful to hear your reflections and experiences as the book continues to take shape…

Read more

I got back very late last night from the great state of Texas, and I wanted to share a brief update while everything is still fresh.

I was there for two full days. On the first day, I gave a keynote at the University of Houston Law School. It was an exceptional experience. I was in dialogue with Professor Kate Brem, who had read my book and saw it as a foundation for rethinking professionalism and ethics for young lawyers. That conversation was thoughtful, serious, and encouraging, and the room was full. I was grateful for the engagement the students brought to our dialogue.

That evening, Braver Angels of Houston graciously hosted a public conversation. It was wonderful to meet so many of their members and to have such a thoughtful discussion, including about the legislative initiative we are building. I left that night encouraged by the hunger for practical ways to lower the temperature and rebuild trust.

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Dispatches from the Texas State Legislature

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American democratic experiment, many people quietly wonder whether, in our state of political violence, hyperpartisanship, and division, our democracy can survive another 250 years. The question is not only about laws or elections, but about whether we still possess the habits of self-government that make freedom workable. Civility is essential to democracy because it sustains self-rule at the level where law cannot reach.

As I argue in The Soul of Civility, free societies depend on the daily practices of restraint, respect, and responsibility that allow people to govern themselves rather than be governed in every detail. When those habits erode, government grows more intrusive, not because leaders necessarily want it to, but because citizens no longer trust one another to act with care.

Civility also makes shared life possible. It fosters the kind of civic friendship that allows us to keep showing up across disagreement, even when our side loses, even when the outcome disappoints us. It resists the impulse to withdraw at the first sign of difference. Without civility, democracy becomes a contest of power alone. With it, democracy remains a shared project. That is why the work now beginning in Texas matters. It is an effort to test whether these habits can be renewed, practiced, and sustained inside one of our most consequential democratic institutions, before they are needed most.

Yesterday was a long and important day for this work. I was up early, took a coach from Houston to Austin for a full day of meetings with legislators,staffers, and partners . The whole day left me hopeful and grateful for the opportunity to put the ideas from The Soul of Civility into practice in a high-stakes, tense political environment.

In every meeting, I said the same thing. The vision here is that this civility initiative is built, led, and sustained by legislators and Texans. I am a catalyst, and my book is a canvas, for these conversations. The work itself belongs to the people inside the institutions; it must be owned by those who want to build a culture of trust across difference.I saw, again and again, a seriousness among these people about doing the hard, long work of building a culture and a system meant to endure, one that is woven into the air and fabric of the institution itself, fifty years from now.

As a student of history, I think in centuries, not because change takes that long to appear, but because lasting change in hearts, minds, and behavior is slow work. Persuasion takes time. Trust takes time. Shared norms take time. The good news is that this kind of change, when it comes, is harder to undo. That is why our civility work in the legislature is deliberate and grassroots-led, focused on shaping habits and relationships that can endure.

I met first with senior staff from across the legislature. We had Republican and Democratic staff, from both the House and the Senate. There were staff there who had read my book and believe in the mission of this work, and eager to lead it. That meeting had two main questions at its center.

First, what role do staff play in helping a member-led, grassroots civility initiative around these ideas succeed? Second, what would a parallel initiative look like for staff themselves?

We talked about infusing this work into mentorship programs, into chiefs of staff meetings, and into the rhythms and culture of legislative life. What stood out most to me was the level of commitment. These were people who see the need for this work in their daily context and who want to help lead it.

I then met with members of the legislature. Texas is unique in that it meets every two years, and this is an off year. There is no session right now. That means every member who came flew in or drove in specifically for this conversation. That matters.

One reason we are starting this work now, a year before session, is because social trust cannot be manufactured on command. You cannot show up once every two years and expect to have the relationships that sustain good deliberation across disagreement. Trust has to be built before it is tested.

We had members present, Republicans and Democrats, from both the House and the Senate. That bipartisan and bicameral foundation—in both the staff and member meeting—is important. I spent most of that meeting listening. Where do you see the needs? Where do you see opportunities for growth? Where should we begin?

We discussed many concrete ideas, including the distinction between civility and politeness, our crisis of dehumanization, and the reality that disagreement is inherent to democracy. Disagreement is not a bug in the system. It is a defining feature of it.

We also talked about practical ways for the intellectual foundation of the book to take root, including using it as part of orientation training for newly elected legislators. The goal would be that from the moment someone is elected, they are grounded in the difference between civility and politeness, an awareness of how dehumanization takes hold, and a responsibility to recognize the dignity of colleagues and staff alike.

One encouraging pattern I continue to notice is this. Whenever I describe this initiative as member-led and member-sustained, someone says, I know exactly who should be part of this. And it is often a different name each time. That tells me something important. There are already models of this way of showing up inside the legislature. This work is not about fixing villains. It is about gathering, supporting, nourishing and convening the people within the legislature who already want to lead well.

We also talked about civic friendship, and the cost of its breakdown. There were moments of real emotion. Members shared that after certain votes, colleagues would not look them in the eye, would not speak to them, would not acknowledge them. That hurts. There is real woundedness, and real erosion of trust.

History teaches us that trust can be rebuilt, but it is fragile, and it must be cultivated. That is why this initiative is being designed as something ongoing, not episodic. It is about day-to-day practice, not just showing up when session begins and hoping for the best.

After that, I was invited to the governor’s office, where I met with several senior staff to brief them on the legislative initiative and to share the framework from my book. The conversation was thoughtful and encouraging, with serious questions and engagement. I was grateful for the opportunity to share this work with them.

At its heart, this is an experiment.

In an environment with low trust and low civic friendship, can trust be rebuilt if even a small group of members believe it can and are willing to work at it?

I believe it can, and we are starting with a strong foundation.

The next step is a twelve-week reading of my book with members, meeting weekly and inviting new participants as we go. These sessions will not just discuss the text, but will ask, directly and practically, how these ideas apply to the legislature as it exists right now, and how they can improve working relationships in service of constituents.

Overall, I am hopeful, and I am honored to partner with these members and staff. The longer-term vision is to build a set of tools and a framework that can serve other leaders, other legislatures, and other divided environments where trust has frayed.

At the end of the day, it was a gift to meet with friends who lead Braver Angels and Leadership Austin to talk through how, from their vantage point as citizens, they might support the legislative initiative among members—and to perhaps start their own initiative around The Soul of Civility Action as well.

I am grateful to these leaders and citizens alike who are saying—in word and action: “The way things are is not the way they have to be. I cannot control others, but I can control myself, and I will choose to be part of the solution.”

That is what I heard yesterday. That is fertile ground for us to build something beautiful, and lasting, together in Texas.

Thank you for your questions, your prayers, and the good will that many of you sent my way. I welcome your feedback, your questions, and your ideas. If you know of partners, organizations, or institutions in Texas that should be part of this, I would love to hear from you.

This work is just getting started. If you’d like to initiate a stop on the Civic Renaissance Tour and bring these ideas to your community, we’d love to hear from you.

The Civic Renaissance Tour has been in Shelbyville, now Texas, and it launches in Indianapolis in a few weeks in partnership with Indiana Humanities, the Fairbanks Foundation, and the University of Indianapolis.

Free registration here!

Thank you for being here, and for walking alongside me in this work.

Lexi

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Invitation: The Forgotten Virtue of Moderation

A live dialogue with Alexandra Hudson and Thomas Chatterton Williams

In an age shaped by outrage, certainty, and faction, moderation has become suspect. Those who refuse to sort neatly into camps are often dismissed as weak, naïve, or uncommitted. And yet, across history, the thinkers who most enlarged human understanding were rarely loyal to a side. They were loyal to truth.

This evening is a live dialogue between Alexandra Hudson and Thomas Chatterton Williams on the recovery of moderation as a serious intellectual posture, and on the examined life as its necessary foundation.

Join us!

In the new:

• The Shelbyville News: FCC hosts Civic Renaissance Tour community engagement event

  

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

When does an intellectual failing become a moral one? Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

This past week marked a visible milestone for Civic Renaissance.

In Texas, members of the state legislature invited their peers to read The Soul of Civility together. A member-led experiment, quiet but serious, is unfolding inside of one of our nation’s most polarized institutions. Leaders there are turning to my book to help them navigate our crisis of dehumanization. I will be back in Austin this week to continue that work.

In Shelbyville, Indiana, we launched the Civic Renaissance Tour: A church-led, community-wide effort to take these ideas off the page and into schools, churches, and civic life. On Thursday night, the room was full. On Friday morning, we sat around tables and built a plan. Superintendents, city council members, pastors, and local leaders asked the same question in different ways: what does this look like here?

All of that mattered. All of it was good.

And yet the moment that stayed with me most this week did not happen on a stage, or in a council chamber, or around a conference table.

It happened on the phone, with a car dealership service manager.

It was a personal victory that was more important to me than these great public ones.

The story.

Last year, my car was stolen from our driveway. We eventually got it back and took it to the dealership to be repaired. We paid for what we were told was a complete fix, with a two-year warranty. Months later, water started getting into the vehicle. Then the battery failed. The dealership refused to take responsibility.

I was angry. I felt wronged. I felt justified.

I left negative reviews. I was sharp on the phone. I replayed the situation in my head, again and again. It took up far more space in my interior life than it deserved. Eventually I thought, with some embarrassment, that I might need to sell the car simply because I could not bear to deal with this one person anymore.

That is when I realized how upside down things had become.

On Thursday morning, as I was packing to drive to Shelbyville to launch the Civic Renaissance Tour, a quiet but persistent thought surfaced. I cannot stand in front of a community and speak about flourishing across difference if I am not willing to practice it when it costs me something.

So I called the service manager of the dealership.

The conversation did not begin with the car. It began with Christmas, with getting sick over the holidays, with kids, with hosting. For twenty minutes we talked as human beings. The tension softened.

Then I said what I needed to say.

I told him I was sorry. I told him I had not shown up well in our previous conversations. I regretted being unkind. This was not who I want to be. I told him, a little awkwardly, that I had written a book about learning how to live well with others across difference, and that in this small but real disagreement, I had failed to live up to my own ideals.

He was gracious. He accepted my apology. We worked out a solution.

By the end, the car barely mattered—and I was ready to have him and his wife for dinner. Repair had led to a stronger friendship than I ever thought possible with my car dealership’s service manager.

I realized that this work matters: that the promise our differences can bring out the best in us, and that conflict can strengthen relationships, is true.

I lived it out firsthand.

What has stayed with me was the physical lightness that followed. The release of resentment and bitterness that had been weighing on me without my realizing it, draining my joy and my will for this work in ways I had not fully appreciated.

The sense of being back in proper alignment was electrifying.

I may have been right about the facts, but I was wrong about what mattered most. I had forgotten the person on the other side of the exchange.

This work is not about perfection. It cannot be. We are human beings, which means we will fall. All of us. We will lose our cool. We will say things we regret. We will forget to see the dignity of the person in front of us when we are tired, stressed, or convinced of our own righteousness.

The question is not whether we will fail. The question is whether we become fluent in repair.

Can we apologize without self-justification? Can we forgive without keeping score? Can we hold the personhood and dignity of the other in view when it would feel easier not to?

Private conduct matters. It always has.

Public initiatives, institutions, and movements rest on the habits we practice when no one is watching.

This work begins there, or it does not begin at all.

As I explore in my book, character is habit long continued, and integrity is what happens when all the parts of the self make sense together.

We cannot be publicly for a school, an institution, or a cause, and privately undermine it through how we live. Making mistakes does not mean we lack character. We will make mistakes. Character is revealed in what we do next. It is shown in our willingness to correct what we have done wrong, to repair what we have damaged, and to bring our private conduct back into alignment with our public commitments. That work is not incidental to who we are. It is who we are.

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Shelbyville: The Civic Renaissance Tour Begins

That theme echoed again in Shelbyville. The community is navigating a contentious local issue involving a proposed data center. The divide is not cleanly partisan. It is urban and rural. Neighbors who feel sold out by leaders they once trusted. On Thursday night we named the tension honestly. On Friday morning, we asked a different question: what power do we already have?

The answer surprised some people. More than we think.

Reading groups forming immediately. Schools engaging the children’s book. Churches hosting conversations. Leaders committing to live this not as a program but as a way of life. The book is a catalyst, not the end. I am a catalyst, not the solution. The goal is a durable, local culture that can outlast any one visit or initiative.

Texas State Legislature: The Civic Renaissance Tour Continues

Texas reflects the same truth. One book study is not enough. One lunch is not enough. Trust is built daily. Civic friendship is practiced daily. Democratic life is sustained not by grand gestures but by small, repeated acts of restraint, generosity, and repair. I’ll be there with legislators in Austin this week to explore this and hopefully build something there together.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this July, that reality feels especially urgent. Our public life is woven together, or unraveled, by these small threads.

So this is my invitation to you.

Think of one relationship where resentment has settled in. One conversation you have avoided. One apology you have delayed because you were certain you were right.

Reach out.

I cannot promise it will go perfectly. I can say, with confidence born of experience, that reconciliation brings a kind of freedom nothing else does. And that private victories like these are not distractions from the work. They are the work.

More soon from Texas, and The Civic Renaissance Tour, soon.

If you’d like your community to host a stop on the Civic Renaissance Tour this year, reach out. Join the Civic Renaissance Ambassador Program here.

Apply here!

I am grateful to be on this journey with you.

Warmly,

Lexi

Join me in Texas!

Houston friends, I’ll be speaking at the University of Houston Law Center on Tuesday, February 3rd. That evening, the Houston Alliance of Braver Angels is hosting a public conversation exploring the grassroots, member-led reading of my book, The Soul of Civility, currently underway in the Texas State Legislature.

The event is called The Leaders We Deserve, and it takes up a timeless chicken-and-the-egg question that democracies have wrestled with across history: what comes first, good leaders or good citizens?

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More pointedly, what responsibility do we have as citizens to shape the kind of leadership we want, to hold leaders to account, and to encourage seriousness, integrity, and sound judgment in public life?

If you’re in Houston, I’d love to see you there. If you’re not, please consider sharing this with friends who might want to join the conversation.

Join us!

Invitation: The Forgotten Virtue of Moderation

A live dialogue with Alexandra Hudson and Thomas Chatterton Williams

In an age shaped by outrage, certainty, and faction, moderation has become suspect. Those who refuse to sort neatly into camps are often dismissed as weak, naïve, or uncommitted. And yet, across history, the thinkers who most enlarged human understanding were rarely loyal to a side. They were loyal to truth.

This evening is a live dialogue between Alexandra Hudson and Thomas Chatterton Williams on the recovery of moderation as a serious intellectual posture, and on the examined life as its necessary foundation.

Join us!

Join me in Indianapolis!

Free registration here!

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

When does an intellectual failing become a moral one? Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

The central, timeless question of democracy is this: when it comes to social flourishing, which comes first, good citizens or good leaders?

For those of us who care about healthier public life, this is not an abstract philosophical question. It is a practical question about responsibility. Where should we focus our energy? On shaping bett…

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This week, an invitation went out to every legislator in Texas, all 180 members of the House and Senate, to read my book, The Soul of Civility.

This is an important moment for these ideas, because they are leaving the page and entering public life and serving leaders during a challenging time.

Last year, while on book tour, I met a member…

Read more

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, today I read to my children the story of Dr. King from a new collection of children’s stories I’m working on, Heroes and Villains: The Soul of Civility for Young Citizens—something I hope becomes a valuable home and classroom resource.

If you have young ones in your life, I’d love to invite you to share this video with them, or better yet, to read the story below aloud together. I wrote it around a core idea that was central to the work of Martin Luther King Jr.

1. Every single human being, without exception, is created with dignity and worth.

2. Because of that, we are all owed, and owe to others, a basic minimum of respect.

3. Segregation and cruelty do not only wound those who are excluded. They also deform those who exclude. Both are harmed. Both parties are dehumanized. As he wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, written April 16, 1963, while imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama, “Segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, while it gives the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

4. Civility, respect, graciousness, and kindness do not weaken us. They enlarge us. They elevate both the one who gives them and the one who receives them.

I’m still shaping this project, and I would genuinely welcome your feedback—both on this story and others. Please feel free to pass this along to a parent, educator, or administrator you care about, and if you’d like to offer feedback on more stories like this one, reach out to us at ahudsonassist@gmail.com

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Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

I’m grateful to be able to honor the life and legacy of this intellectual giant, and hero of civility, with you.

—

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.

—Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

There are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because everyone is made in the image of God.

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon “The Seeking God,” emphasizing that racial segregation is sinful because it devalues the imago dei—our divine reflection—in others, delivered in 1966

He who commits evil injures himself.

—Martin Luther King Jr, Strength to Love (1963)

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, and in a land very close to home, right here in our own country, there lived a boy named Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin grew up seeing two things at the same time.

He was taught, at home and at church, that every person is created in the image of God. That meant every person mattered, no matter what they looked like, where they came from, how much money they had, or what anyone else thought of them. It meant every person carried worth that could not be taken away. No rule, no sign, no opinion, and no law could erase it. And it meant something else, too. When people treated others as less than human, they were not only hurting the person in front of them. They were also forgetting something true about themselves, and harming their own hearts along the way.

And at the very same time, Martin saw a different lesson everywhere around him.

He saw signs and rules that treated some people as if they mattered less. He saw doors that were open to some and closed to others. He saw people told where they could sit, stand, drink, and learn, not because of what they did, but because of who they were.

This lesson had a name. It was called segregation.

Segregation taught people something false about the world. It taught some people that they were smaller than they were. It taught others that they were larger than they were.

Martin grew up holding both lessons in his mind at once.

The false one was loud and everywhere.
The true one was quieter, but deeper.

The more Martin saw people treated as less than human, the more tightly he held on to what he knew was true. That every person is a human being with equal dignity and worth, created in the image of God.

Martin’s world looked a little like ours. There were cars and buses, radios and electric lights, children walking to school and playing outside.

But his world also had rules and laws that asked people to forget the truth about what it means to be human: that every single one of us are equally valuable, beautiful, just the way we are.

When Martin was a boy, he went into a shoe store with his father. A clerk told them to move to the back so white customers could be helped first. They took a few steps.

Then Martin’s father stopped.

He did not shout. He did not argue. He decided they would leave instead.

They walked out together.

Martin felt embarrassed. But he also felt alert, as if a light had been turned on.

One person was taught, You do not belong.
Another was taught, Do not look too closely.
Both lessons were wrong.

Years later, in a city called Montgomery, a woman named Rosa Parks boarded a bus after a long day at work. She was told to give up her seat because she was Black.

She stayed seated.

She broke the law.

She was arrested.

Other passengers watched. Some felt relieved it was not them. Some stared out the window. Some pretended nothing was happening.

One person was taught, You do not belong.
Another was taught, Stay comfortable. Stay quiet.
Both lessons were wrong.

People decided they would no longer ride the buses. They walked instead. To work. To school. To the store. Day after day. This became the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Martin, still young and unsure, was asked to help lead it.

The boycott lasted more than a year. It was tiring and hard.

One night, Martin’s house was bombed. A crowd gathered outside, angry and ready to hurt someone back. Martin stood in front of them and asked them to go home peacefully.

He knew that answering harm with harm would not heal anyone. It would only spread the damage.

Not long after, Martin was arrested again, this time in a city called Birmingham. He was put in jail for marching.

While he was there, a group of pastors wrote to him. They were not shouting at him. They were polite. They told him he was moving too fast. They told him he was making people uncomfortable. They told him that staying quiet would be wiser and kinder, and that time would fix things on its own.

In other words, they asked him to stay quiet and stay comfortable.

Martin read their words while sitting in a small jail cell. He had little paper, so he wrote back on scraps and margins.

He refused.

He knew that silence would not help people see the truth. Silence would help them keep believing something false.

He believed every person is a human being with equal dignity and worth, created in the image of God. And he believed that segregation did not only hurt the person pushed aside. It also hurt the person doing the pushing, and the person watching and looking away.

One person was trained to feel smaller than they were.
Another was trained to feel bigger than they were.
Both were taught something untrue.
Both were harmed by it.

Martin believed loving people meant helping them see the world as it really is. Not yelling at them. Not hurting them. But refusing to pretend that a lie was harmless.

Before marches, Martin trained people. They practiced staying seated while being shouted at. They practiced keeping their hands still when shoved. They practiced dignity the way you practice music or a sport.

During the marches, some people were pushed, insulted, and arrested. Others watched from sidewalks or windows.

One person was taught, You must endure cruelty.
Another was taught, Do not look too closely.
Both lessons were wrong.

Martin believed cruelty does not stop with the person it lands on. It changes the person who gives it and the person who allows it. It bends everyone involved.

He also believed the opposite was true.

When people choose care instead of cruelty, even when it costs them, they help others stand upright. And they help themselves remain whole.

Martin Luther King Jr. spent his life trying to help people see clearly.

He believed segregation hurts both the segregated and the segregator.
He believed silence protects false pictures of the world.
And he believed that telling the truth about who people really are is one of the most loving things a person can do.

One person was taught, You do not belong.
Another was taught, Do not look too closely.
Both lessons were wrong.

And Martin believed we could learn something better.

Because every day, in small moments and large ones, we are shaping one another.
And how we treat people shapes who we become, together.

Segregation, Martin Luther King Jr. taught, hurts both the person who is pushed aside and the person who does the pushing. Incivility works the same way. It harms everyone involved. But when people choose civility, when they act with care and kindness toward one another, both the giver and the receiver are made better

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More on Martin Luther King Jr. from Civic Renaissance:

• MLKJ on the power of true civility

• What MLK teaches us about civility and the power of ideas to heal our divides

• What MLK teaches us about civility and the power of ideas to heal our divides

• What is your life's blueprint? Dr. King and the Great Conversation

• Why We Need Dr. King’s Wisdom This Inauguration Day

The Forgotten Virtue of Moderation

A live dialogue with Alexandra Hudson and Thomas Chatterton Williams

In an age shaped by outrage, certainty, and faction, moderation has become suspect. Those who refuse to sort neatly into camps are often dismissed as weak, naïve, or uncommitted. And yet, across history, the thinkers who most enlarged human understanding were rarely loyal to a side. They were loyal to truth.

This evening is a live dialogue between Alexandra Hudson and Thomas Chatterton Williams on the recovery of moderation as a serious intellectual posture, and on the examined life as its necessary foundation.

Join us!

In the news

“Author launches national civic renaissance tour in Shelbyville,” The Shelbyville News

The Shelbyville effort is being led locally by Pastor Ralph Botte of First Christian Church of Shelbyville, who invited Hudson to help launch a community-wide initiative inspired by her book.

“When I read The Soul of Civility, it gave language to a problem I was seeing every day in Shelbyville,” Botte said. “People wanted to engage across differences without tearing relationships apart, but we didn’t have a shared framework for doing that. The book clarified what was missing: a way to practice civility that goes beyond surface politeness and is grounded in human dignity. That’s what led me to reach out to Alexandra. As we began sharing the book locally, people recognized themselves in it and wanted to take responsibility for living these ideas together.”

The Civic Renaissance Tour represents the next phase of Hudson’s work, building directly on the impact of The Soul of Civility. Since its release in 2023, the book has been taken up by community leaders, universities, and bipartisan legislative groups across the United States and abroad as a practical framework for engaging disagreement without dehumanization and for reclaiming responsibility at the local level. Rather than remaining a theoretical work, the book has repeatedly served as a catalyst for concrete civic initiatives. In an age marked by polarization and distrust, The Soul of Civility asks a central question: how can people flourish across difference?

Following the book’s publication, Hudson, often traveling with her husband and three small children, visited 136 cities across five countries. She spoke in venues ranging from local libraries and churches to Stanford University, Yale Law School, the Canadian Parliament, and the UK House of Lords. In city after city, the book sparked not only conversation, but sustained local action.

“The Civic Renaissance Tour grew out of listening,” Hudson said. “Everywhere I went, leaders were asking how to live these ideas together, not just talk about them. I realized my role was not to visit and lead every community, but to help local leaders build the capacity, relationships, and support they need to carry this work forward every day.”

The Shelbyville launch follows Hudson’s demonstrated framework for community renewal, a four-phase process that moves communities from shared understanding to sustained local practice. The effort begins with residents reading The Soul of Civility together, followed by Hudson’s visit for a public event and leaders’ roundtable. From there, local leaders across sectors will take responsibility for carrying the work forward in daily civic life, with the long-term goal of Shelbyville serving as a regional hub for civic renewal.

The Shelbyville engagement will begin with a community-wide public event on Thursday, January 29, at 7:00 p.m. at First Christian Church of Shelbyville. The following morning, Friday, January 30 at 9:00 a.m., Hudson and Botte will convene a leaders’ roundtable. During the roundtable, a select group of Shelbyville leaders will work together with Hudson to develop a practical action plan for implementing the book’s ideas and fostering long-term civic renewal in the community.

Join us in Shelbyville!

Hudson’s work with Shelbyville follows a demonstrated and repeatable pattern.

In Carmel, Indiana, City Councilor Jeff Worrell contacted Hudson after reading The Soul of Civility to explore how its ideas could be embedded locally. That effort culminated in the Carmel Civility Summit, which convened more than 100 mayors, city council members, commissioners, and civic leaders from 17 states and Canada. “The Soul of Civility was a roadmap that led me to invite Alexandra to speak and launch a civility effort in Carmel,” Worrell said. Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and Hudson opened the summit with a fireside conversation on civility and leadership. “You’ve only begun to hear from this amazing young woman,” Daniels said.

In Zionsville, former Deputy Mayor Kate Swanson partnered with the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council to integrate The Soul of Civility into the council’s core curriculum, grounding civic formation in a shared moral framework. The council then convened a public community discussion with Alexandra Hudson at the Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library, drawing a standing-room-only audience and signaling broad public engagement across generations.

“Every person, and especially every young person, in America needs to read The Soul of Civility,” Swanson said.

In Muncie, The Soul of Civility was chosen as a citywide community read, anchoring a shared civic conversation across residents, institutions, and local leaders. State Rep. Elizabeth Rowray partnered with the Muncie Chamber of Commerce to invite Alexandra Hudson to keynote their Christmas banquet, where every attendee received a copy of the book as a call to carry the work into their own civic and professional lives.

Communities across Indiana, including Fishers, Valparaiso, South Bend, Evansville, New Albany, and Salem, are now implementing similar initiatives inspired by Hudson’s work.

Nationally, The Soul of Civility is informing freshman orientation programs at Ivy League universities and is being read in bipartisan book clubs within polarized state legislatures. The book has earned praise from leaders and public intellectuals across the political spectrum, including Francis Fukuyama and Jonathan Haidt.

The Civic Renaissance Tour formalizes this growing momentum by offering communities a structured pathway to move from shared ideas to sustained local practice. Additional tour stops include Colorado Springs, Colorado; Urbandale, Iowa; Sacramento, California; Austin, Texas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Toronto, Canada; and London, England, with more locations to be announced.

“My vision is to help unlock an era of human flourishing in our country,” Hudson, who lives in Indianapolis, said. “That work begins when people stop waiting for rescue and start taking responsibility for the communities they are shaping together. We each have way more power than we realize to be part of the solution.”

She continued, “Ralph, First Christian Church of Shelbyville, and the greater Shelbyville community are showing what that looks like in practice. I am honored to partner with the leaders of Shelbyville in this work.”

As the kickoff city of the Civic Renaissance initiative, Shelbyville is helping shape and refine a new model of community renewal rooted in Alexandra Hudson’s The Soul of Civility. The city is piloting the framework as it moves from idea to practice, generating lessons that other communities can adapt to their own contexts. By launching the Civic Renaissance Tour in Shelbyville, local leaders are contributing to an emerging national effort to strengthen civic life by investing in their own capacity to lead and flourish.

Join us in Shelbyville!

Become a Civic Renaissance Ambassador

To join the Civic Renaissance movement, or to bring the Civic Renaissance Tour to your community, apply to be a Civic Renaissance Ambassador!

Apply here!

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

It’s Time for a New Era of Christian Civility

Thank you for being part of our Civic Renaissance community!

Review on Amazon

Review on barnsandnoble.com

My friend Ericka Andersen wrote a book, Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith, and has shared a guest post with us below that I hope you enjoy. Her book has me thinking about the role of alcohol in social life. (You might also enjoy learning more about Ericka’s work through her substack and podcast, Worth Your Time).

Note: Apologies again for the video cutting off. I recorded a full one, but Substack decided ten seconds was plenty. Expecting the best but prepared for the worst, I also recorded the audio, which you’ll find below.

Over the weekend, my husband sent me an article called Why My 2026 Resolution Is to Start Drinking Again. It has lingered with me. It was about social life, loneliness, and alcohol.

The author, a man in his mid-thirties, decided partway through the year to stop drinking. Not to recover from addiction, but as an experiment in health. He went fully sober and expected to feel better.

Instead, he found himself lonelier.

He wrote that drinking had quietly structured his social world. It was how he and his wife spent time together. It was how he stayed connected to friends. Dinners turned into evenings out, evenings out turned into conversations, and conversations turned into belonging. When alcohol disappeared, those rituals vanished with it. He tried to replace them. Exercise. New habits. New routines. But he found that rebuilding an entire social life in one’s thirties is harder than it sounds, especially when so much of friendship is organized around shared customs.

What struck me was not his conclusion. He eventually returned to drinking, saying that while sobriety made him physically healthier, he felt emotionally worse. What struck me was the question his story raised.

What do we do with the fact that alcohol has become such a central social glue in modern life?

Of course, alcohol can be abused. For many people it causes real harm. That reality matters and must be taken seriously. At the same time, alcohol has long played a role in human conviviality. Across cultures and centuries, people have fermented, brewed, and shared drinks as a way of marking time, celebrating, mourning, and gathering. Even the failure of Prohibition points to something real. You cannot simply remove a practice that carries deep social meaning without leaving a vacuum behind.

This is why I was grateful for the timing of a guest essay we are sharing this week from my friend Ericka Andersen, an Indianapolis-based writer who has just published her third book, Freely Sober.

Ericka writes honestly about alcohol not only as a substance, but as a coping mechanism. For many women, especially those juggling work, children, and constant pressure, drinking becomes a way to take the edge off a life that rarely slows down. Her reflections are not abstract. She shares her own story of dependence and of learning to rebuild both her interior life and her public life without alcohol at the center.

What I appreciate most in her writing is the refusal to treat the personal and the civic as separate realms. How we soothe ourselves privately shapes how we show up publicly. Loneliness, stress, and quiet despair do not stay neatly contained. They spill outward, into our relationships, our communities, and our civic life.

So I want to open this up to you.

Why do you think the author of that article found sobriety so socially isolating?

What rituals have quietly disappeared from our common life, and what has taken their place, if anything?

If alcohol is doing more relational work than we want to admit, what does that tell us about the fragility of our social bonds?

And how do we learn to see one another more clearly, not just the polished exterior, but the inner life behind it?

As Kafka said, “He who has eyes for beauty never grows old.” One of my hopes for Civic Renaissance is that this community sharpens our vision for beauty, that we learn to notice what sits beneath the surface and to respond with attention rather than indifference.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the article mentioned above, and Ericka’s thoughtful reflection about alcoholism and civic health below.

Thank you for being here!

Warmly,

Lexi

What Personal Sobriety Communicates About Flourishing Together
By Ericka Andersen

* Ericka is the author of the newly released book, Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith (InterVarsity Press)

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Modern civic life often treats the personal and the public as separate realms: our inner struggles kept secret, and our shared responsibilities out in the open. But older traditions understood what we have largely forgotten: the health of a society depends on the inner and outer of its people.

We do not become good citizens exclusively by holding the “right” views or participating in public life. We do so by intentionally cultivating virtuous habits, like honesty, restraint, attention, and care in every aspect of our lives.

For many, including myself, sobriety is one such practice. This may not be necessary for everyone, but I’d like to discuss why it’s been an empowering tool fo me.

Sobriety is usually framed as a private health choice or a personal struggle. But, for some people, sobriety can be the right step toward building a deeper connection between their own healing and the common good at large.

The Recovery of Attention

Alcohol is not merely a substance or something we enjoy. For many, it becomes a socially sanctioned escape, numbing discomfort, quieting conflict, and subtly eroding our awareness of the people and responsibilities before us.

Choosing sobriety – even temporarily – interrupts this pattern and forces a return to attention.

Attention to one’s interior life rather than numbing it.
Attention to relationships rather than smoothing over tension.
Attention to truth rather than managing appearances.

This attentiveness is the groundwork of responsibility. A person who can remain present to discomfort without fleeing it is better equipped to listen well, to disagree without contempt, and to act with restraint rather than impulse. Such capacities are essential to civic life.

Temperance Reconsidered

Temperance is often misunderstood as repression or moral severity. In the classical and Christian traditions, it can mean something far richer: the ordering of desire and moderation toward what is good.

Sobriety is not merely abstention. Rather, we can use it as a tool, like an education of desire in some sense. We can learn what we reach for, why we reach for it, and what actually satisfies. This process reshapes not only private habits but ultimately, reflects out how we outwardly live our lives as well.

A temperate person is less governed by excess; of consumption, outrage, or appetite. They are less dependent on constant stimulation and more capable of patience, proportion, and mercy.

It’s not to say sobriety from alcohol is necessary for these goods to appear, but it’s something to consider & strive toward in all things we do.

Community as the Bridge Between Healing and the Public Good

Another essential truth about sobriety is that it is rarely sustained in isolation, but through shared practices of accountability and care.

It depends on the community, one that values truth-telling, accountability, shared practices, and mutual care. The benefits of these practices multiply internally and externally in how we move about the world.

When people learn to tell the truth about themselves, they become less invested in caricatures of others. When they learn to ask for help, they grow more willing to offer it. When they experience grace personally, they become less eager to weaponize judgment publicly.

As someone who has attended many AA-style recovery meetings, I can attest that this is true. We learn a person’s wholeness when we allow the truth of their struggle to ring free. Partisan angles disappear when we can see and communicate with one another as broken but beautiful image bearers of God.

In this way, sobriety strengthens the social fabric – not through programs or slogans, but through restored relationships and renewed moral imagination.

Flourishing Is Never Merely Individual

Modern culture often defines flourishing in solitary terms: autonomy, happiness, self-expression. But human flourishing has always been communal. We flourish when our freedoms are shaped by love rather than impulse, and when our lives are ordered toward God and neighbor.

Sobriety is one path, among many, by which some people rediscover this truth. Those who have struggled with addiction and come on the other side have some of the most profound insights about life. A favorite author of mine, Laura McKowen, titled her sobriety memoir, We Are the Luckiest. She did so because she claimed the hard-won wisdom and insights she had gained in her struggle – information and empowerment she would never have received otherwise.

To cheer for the healing of others and embrace an environment where that is more possible is to cultivate a more beautiful world. Some of the most durable forms of cultural renewal often begin quietly, in lives remade from the inside out.

The restoration of civic life will not come solely from better policies or sharper arguments, necessary as those are. It will take more than that – individual lives transformed, personal decisions made that lead us toward betterment and virtue for ourselves and the common good.

These themes are explored more fully in my book, Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith. There, I examine sobriety not as self-denial, but as a practice of truth, freedom, and renewed belonging.

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In the news

“Author launches national civic renaissance tour in Shelbyville,” The Shelbyville News

The Shelbyville effort is being led locally by Pastor Ralph Botte of First Christian Church of Shelbyville, who invited Hudson to help launch a community-wide initiative inspired by her book.

“When I read The Soul of Civility, it gave language to a problem I was seeing every day in Shelbyville,” Botte said. “People wanted to engage across differences without tearing relationships apart, but we didn’t have a shared framework for doing that. The book clarified what was missing: a way to practice civility that goes beyond surface politeness and is grounded in human dignity. That’s what led me to reach out to Alexandra. As we began sharing the book locally, people recognized themselves in it and wanted to take responsibility for living these ideas together.”

The Civic Renaissance Tour represents the next phase of Hudson’s work, building directly on the impact of The Soul of Civility. Since its release in 2023, the book has been taken up by community leaders, universities, and bipartisan legislative groups across the United States and abroad as a practical framework for engaging disagreement without dehumanization and for reclaiming responsibility at the local level. Rather than remaining a theoretical work, the book has repeatedly served as a catalyst for concrete civic initiatives. In an age marked by polarization and distrust, The Soul of Civility asks a central question: how can people flourish across difference?

Following the book’s publication, Hudson, often traveling with her husband and three small children, visited 136 cities across five countries. She spoke in venues ranging from local libraries and churches to Stanford University, Yale Law School, the Canadian Parliament, and the UK House of Lords. In city after city, the book sparked not only conversation, but sustained local action.

“The Civic Renaissance Tour grew out of listening,” Hudson said. “Everywhere I went, leaders were asking how to live these ideas together, not just talk about them. I realized my role was not to visit and lead every community, but to help local leaders build the capacity, relationships, and support they need to carry this work forward every day.”

The Shelbyville launch follows Hudson’s demonstrated framework for community renewal, a four-phase process that moves communities from shared understanding to sustained local practice. The effort begins with residents reading The Soul of Civility together, followed by Hudson’s visit for a public event and leaders’ roundtable. From there, local leaders across sectors will take responsibility for carrying the work forward in daily civic life, with the long-term goal of Shelbyville serving as a regional hub for civic renewal.

The Shelbyville engagement will begin with a community-wide public event on Thursday, January 29, at 7:00 p.m. at First Christian Church of Shelbyville. The following morning, Friday, January 30 at 9:00 a.m., Hudson and Botte will convene a leaders’ roundtable. During the roundtable, a select group of Shelbyville leaders will work together with Hudson to develop a practical action plan for implementing the book’s ideas and fostering long-term civic renewal in the community.

Join us in Shelbyville!

Hudson’s work with Shelbyville follows a demonstrated and repeatable pattern.

In Carmel, Indiana, City Councilor Jeff Worrell contacted Hudson after reading The Soul of Civility to explore how its ideas could be embedded locally. That effort culminated in the Carmel Civility Summit, which convened more than 100 mayors, city council members, commissioners, and civic leaders from 17 states and Canada. “The Soul of Civility was a roadmap that led me to invite Alexandra to speak and launch a civility effort in Carmel,” Worrell said. Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and Hudson opened the summit with a fireside conversation on civility and leadership. “You’ve only begun to hear from this amazing young woman,” Daniels said.

In Zionsville, former Deputy Mayor Kate Swanson partnered with the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council to integrate The Soul of Civility into the council’s core curriculum, grounding civic formation in a shared moral framework. The council then convened a public community discussion with Alexandra Hudson at the Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library, drawing a standing-room-only audience and signaling broad public engagement across generations.

“Every person, and especially every young person, in America needs to read The Soul of Civility,” Swanson said.

In Muncie, The Soul of Civility was chosen as a citywide community read, anchoring a shared civic conversation across residents, institutions, and local leaders. State Rep. Elizabeth Rowray partnered with the Muncie Chamber of Commerce to invite Alexandra Hudson to keynote their Christmas banquet, where every attendee received a copy of the book as a call to carry the work into their own civic and professional lives.

Communities across Indiana, including Fishers, Valparaiso, South Bend, Evansville, New Albany, and Salem, are now implementing similar initiatives inspired by Hudson’s work.

Nationally, The Soul of Civility is informing freshman orientation programs at Ivy League universities and is being read in bipartisan book clubs within polarized state legislatures. The book has earned praise from leaders and public intellectuals across the political spectrum, including Francis Fukuyama and Jonathan Haidt.

The Civic Renaissance Tour formalizes this growing momentum by offering communities a structured pathway to move from shared ideas to sustained local practice. Additional tour stops include Colorado Springs, Colorado; Urbandale, Iowa; Sacramento, California; Austin, Texas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Toronto, Canada; and London, England, with more locations to be announced.

“My vision is to help unlock an era of human flourishing in our country,” Hudson, who lives in Indianapolis, said. “That work begins when people stop waiting for rescue and start taking responsibility for the communities they are shaping together. We each have way more power than we realize to be part of the solution.”

She continued, “Ralph, First Christian Church of Shelbyville, and the greater Shelbyville community are showing what that looks like in practice. I am honored to partner with the leaders of Shelbyville in this work.”

As the kickoff city of the Civic Renaissance initiative, Shelbyville is helping shape and refine a new model of community renewal rooted in Alexandra Hudson’s The Soul of Civility. The city is piloting the framework as it moves from idea to practice, generating lessons that other communities can adapt to their own contexts. By launching the Civic Renaissance Tour in Shelbyville, local leaders are contributing to an emerging national effort to strengthen civic life by investing in their own capacity to lead and flourish.

Join us in Shelbyville!

To join the Civic Renaissance movement, or to bring the Civic Renaissance Tour to your community, apply to be a Civic Renaissance Ambassador!

Apply here!

In case you missed it: Alexandra Hudson and Mitch Daniels at the Civility Summit

Year Ago on Civic Renaissance:

It’s Time for a New Era of Christian Civility

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Kahlil Gibran and Jacques Ellul were both born this week, on January 6.

Kahlil Gibran was born in 1883 in Bsharri, Lebanon, under Ottoman rule, the same year Karl Marx died, five years before the Berlin Conference formalized European imperial control over much of the world, and at the start of a period of mass emigration that would soon reshape American cities like Boston.

Jacques Ellul was born in 1912 in Bordeaux, France, one year after Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management and two years before World War I, as industrial efficiency, centralized bureaucracy, and technological optimism reached their peak.

They could hardly be more different in style or reputation. Gibran became one of the most widely read poets of the modern era, author of The Prophet, a book that has lived quietly in people’s homes, marking weddings, funerals, grief, love, and private reckoning for a century. Ellul, by contrast, was a legal scholar, theologian, and public servant, best known for The Technological Society, one of the earliest and most serious critiques of modern technological life.

Long before smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence, and far prior to it being fashionable to be a tech-skeptic, Ellul warned that efficiency would become a ruling value, reshaping institutions and, eventually, human beings themselves. Gibran protected the interior life from reduction; Ellul exposed the systems that try to reduce it anyway. Together, they remain essential guides for a world that keeps mistaking what can be measured for what actually matters.

Both thought deeply about what it means to be human, which is why they belong in the Great Conversation, the long, iterative dialogue about life’s biggest questions, and why their work sits at the heart of Civic Renaissance.

Gibran: forming a human vision from exile and attention

Gibran’s sensibility was shaped early by displacement and precarity. Born in Ottoman-era Lebanon, he immigrated to Boston as a child with his family, poor and largely invisible by the standards that sort people quickly. They lived among other immigrants in settlement housing. At Denison House, a settlement house for refugees, Gibran’s talent for drawing was noticed by a discerning adult who paid attention rather than tallying deficits. That moment mattered. His life could have been assessed, categorized, and dismissed. Instead, he was seen.

That experience never left him.

Gibran grew up carrying real responsibility. His father’s imprisonment and later death left the family financially vulnerable, and Gibran’s art and writing were not hobbies. They were how he helped keep his family afloat. Work, for him, was never abstract. It was bound up with duty, care, and provision. That history clarifies why he writes about work not as productivity but as moral offering.

The Prophet (1923) is composed of twenty-six prose poems addressing the ordinary elements of a human life: love, marriage, children, work, giving, sorrow, joy, death. Gibran began working on the book in 1912 and held it back for years. He explained why:

I kept this manuscript for four years before I delivered it over to my publisher because I wanted to be sure, I wanted to be very sure, that every word of it was the very best I had to offer.

He chose poetry because poetry resists reduction. It cannot be optimized or extracted for metrics without being destroyed. The book opens with a figure Gibran calls “the chosen and the beloved,” preparing to leave the town of Orphalese. Before he departs, the people ask him to speak about how to live.

On joy and sorrow, Gibran writes:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears…

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that has given you joy.

Gibran’s insight here is reminiscent of a story Socrates tells about the relationship between pleasure and pain in the Platonic dialogue the Phaedo—also a manifesto about the importance of the immaterial amid a world that values the corporeal. In reflecting on his recent, unjust conviction and death sentence, Socrates speculates about the nature of pleasure and pain. “It would make for a good fable from Aesop!” Socrates quips before telling the story: “God wanted to stop their continual quarreling, and when he found that it was impossible, he fastened their heads together; so whenever one of them appears, the other is sure to follow.”

Socrates says that pleasure and pain are apparent opposites, but are also two sides of the same coin. This is why we often experience them together—as someone who loves spicy food, I can attest to this! But Socrates is also getting at a deeper insight into the human experience: Often, after we have endured great suffering, the good things in life—perhaps the simple pleasures we took for granted before—are that much more delightful.

Gibran on giving:

You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

On eating and drinking:

Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by light. But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship.

And on work:

All work is empty save when there is love; and when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God…

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if the bread you bake with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half a man’s hunger.

Gibran’s insistence is clear. Meaning lives in attention, love, and responsibility, not in output. Once we begin measuring the soul, we stop listening to it.

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Ellul on the perils of optimization

Ellul arrived at the same conclusion from the opposite direction.

Unlike Gibran, he did not come to the question of dehumanization through exile or marginality, but through immersion. He grew up in Bordeaux in a modest household, the son of a Serbian immigrant who worked as a commercial agent and struggled to maintain financial stability. There was no inherited political authority, no elite cushion. What Ellul absorbed early was precarity, discipline, and the quiet pressure of making institutions work for people who depended on them.

He was trained as a lawyer and entered the world of law, bureaucracy, and public administration on its own terms. He understood how rules are made, how procedures harden, how systems begin with good intentions and end by prioritizing their own survival. He learned, from the inside, how easily institutions slide from serving human beings to managing them.

That education was sharpened by history.

When France fell and the Vichy regime aligned itself with Nazi Germany, Ellul was dismissed from his university post. Law, which had promised order and protection, now collaborated with the dehumanizing Nazi regime. Categories, files, permits, lists. He watched the machinery of administration turn people into cases and schedules. Jewish families became entries to be processed. Efficiency did not look neutral anymore. It looked lethal.

During the Second World War, Ellul joined the French Resistance. He helped warn Jewish families of impending arrest and assisted them in finding refuge. These people were being reduced to lists, schedules, and administrative categories. Ellul responded with prudence, and risk, not because a system told him to, but because he recognized their humanity.

After the war, Ellul entered public life, serving as Deputy Mayor of Bordeaux. He wanted to help rebuild a fractured society. He wanted to see whether institutions could be turned back toward human ends. The experience disillusioned him. He watched procedure replace responsibility. He watched success measured in outputs while deeper damage went unaddressed. After two years, he left politics, convinced that systems could run smoothly while hollowing out the people inside them.

Ellul did not reject institutions from the outside. He tested them from within. He learned their language. He saw how easily efficiency becomes a moral substitute, how quickly rules relieve people of the burden of seeing one another as human beings.

This is what gives weight to The Technological Society. Ellul is not railing against machines and technology. He is naming a habit of mind, and describing what their precursors did to us, and what their current manifestations do to us now: they foster a way of thinking that treats human life as a technical problem to be solved rather than a moral reality to be honored. It promoted a way of organizing the world that prizes speed, scale, and predictability, even when those virtues come at the expense of attention, responsibility, and care.

Where Gibran learned the cost of reduction through exile and invisibility, Ellul learned it through proximity to power and process. One guarded the interior life. The other exposed the systems that quietly train us to forget it.

Both arrived at the same warning from opposite ends of the human experience. When efficiency becomes the highest good, people begin to resemble machines. And once that happens, no amount of technical brilliance can restore what has been lost.

Ellul spent the rest of his life naming what he had seen. His most famous work, The Technological Society, first published in French in 1954 under the name Technique: The Wager of the Century. It was translated into English ten years later in 1964 and popularized in America by Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World.

It is not about gadgets or screens. It is about a way of thinking that quietly takes over a civilization. He called it technique.

Ellul defined “technique”, the single greatest threat to modern society, this way:

In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.

In over-valuing protocol and efficiency in every realm of human life, Ellul says, we overlook and undermine many important aspects of the human experience.

Once efficiency becomes the supreme logic, means replace ends. We don’t see human beings in the fullness of who they are: beings with dignity and equal moral worth.

We see them instead by virtue of utility, their usefulness to us, to society.

Instead of asking whether something is good, just, or fitting for human life, institutions ask whether it works. Faster. Cheaper. More scalable. Questions of meaning give way to questions of performance.

Wisdom gives way to procedure. Decisions are no longer made by people exercising discernment, but by systems following rules. Responsibility dissolves into process. No one is accountable, because everyone is following protocol.

Human beings adapt to systems instead of the other way around. Time is reorganized. Attention is fragmented. Life is paced by clocks, metrics, and schedules rather than by hunger, rest, relationship, or need.

Freedom narrows without anyone choosing it. The efficient option becomes the only imaginable one. Moral language erodes. Words like wise, just, good, right, gracious, and humane start to feel imprecise or naïve.

Ellul describes the result with chilling clarity:

Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence… He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock… He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.

And later:

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

Ellul is not offering a program or a solution. He is diagnosing. He wants readers to see the logic shaping their lives so that discretion, responsibility, and humanity are not quietly surrendered to systems that claim to know better.

But Ellul’s concern is about far more than technology. Ellul is concerned that in our fixation with specialization and technique, especially in our modern universities, we’ve lost a holistic vision of the human person—and have thereby imperiled the education required to cultivate truly whole persons.

And on this score Ellul is again in good company.

Socrates said that techne (Greek for knowing and making) could be good only when deployed with sophia (Greek for wisdom). Many years later, C.S. Lewis, a contemporary of Ellul, echoed this idea in his famous essay, The Abolition of Man: technique that is not guided by wisdom has the potential for disastrous consequences, including the very abolition of mankind itself.

For Ellul, technique and the modern “cult of efficiency” come at the expense of thinking holistically and globally. Have you ever been encouraged to “Think globally, act locally?” Ellul actually coined that phrase: He wrote in his Perspectives on Our Age, “By thinking globally I can analyze all phenomena, but when it comes to acting, it can only be local and on a grassroots level if it is to be honest, realistic, and authentic.”

He was worried, however, that our current era’s ethos— defined by focus on “practical” vocations and areas of study, such as the STEM disciplines, business, or marketing—inhibits us from either thinking globally or acting locally, and from cultivating our humanity, too.

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Choosing the human in a world of optimization

What matters in human life is not efficiency, output, or optimization.

What matters is prudence, or practical wisdom: the ability to discern what is fitting in a particular moment with particular people.

What matters is attention, the capacity to see another person as they are, not as a category or obstacle.

What matters is responsibility, owning the consequences of our choices rather than hiding behind process or protocol.

What matters is relationship, the slow accumulation of trust, loyalty, memory, and shared life.

What matters is meaning, the sense that our actions participate in something larger than immediate results.

None of these can be measured without being distorted.

When what can be measured replaces what matters, decisions stop being about what is right and become about what is defensible. People stop being encountered and start being managed. Disagreement stops being a condition of shared life and becomes a threat to be eliminated. Responsibility is displaced onto systems, metrics, and experts. Human beings begin to feel interchangeable, unseen, and disposable, even when no one intends harm.

This is not a moral collapse driven by bad actors. It is a category mistake. We begin treating human life as if it were a technical problem, and technical solutions cannot answer human questions.

That is the danger Ellul is naming.

That is what Gibran is protecting against.

The Civic Renaissance tour: what it means to be human in the age of the machine

This is central to Civic Renaissance: the goal of this work is not to win arguments or design better systems. It is about restoring the conditions under which people can thrive without dehumanizing one another. It begins and ends with helping us re-discover the gift of being human, in ourselves and in others.

Across The Soul of Civility, Civic Renaissance, and now the tour, the claim remains the same: civic renewal is first a human task, not a technical one.

This work does not abolish efficiency and systems; it stays mindful of humanity amid them.

This work does not promise to fix conflicts or resolve controversy. It equips people to exercise judgment, restraint, and recognition in the middle of disagreement, day in and day out.

Gibran insists that the interior life cannot be neglected without cost.

Ellul insists that systems will neglect it by default.

This work lives in the space between them, defending what cannot be measured in a world that keeps trying to measure it anyway.

Some questions for you to consider:

• Where in your own life do numbers, metrics, or efficiency crowd out things you know matter more, such as attention, care, or responsibility?

• What is something in your life that would be diminished or distorted if you tried to measure it?

• Can you think of a time when something “worked” on paper but felt wrong in practice? What did you notice, and what did you do?

• Where do you see the cult of efficiency corroding our humanity most egregiously today?

• What is one small, ordinary place in your life where you could resist reduction and show up more fully human?

• Do you think it’s possible to stay humane toward one another without resolving the underlying conflict? What would that look like in practice?

I’d love to hear what you think. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Thank you for being part of the Civic Renaissance community!

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In case you missed it: Alexandra Hudson and Mitch Daniels at the Civility Summit

In the news

“Author launches national civic renaissance tour in Shelbyville,” The Shelbyville News

The Shelbyville effort is being led locally by Pastor Ralph Botte of First Christian Church of Shelbyville, who invited Hudson to help launch a community-wide initiative inspired by her book.

“When I read The Soul of Civility, it gave language to a problem I was seeing every day in Shelbyville,” Botte said. “People wanted to engage across differences without tearing relationships apart, but we didn’t have a shared framework for doing that. The book clarified what was missing: a way to practice civility that goes beyond surface politeness and is grounded in human dignity. That’s what led me to reach out to Alexandra. As we began sharing the book locally, people recognized themselves in it and wanted to take responsibility for living these ideas together.”

The Civic Renaissance Tour represents the next phase of Hudson’s work, building directly on the impact of The Soul of Civility. Since its release in 2023, the book has been taken up by community leaders, universities, and bipartisan legislative groups across the United States and abroad as a practical framework for engaging disagreement without dehumanization and for reclaiming responsibility at the local level. Rather than remaining a theoretical work, the book has repeatedly served as a catalyst for concrete civic initiatives. In an age marked by polarization and distrust, The Soul of Civility asks a central question: how can people flourish across difference?

Following the book’s publication, Hudson, often traveling with her husband and three small children, visited 136 cities across five countries. She spoke in venues ranging from local libraries and churches to Stanford University, Yale Law School, the Canadian Parliament, and the UK House of Lords. In city after city, the book sparked not only conversation, but sustained local action.

“The Civic Renaissance Tour grew out of listening,” Hudson said. “Everywhere I went, leaders were asking how to live these ideas together, not just talk about them. I realized my role was not to visit and lead every community, but to help local leaders build the capacity, relationships, and support they need to carry this work forward every day.”

The Shelbyville launch follows Hudson’s demonstrated framework for community renewal, a four-phase process that moves communities from shared understanding to sustained local practice. The effort begins with residents reading The Soul of Civility together, followed by Hudson’s visit for a public event and leaders’ roundtable. From there, local leaders across sectors will take responsibility for carrying the work forward in daily civic life, with the long-term goal of Shelbyville serving as a regional hub for civic renewal.

The Shelbyville engagement will begin with a community-wide public event on Thursday, January 29, at 7:00 p.m. at First Christian Church of Shelbyville. The following morning, Friday, January 30 at 9:00 a.m., Hudson and Botte will convene a leaders’ roundtable. During the roundtable, a select group of Shelbyville leaders will work together with Hudson to develop a practical action plan for implementing the book’s ideas and fostering long-term civic renewal in the community.

Join us in Shelbyville!

Hudson’s work with Shelbyville follows a demonstrated and repeatable pattern.

In Carmel, Indiana, City Councilor Jeff Worrell contacted Hudson after reading The Soul of Civility to explore how its ideas could be embedded locally. That effort culminated in the Carmel Civility Summit, which convened more than 100 mayors, city council members, commissioners, and civic leaders from 17 states and Canada. “The Soul of Civility was a roadmap that led me to invite Alexandra to speak and launch a civility effort in Carmel,” Worrell said. Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and Hudson opened the summit with a fireside conversation on civility and leadership. “You’ve only begun to hear from this amazing young woman,” Daniels said.

In Zionsville, former Deputy Mayor Kate Swanson partnered with the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Council to integrate The Soul of Civility into the council’s core curriculum, grounding civic formation in a shared moral framework. The council then convened a public community discussion with Alexandra Hudson at the Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library, drawing a standing-room-only audience and signaling broad public engagement across generations.

“Every person, and especially every young person, in America needs to read The Soul of Civility,” Swanson said.

In Muncie, The Soul of Civility was chosen as a citywide community read, anchoring a shared civic conversation across residents, institutions, and local leaders. State Rep. Elizabeth Rowray partnered with the Muncie Chamber of Commerce to invite Alexandra Hudson to keynote their Christmas banquet, where every attendee received a copy of the book as a call to carry the work into their own civic and professional lives.

Communities across Indiana, including Fishers, Valparaiso, South Bend, Evansville, New Albany, and Salem, are now implementing similar initiatives inspired by Hudson’s work.

Nationally, The Soul of Civility is informing freshman orientation programs at Ivy League universities and is being read in bipartisan book clubs within polarized state legislatures. The book has earned praise from leaders and public intellectuals across the political spectrum, including Francis Fukuyama and Jonathan Haidt.

The Civic Renaissance Tour formalizes this growing momentum by offering communities a structured pathway to move from shared ideas to sustained local practice. Additional tour stops include Colorado Springs, Colorado; Urbandale, Iowa; Sacramento, California; Austin, Texas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Toronto, Canada; and London, England, with more locations to be announced.

“My vision is to help unlock an era of human flourishing in our country,” Hudson, who lives in Indianapolis, said. “That work begins when people stop waiting for rescue and start taking responsibility for the communities they are shaping together. We each have way more power than we realize to be part of the solution.”

She continued, “Ralph, First Christian Church of Shelbyville, and the greater Shelbyville community are showing what that looks like in practice. I am honored to partner with the leaders of Shelbyville in this work.”

As the kickoff city of the Civic Renaissance initiative, Shelbyville is helping shape and refine a new model of community renewal rooted in Alexandra Hudson’s The Soul of Civility. The city is piloting the framework as it moves from idea to practice, generating lessons that other communities can adapt to their own contexts. By launching the Civic Renaissance Tour in Shelbyville, local leaders are contributing to an emerging national effort to strengthen civic life by investing in their own capacity to lead and flourish.

Join us in Shelbyville!

To join the Civic Renaissance movement, or to bring the Civic Renaissance Tour to your community, apply to be a Civic Renaissance Ambassador!

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