TWO WEEKS: May 10 Dinner at the Square ✨ + "The Skeptics" via Zoom this Friday

Get your dinner tickets to join Dr. Kurt Gray + our very own Christine White: Intellectual Humility in a Polarized World | Tuesday, May 10, 6:30 pm

Join us for our May 10 Dinner at the Square with Dr. Kurt Gray of UNC Chapel Hill and our very own Executive Director Christine White who will moderate this timely and intriguing discussion about intellectual humility. Simply put, we'll be exploring the importance of knowing you might be wrong (gasp! yes, even you), why this is so critical to address, and what we can do about it to help build human connections and bridge our divides.

Learn more about Kurt and his "very Village Square" work here.

Kurt says our brains are designed to notice patterns and make generalizations to keep us safe rather than discovering truth with accuracy. Finding comfort in our knowledge, even if it's wrong, leads us to overgeneralize what we think we know in unproductive ways. And the harsh reality is that this describes everyone, including you. That's why you and your friends must join us for this pivotal program!

Grab your tickets to explore what we might achieve together if we remember that we don't know everything and restore intellectual humility to our lives. What a great way to start getting our groove back!

What's on the dinner menu? Lively Cafe's Fran Doxsee will be serving up chicken Marbella (with tofu Marbella as the veggie option), red-skinned mashed potatoes, broccoli, and yeast rolls, with peanut butter brownies and chewy orange bars for dessert!

God Squad hosts "The Skeptics" via Zoom for season finale this Friday, April 29 @ noon

We're hosting this week's season finale of God Squad via Zoom so that people across America can join in as part of this week's big national shindig National Week of Conversation. And for this special God Squad-esque conversation, you'll meet "The Skeptics," kind of a DIY lay version of God Squad. They're a group of politically and spiritually diverse men who've been meeting once a week for many (many) years now in private.

From where we sit, these guys are a great model for the rest of us because they've developed strong friendships over the years by regularly discussing spiritual topics respectfully where disagreement is NOT shied away from. This unique God Squad conversation will be facilitated by Village Square Founder Liz Joyner (not a Skeptic) and will feature The Village Square's Bill Mattox and former County Commissioner Bryan Desloge, among others. Liz will be there to help balance out their all-men thing and promises to explore why that just might be a plus every once in a while. We think you'll be inspired by what a group of unexpected friends can talk about, and how you might consider giving it a try too!

Register to join us for this lively discussion via Zoom this Friday, April 29, from noon to 1 pm ET.

UNUM series continues May 19 via Zoom: Dr. Justin Gest, author of "Majority Minority"

“Trenchant and groundbreaking work.”
—Molly Ball, National Political Correspondent, TIME Magazine

Rarely does a week go by that someone in the media doesn't refer to the impending shift in the demographics of America. Within two decades, it's expected that we'll be a majority minority country. But what does that even mean, exactly? And has anyone stopped to think how a society makes a transition like this successfully? Or were we just planning on winging it?

Lucky for us, our May 19 special guest hasn't just thought about it, he's studied it. Dr. Justin Gest will join us fresh off the release of his book "Majority Minority." Justin is an Associate Professor of Policy and Government at George Mason University’s Schar School. He is the author of six books, primarily on the politics of immigration and demographic change. And you might even recognize him from his 2017 visit to Tallahassee when he helped us understand the societal shifts that elected President Donald Trump (Justin saw the shift and wrote "The New Minority" way before "Hillbilly Elegy"). He is insightful, brilliant, and really a lot of fun to have a conversation with. We're teaming him up with our friend and colleague Manu Meel as facilitator, the CEO of BridgeUSA (a Village Square-like effort to bridge divisions on college campuses), who was recently named to Forbes 30 under 30.

Register for "Majority Minority" today!