Greetings and welcome to Cultivating Compassion 2023!

What’s happening here? Maybe the shortest answer is this: we’re working to cultivate a more compassionate world.

This project is a collaboration between NT-NL Public Witness Team, The Charter for Compassion, United States Christian Leadership Organization (USCLO), and Kairos Collaborative. Each of these organizations is committed to creating a world where compassion and empathy provide a bridge to connect our humanity.

As we’ve surveyed the landscape of our communal life in the US, we see hope and fear, connection and isolation. How can we transcend the things that divide us and move forward together? We need skills!

Cultivating Compassion 2023 is designed to help us learn and practice the skills of connection. Drawing from psychology, sociology, philosophy, and history, we’ll adopt a quarterly rhythm of topical book discussions followed by practice sessions where we take on a controversial issue to practice our developing skills. The book discussions will take place on the 4th Thursday of each month via zoom. For participants who wish, an in-person practice session will be available on a Saturday morning, with Thursday night zoom option available as well.

Cultivating Compassion Session 1: Permission to Feel

VIRTUAL: Thursday, January 26, 2023 | 7:00 pm US Central When we hide, suppress, and deny our own emotions (or others’), we blind ourselves to what we most desire and […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 2: Nonviolent Communication

VIRTUAL: Thursday, February 23, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central Communicating without judgment (of ourselves or others), following an emotion to the needs that give rise to it, and making requests […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 3: Better Conversations about Disproportionality

VIRTUAL: Thu, Mar 23, 2023 7:00 PM IN PERSON: Sat, Mar 25, 2023 9:00 AM A data-driven discussion about how we can measure both the problems of our world and […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 4: Think Again

VIRTUAL: Thursday, April 27, 2023 | 7:00 PM Creating intellectual humility and reframing change as learning and growth (vs “flip-flopping” or failures of integrity). Building skill in changing our mind […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 5: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics & Religion

VIRTUAL: Thu, May 25, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central The “others”, whoever they may be, are not evil, but often serving a different set of priorities. Learning how to describe […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 6: Better Conversations About Critical Race Theory

VIRTUAL: Thursday, June 22, 2023  | 7:00 PM Central Practicing what we’ve been learning stimulated by a topic regarded as controversial in some circles, with readings that stimulate that controversy […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 7: The Wild Edge of Sorrow

VIRTUAL: Thursday, July 27, 2023 | 7:00 PM As we turn our attention toward the reality of our world and how it became as it is, it’s important that we […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 8: See No Stranger: a Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

VIRTUAL: Thursday, August 24, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central “We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say – as a moral declaration and a […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 9: Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

VIRTUAL: Thursday, September 28, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central Before we’re 2 years old, most humans develop a capacity for “object permanence,” the understanding that objects in the world exist […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 10: A People’s History of the United States 1492 – Present

VIRTUAL: Thursday, October 26, 2023 | 7:00 PM Central In his 1889 biography of Charles George Gordon, William Francis Butler observed, ” it is the victor who writes the history […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 11: Better Conversations about Affirmative Action & Reparations

VIRTUAL: Thursday, November 30, 2023 | 7:00 PM US Central IN-PERSON: Saturday, December 2, 2023 | 9:00 AM Affirmative Action and Reparations may be some of the most frightening outcomes […]

Cultivating Compassion Session 12: Finite and Infinite Games

VIRTUAL: Thursday, January 4, 2024 | 7:00 PM US Central Across disciplines as diverse as marketing, education, health, and management, “gamification” draws on our capacity to play to help us […]

Cultivating Compassion 2023 – Series Overview

Greetings and welcome to Cultivating Compassion 2023! What’s happening here? Maybe the shortest answer is this: we’re working to cultivate a more compassionate world. This project is a collaboration between NT-NL […]

 

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