Braver Angels Returns to the Village

Braver Angels-Arkansas has announced that it will conduct another seminar in Hot Springs Village on September 18 at 1:00 at Village United Methodist Church, located at 200 Carmona.

Braver Angels is a national organization (www.braverangels.org) that promotes civil communication and conducts seminars that teach specific civil communication skills that are used by family counselors, dispute mediators, and hostage negotiators, and can be used by anyone in any circumstance, from family gatherings, to workplaces, to Club meetings, to political discussions.

Braver Angels’ State of Arkansas Co-Coordinator, and Village resident, David Childs, says, “Braver Angels was founded in 2016 with a mission of helping to reduce our national anger and polarization, and restore more civility to our national dialogue and to our personal lives.”

Braver Angels’ name was derived from a passage in Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural address on the brink of the Civil War, when he said, “We must all call on the better angels of our nature… .” Another Lincoln quote that Braver Angels likes to reference is, “I don’t like that man; I must get to know him better.” Childs says, “I love that quote because it means that Lincoln’s core belief was that there was good in everyone, and if he just got to know them better, then he could find that good. Lincoln was committed to maximizing the good in people, not seeking and obsessing over every little mistake that people make.”

Braver Angels conducted a seminar in The Village in April. That seminar taught four core steps for how to guide any conversation in a civil way. The 30 Villagers who attended the April seminar were so impressed by it that they requested another seminar with additional guidance, and so the September seminar was scheduled.

The title of the September seminar will be “The Golden Rule: How to Live It.” The seminar will include a 13-question Self-Assessment in which participants will be able to determine to what degree they already are or are not living the Golden Rule. The questions will ask such things as “How much time do you spend intentionally seeking sensationalized negative media and social media posts?” The seminar will then present 13 recommendations for how to live the Golden Rule better and build more positive, meaningful interactions and relationships. The recommendations include such specific actions as “Separate personal relationships from policies; you can disagree on one or two policies, while still agreeing on many more, without choosing to end a personal relationship over the few exceptions.”

Says Childs, “This training is for anybody. We get high school and college students who have grown up knowing how to navigate their cell phones but remain baffled about how to navigate human relationships. We also get a lot of interest from religious people who want to do a better job of living and modeling their faith. Anyone who wants to improve the quality of their human relationships should look into Braver Angels and this seminar.”

For more information about the September 18 Braver Angels seminar, “The Golden Rule: How to Live It,” contact dchilds@braverangels.org.