NEW! Read and Reflect with Pastor Stephen

6 PM TUESDAY, APR 22 IN ROOM 2 AND ON ZOOM | RSVP REQUESTED

As Pastor Stephen reads and prepares for sermons and upcoming continuing education projects, he invites you to read along and then join him for a bimonthly book discussion. First up is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, a book that Pastor Stephen has often referenced.

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition —the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. Finally, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

On Sunday morning, June 8, we’ll read and reflect on Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Lessons from the Twentieth Century.