Hello friends, I am thrilled to share that I'll be recording a live episode of on being in New York City with poet and MacArthur Genius fellow

Claudia Rankin as part of the work at festival from W and YC studios. Our conversation will take place on November 12th at 7pm at the K Playhouse at Hunter College.

This is an evening you won't want to miss so buy tickets now at workitevents.com. That's workit, W-E-R-K-I-T events.com.

On being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation supports academic research and civil dialogue on the deepest, most perplexing questions facing humankind.

Who are we? Why are we here? And where are we going? To learn more please visit Templeton.org, the Templeton Foundation. Stay curious.

We generally avoid lightning rod figures on this show. But earlier this year, the University of Montana in Missoula, a blue city in a red state, invited on being to attempt an outside the box civil conversation between two pundits with big followings on contrasting ends of the US political spectrum.

It became a sold out public event in the spirit of Montana's Senator Mike Mansfield, who famously modeled integrity, courage and humility across the partisan aisle in the tumult of the 1960s and 70s.

We first reached out to CNN commentator Sally Cohn, who for several years was best known as the liberal lesbian contributor to Fox News. She just written a book which gathered its own controversy called The Opposite of Hate.

Sally asked to be paired with Eric Erickson. He was a longtime executive editor of the conservative blog red state, and he's an evangelical daily drive time radio host in Atlanta. He enthusiastically agreed.

Since we recorded this conversation, the two of them have been on polar opposite sides of the Kavanaugh hearings and as controversial as ever before.

But I couldn't let go of a conversation I had after the event with two 12 year old girls who waited in a long line. They told me that come at the insistence of a teacher and had expected to be bored. They were instead exhilarated.

In the short span of time in which they've come into political awareness, they told me they had not witnessed or imagined that this was possible.

A true back and forth marked at once by bedrock difference and goodwill, humor and a willingness to bring our questions as well as our arguments, our humanity as well as our positions into the room if only for an evening.

I'm Christopher Tippett and this is on being this conversation unfolded at the Denison Theatre in Missoula, Montana and was co-hosted by Montana Public Radio.

So you know, as I moved through 2016, what started being clear to me kind of midway through that year is whoever won, the deep work that we were going to have to do as a society was about human work, about repairing like stitching relationship across that rupture that had suddenly become un, you know, we couldn't no longer not see it.

And that somehow that was going to involve each and every one of us wherever we were on the political or social spectrum, taking some kind of stock in terms of how we got to this place.

And you know Sally, you know, you know, as you say, you're a liberal, like you're a credentials firm.

Thank you.

And I don't think I've worked really hard.

Yeah, okay.

All right.

You demonstrate that.

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