Seeking Understanding in the Culture Wars

A dare: next time you are frustrated by “the other side” in the culture wars, try to understand how they feel.
Try to look out on the world from a vantage point within their experience.
That’s what an important article by Joe Ferullo in the National Catholic Reporter seeks to do, looking from progressive space into conservative space. Quotable:

Pretend for a moment that your world was flipped over. Everything you thought right was wrong, all the threads of a civil society seemed frayed and no one appeared to notice or care. You’d be a little scared and very angry — and you probably wouldn’t know just who to blame….
Imagine … you’ve watched as something close to social chaos has emerged all around you over the last two generations. Hard-and-fast truths like church, marriage, intact families and simple civil behavior are all on sharp decline where you live, and there seems to be no way out. Government doesn’t help (your schools are lousy and everyone in town knows it; you know too many people gaming the safety net system; etc.) so taxes are a form of theft from your pocket and politicians are the crooks looking out for themselves and their friends who live in the better places, the ones with the gates and the guards.

I hope someone will write a parallel article from the opposite perspective … If you find one, let me know on my Facebook page and I’ll post a link.