Gannon READS Lecture: Lara Schwartz

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Gannon students and community members filled the Warner theater as author Lara Schwartz presented a speech about her book: "Try to love the questions: From Debate to Dialogue in The Classroom and Life."   

“The book is a guide to exploring our differences and actually exploring our own assumptions. How we relate to one another. How we relate to our own backgrounds and our own assumptions. So tonight will actually be about this topic about how do we work across disagreement. How do we work together when we might disagree," Schwartz said.   

As we near election day, polarizing political discussions may be happening more frequently. Schwartz says when we disagree with people, to remember our shared humanity.   

“There's not really any such thing as a purely red or blue person. What are our challenges are challenges that we face and then there are the values and shared concerns that we might have. So, one thing that I'd love for people to be able to do is think deeply about whether there are people in their life that they care about deeply, that they respect, and with whom they disagree about something, and just kind of bear that in bear. Bear one another’s humanity in mind,” Schwartz said.  

When it comes to having those difficult conversations, Schwartz says aim to understand rather than persuade a person.    

“So, the first thing that we can do is you can say like ‘do I have a commitment to understand? Am I ready to go into a conversation with another person where we agree on one thing which is that we would really like to understand better,’’’ Schwartz