I enjoyed watching Charlie Rose's interview with Karen Armstrong, particularly regarding how we need to dialogue with each other these days:
CHARLIE ROSE: Socrates said conduct dialogue with gentleness.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Yes, no one must be pushed where he doesn’t want to go. There must be accord between participants. And very often with dialogue, when we say we’re going to enter into dialogue with x, it means we want to bludgeon him into our point of view. In fact, there’s no point in going into dialogue unless you’re prepared to be changed by the encounter and enriched, probably.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes,you make a strong case for being willing to be open to access new ideas and new experiences and new information and new compassion. Then there’s knowledge. Concern for everybody, then there’s knowledge. Then there’s recognition. What’s recognition?
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Basically by this time instead of concentrating on our own communities we’re beginning to look more globally at different communities around the world and realizing that the profound oneness that we have, by this time this is a cumulative process, so each step becomes a part of your listen, rather like alcoholics anonymous, the 12 steps. And so by this time you should be seeing, for example, you’ve learned about your own suffering, your own pain, and you’re also becoming aware that everybody suffers, even our enemies suffer.
CHARLIE ROSE: The 12th step.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Love your enemies.
[Karen Armstrong is an author who writes on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Armstrong is a former nun, now a “freelance monotheist”. She has advanced the theory that fundamentalist religion is a response to and product of modern culture. She was born into a family with Irish roots who after her birth moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham.]
Source- Wikipedia