I have a friend who likes to engage me on our points of departure. He’s a self-admitted conservative, I am not. He’s a sincere Christian, I’m an atheist. Looking around at the current culture, you would think that should make any conversation we might have problematic at best, impossible at worst.
Yet we carry on the occasional hour, two-hour, sometimes three hour conversation and never once descend into anger or dismissive rhetoric. And yes, we talk about religion regularly. We talk about politics. We talk about meaningful living. It’s the kind of exchange of ideas from different perspectives that seems both rare and uniquely pleasurable. …