Greg McKeown:
Before we get into today’s episode, let me just say this. I am politically independent, and on this podcast, I have invited people from across the political spectrum. And in all cases, I have tried, perhaps not always successfully, to really listen, to really understand, and to balance challenging people and asking them what I hope are incisive questions with respect for the individual. Because we cannot bridge these times of polarization by starting with the things we most disagree about.
We have to engage with people as if we want to have an ongoing conversation, an ongoing relationship, because it’s only that approach that can help us to solve any problems at all. I was just speaking with one of the world’s leading authorities on negotiation, and he made this point that a relationship, by definition, is someone with whom you can solve problems. I hope through my writing, through my speaking, and of course, through this podcast, to be a part of the solution, not the problem.
To listen to people from all walks of life, to be able to see the good in them, to learn from them, even if there are things with which I disagree. Or, of course, as you’re listening, that you may disagree with. It’s my view that we face a serious understanding paradox in our times, that as information has exploded, understanding has imploded, and that’s affecting everything around us. So whether I’m interviewing somebody from the left, from the right, from one administration or another, what I’m going for is understanding.
And that is what I’m asking from you as well. To remember that there is a space between agreeing and disagreeing. And in that space, there is understanding. Understanding doesn’t mean we agree. And realizing that there is space for that is among the more game-changing things in my whole life. To listen, to understand, to be able to appreciate, to have in some ways a holy envy that even if we don’t see things a certain way, we can see why it might be appealing to somebody else.
And with that, let’s move on to today’s episode. Welcome, everybody. Before we get to the podcast itself, a reminder to sign up for the 1-Minute Wednesday newsletter. You’ll be joining more than 175,000 people. You can sign up for it by just going to gregmckeown.com/1MW. And every week, you will get 1 minute, or something close to it, of the best thinking to be able to help you design a life that really matters and to make that as effortless and easy as possible. So go to gregmckeown.com/1MW.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how a single person can make a disproportionate difference in the world. And today I have someone on the podcast who I believe has done that, and he’s been in a family of people who have done that, too. My guest is Tim Shriver. Tim is a proud member of the Kennedy family through his mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a younger sister of President John F. Kennedy.
His uncles are John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Edward Kennedy. His siblings are Bobby, Mark, Anthony and Maria Shriver, the former first lady of California and a previous guest on this podcast. He’s cousins to Bobby Kennedy Jr., who recently ran as president as a Democrat, then an independent, before throwing his support behind the former president Donald Trump in an effort to build. And I’m just not making a political point, just their own view.
His father started the Peace Corps. His mother started the Special Olympics. But back to Tim. He has served as the chairman of the Special Olympics. He’s worked with the Special Olympics for decades. He’s dedicated his life to advocating for the world’s most forgotten minorities, people with intellectual disabilities. With over 6 million athletes across more than 200 countries, the Special Olympics, under his leadership, has not only championed the joy of sport but has also offered lessons in what it means to be fully human.
Beyond his work with Special Olympics, Tim is a leading advocate for social-emotional learning in education, specifically co-founding and chairing the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. He continues to challenge the way we think about education and empathy as tools for societal change. He holds degrees from Yale University, Catholic University, and a doctorate in education from the University of Connecticut. He’s a film producer, New York Times bestselling author, and a relentless champion for a more empathetic world.
I do think that there has been a chilling factor for people at work, for example, to be able to just speak their views about things, that there is a fear of retaliation. If there’s a dominant assumption, that sort of now infiltrates the organization.
Tim Shriver:
The biggest reducer of free speech is not the government. It’s contempt. If I sit in a room, Greg, and I say to you, “How many people in this room have not said something they believe in the last month because of fear of contempt from someone else in the room?” Every hand goes up. Not in the last ten years. In the last month, every hand goes up. People are terrified. Not of opposing points of view. They’re terrified of being treated with contempt by other people.
And they should be because it’s scary to be treated with contempt, especially if it’s by your own group, right? So this is… It’s insidious, and it operates by disguise. You know, hatred operates usually in the guise of self-righteousness. As one woman said to me the other day, “I don’t know what to tell you. I hate hateful people.”
Greg McKeown:
I’ve heard that before.
Tim Shriver:
But, I mean, she didn’t… She was like, “I just never thought of it that way before. I never saw that I was saying I’m hateful as a way of justifying the fact that I hate people who are like that.” So she didn’t see it. I don’t see it. I’m not pointing the finger at her. We think, “Oh no, no, I’m not being intolerant. I’m just hating intolerant people.”
Greg McKeown:
I remember someone very bombastically saying to me, “Oh, I just hate the haters.” And it’s like, it is exactly what you’re saying. But the irony was lost on him in this conversation. And as you say, it’s not just him or this woman that you’re talking about. It’s our own tendency to think that the problem is out there. It’s not in my heart; it’s not in my words. Somebody else’s.
Tim Shriver:
It’s other people. It’s… They’re too different, they’re too valueless, they’re too broken. And I don’t want to maybe create a crazy analogy here, but I see this in the Special Olympics movement. My mom got me in the pool with people with intellectual disabilities when I was three and four years old. So, I’ve seen this my whole life. But what happens to people with intellectual disabilities is they’re pushed onto the other side of either a metaphoric or a physical wall. Why? They’re too different. Put them in institutions. Put them in the other school. Don’t let them out to come to work. They can’t ride the regular bus. Place them somewhere else. Not because they have special needs, honestly, but because they’re just too different.
Greg McKeown:
It’s too weird for people. They feel too uncomfortable in the situation.
Tim Shriver:
It’s too discomforting. And when you bring those same people, which is all of us, I dare say, to a Special Olympics event, and you say, “Okay, you’re gonna help set up the hundred-meter dash,” and everybody stands there and cheers, and supports it, and you look at the person running, and you go, “Oh, my God, I had it all wrong. Look at her. She’s beautiful. Look at the smile. Look at the effort. Look at his mom or her dad. My God, it’s a human being. Just like me.”
Yeah, we may have different IQs, as though that were the most important thing in life. Look at him. We may be very, very different, Greg. We are very, very different. I mean, there’s no way to deny it. We have very different points of view. But difference isn’t the problem. Difference is not the problem. People that want to build a wall and people that want to have open borders, those positions are not the problem.
The problem is treating each other with hatred and dehumanizing contempt because we can solve the problems of people who are migrating or the border or whatever you want to call it. We can solve them if we listen deeply and find the path to a solution that can bring majorities along. We’re never going to get everybody. I mean, in the American context, that’s a hot issue. It’s a big divider. It’s a big motivator of the Republican base. So it’s not one party or the other. But the problem is dehumanizing contempt, which is why, again, on this podcast, and I think you do this as well, many people do, trying to actually build a community of people who say, “Wait a minute, there’s a lot of people who don’t do that. There’s a lot of people who cross over.” You know, the prophetic language is “Be a healer of the breach.” Take the wall down.
Greg McKeown:
Tear down this wall.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, exactly. President Reagan’s famous comment. You know, there are many people who do this. They might not get as much traction, but they’re out there, and they’re building a strong, almost spiritual conviction that we’ve got to retool our culture. We’re rapidly changing. Yes. We’re big. Yes. It’s complicated. Yes. It’s scary. Yes. Those are the times when you most need each other, when you’re scared, when you don’t know what’s going to happen next. None of us does.
None of us do, I should say. That’s when we need each other. That’s when we need more support.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. The question is, how do you really get people to gain in the way you’re describing? For example, Carl Rogers, the psychologist from the… certainly, possibly one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, had a rule—not a well-known rule—but the rule, he said, is if you’re ever disagreeing with somebody, you stop the conversation, and you institute this rule. And that is, you only get to make your point after you can explain to the other person, to their satisfaction, what they’re really trying to say.
And then you get the chance to do it after they say, “Yes, you’ve heard me. Got it.” You get a turn, and you go back and forth. I’ve facilitated conversations like that. I’ve taught it to my own children as teenagers. I remember a very long conversation that they held without my facilitation but following that rule. It took a couple of hours after a dinner—lots of emotion. There was crying. By the end, there was laughter as they really, really listened to each other and got through the surface symptoms.
And I thought a couple of things in that moment. I thought, well, one, I felt the chance of sort of intergenerational health was increased on that day. Right. The probability that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to communicate, you know, to use your term, the fourth generation, increases the chance if they can pass down this particular rule and skill set. Getting people to do this on air, for example—I’ve reached out to people about the Israeli-Palestinian war to represent both sides. And I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus on either side, so I won’t share the specifics now, but one of the sides has been immediately willing to talk and abide by those rules, and I simply cannot find somebody on the other side who’s willing to do it. I almost found somebody, and then, just at the last moment, they said, “Actually, you know, I just don’t think it will be a valuable conversation.”
So it’s very tricky to get people to be able to engage on some of these issues. But if we can, it’s completely obvious to me that we would make a lot more progress talking with each other and really listening to each other. How do we get people to talk? Maybe it’s through the dignity work.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, I think the new skill—if I can put it this way, this new prized skill for the 21st century—is listening. I think over the last 30 or 40 years, a lot of psychology has put a huge premium on the skill of self-regulation stress management. How do I control my emotions? How do I de-stress my experience? How do I regulate my breathing? How do I bring down my heart rate? How do I manage things that trigger me? Now, I think it’s still important, but I think learning to listen and listen well is the new prize.
Greg McKeown:
And I didn’t mean to interrupt you. It’s the rarest, most valuable skill in the world today. Like deep listening. Not surface listening, not even active listening, but deep listening. Please continue.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah, well, I think you’re right, and I think it’s really an important point. I think the second point is that we’re not likely to make progress if we start at the point of the greatest pain.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, maybe so.
Tim Shriver:
So if you’re, you know, just if you’re trying to figure out how to get along with someone and you start with, “Well, you’ve got a gun to my head, and I’ve got a gun to your head,” you’re probably not going to be in a good listening mode. Right? But let me give you an example of what I mean. I was very, very lucky to have on my podcast; we haven’t released it yet, a conversation on the Middle East with members of what’s called the Parents Circle, which is people, Israelis, and Palestinians, who have lost family members to the conflict. I had three people.
Greg McKeown:
Amazing.
Tim Shriver:
Rabi Damelin, Yonatan Zeigan, and Aziz Abu Sara. Aziz lost his brother to the IDF. He was killed in prison. Robbie lost her son to a sniper—a Palestinian sniper. And Yonatan lost his mother on October 7 in the massacre at the Nova Festival. Now, here’s what all three of them talk about. They talk about human loss. They talk about the transformation of pain. They talk about what pain has taught them about their purpose in life.
They talk about what it’s felt like to overcome the fear of someone who they loathed or feared or were angry at and find common ground with that person. They talk about the things that actually matter at the deepest level of life, and then they come. They don’t ignore the politics, but then they can work their way toward the politics and say what they believe about a two-state solution or about a ceasefire, or about the eradication of terrorism.
But if you start with, “Do you believe in a ceasefire?” you’re just going to have people who are hyper-inflamed, and you’re asking them an inflammatory question, and they won’t be able to self-regulate, and they can’t listen. Honestly, it’s almost physiologically impossible. So we’ve got to get people out of, like… I don’t think the solution here is, “Let’s have 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans and have them meet on the border where there’s 50,000 illegal immigrants and overrun hospitals and angry human services people. Let’s have them have a nice civil conversation about what’s going on.” You’re just putting fire and fire and fire and fire. And by the time you get into the room, you’re like, “I’m about to kill somebody,” before you’ve even started.
This is true in our… this is a human problem. This is not a political problem. This is like, again, if you’re with your spouse or your best friend and something terrible has just happened, don’t go right back to the point of the pain. Try to de-escalate it to the core and then work your way back to resolving the problem after you’ve established some trust.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I think that really is beautiful. It reminds me, I just was speaking—it was off air—but with one of the world’s authorities in negotiation. And one of the stories that he shares is of this complete stalemate in a war-torn area. And they had the negotiators from those two countries together, and they just weren’t—you know, they had these two different teams—and they just could not communicate and so on. Somebody noticed that these two people in the room just need to go off on their own and meet each other. They didn’t know how it would go, but they thought, “Okay, go for 20 minutes and see.” It went on for an hour and longer. Eventually, they came back in, and the tone had all changed.
When they later explored what changed, it turned out that early in their getting to know each other, they discovered that they each had a special needs child.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
And so the humanizing of that meant that when they walked back into the room, they said, “Look, this is the kind of person I can make progress with.”
Tim Shriver:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
He defines relationship as the ability to solve problems together.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah. Beautiful. No, it’s a beautiful example. I think the same thing could be said for the Good Friday Agreements for helping people build relationships outside the spotlight. Someone told me the other day that in the writing of the United States Constitution, someone actually locked the doors so that people couldn’t run outside and send messages back to their base with rhetoric that would lead to more division because they had such nuanced challenges to try to navigate differences of interest between the states, states, and the citizens, and so on. So, I think sometimes we need de-escalation, right?
Points at which we can reground ourselves. And here’s the thing—I don’t want to sound too rhetorical about this—everybody has a special needs child. We have it within us. We’re all broken. We’re all scared. We are all vulnerable. We all don’t know what to do next. We all don’t know if we fit in. We all don’t know if we’re going to be safe in the future. We all wonder what matters. If I matter, do I matter to anyone? Am I seen? Does anybody care?
We don’t know, right? We don’t know. None of us does, right? You know, the rest is a mask. The rest is a mask. And all this, you know, “I’m smarter and stronger and more powerful, and I’m going to crush you or humiliate you or demean you, or you’re going to do this.” I mean, I know it happens in life. I know evil is real. And I know people have done horrible, horrible things that need to be stopped. I don’t mean to diminish that, but the ending of these cycles of violence and contempt and dehumanization depends on discovering with some degree of emotional and social, almost I’d say, brilliance.
The fact that we’re all a little bit scared and… it’s okay. I get it. I can work with you.
Greg McKeown:
I’ve done some research into not just the importance of understanding each other but why is it so important. If you say, for example, that being understood is something like our deepest need outside of physical survival, why? Why does it matter? There’s lots of answers to it. But one is that the first lesson of life is that if we’re not heard, we will die.
Tim Shriver:
Infants die. As you probably know, infants can die for lack of physical and emotional connection.
Greg McKeown:
Literally.
Tim Shriver:
Even if fed, even if clothed, even if housed, they expire. It’s called failure to thrive.
Greg McKeown:
I was searching for, and I think I have just found… Well, let’s see if this is correct. This is… No, no, no. I have something special here. Listen to this. You’ll know what it is as soon as I start: Effects of the Special Olympics World Games on Attitudes of Non-Handicapped Children Towards Persons with Mental Retardation.
Tim Shriver:
You dug deep, brother.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. Tell people what I’m reading here.
Tim Shriver:
You’re reading the title of my dissertation, my PhD dissertation on attitude.
Greg McKeown:
Literally, I tried to get.
Tim Shriver:
If somebody asked me about that the other day, I was like, “I don’t know where the heck that thing is.”
Greg McKeown:
I’m going to send it as soon as that conversation is over. I mean, what were your findings? What were your key findings?
Tim Shriver:
Well, I was curious, you know, because people say that exposure changes people for the better. I want to know, does it? Yeah. I mean, I’m committing myself to this movement, Special Olympics. I want to know if it works. Does it work? And we actually found some very conflicting results in the study that I conducted for my dissertation. It was conflicting. Kids actually got a little scared after more exposure and hadn’t done a good enough job of helping prepare them so that they would understand difference because difference can be scary.
And so we can’t just throw each other together. This is back to the point I was trying to make. Don’t just throw people into the room together and hope that they’re going to get along. Some of the worst violence in history has been from people who have lived together for a long time right next to each other. Rwanda, the Balkans, the list goes on and on. These are people who knew each other intimately and killed viciously.
The study found that attitudes and behaviors do not necessarily move as a function of exposure or contact. They sometimes can move in different directions. Your attitude can improve, and your behavior can get worse, or your behavior can improve, and your attitude can be worse. And so it’s very important—and I spent the next 30 years of my career trying to ensure that Special Olympics was thoughtful and methodical about helping young people who don’t have intellectual disabilities understand intellectual disability, have enough exposure to it so that they can process what’s different about people who have differences, who speak differently, who walk differently, these kinds of things, and hopefully come out on the other side with more positive attitudes than I found in that one study.
Greg McKeown:
It really is a counterintuitive point about exposure, and it is what I found. And I’ve exaggerated the point in order to make it at times by saying that there is no correlation between exposure and length—length of time that you’re with somebody—and your level of understanding of each other. And that’s not entirely right, but it speaks to something that is right, which is that, as you say, you could know somebody very well and be at war with them. And this is literally what you’re describing, right? People that are in their same families, and the contempt cycle means that it’s broken apart. You can know somebody for years, and then a certain way of thinking can, you know, like this idea,
Tim Shriver:
Lingering contempt. Religions have done a bad job on this, and so have politicians. But if you’re living next door to each other in Northern Ireland, and you hear every Sunday how horrible the Catholics are or how horrible the Protestants are, and you hear it more and more during the week, and it’s reinforced by the fact that you see that somebody left their window open or that their kids ran out without their uniform on properly, and then you talk at your dinner table about how horrible they are because of what you saw, and it’s like, “Let’s go get them. Come on. Let’s go get them.”
I’ve had enough. So that’s this persistent, relentless selling of contempt for people who are different that causes those conflicts, even when people are proximate because when you’re proximate, you get reinforced with the contempt. Right. I just think we gotta name this really clearly. Now, this is… I mean, I’m just making this pitch here. Like, there’s so many problems in the world, so many things we can’t control, so many issues that are, you know, so many things that are changing. But this one, we can spot it. You know, I like to say contempt is hard to see when you use it, but it’s hard to use once you see it.
Greg McKeown: I love that.
Tim Shriver:
So if you’re in a church where the pastor or the leader is up there spewing hatred towards somebody of another faith, go up to the pastor or the faith leader at the end and say, “By the way, I believe what you believe, and I come to the same faith-based institution you’re a part of. But I do not think it’s in our best interest or in the interest of our faith to be spewing or to be using contemptuous language to describe people of other faiths. I just don’t—I would prefer, Father this or Minister this or Imam that or Rabbi this, whatever it is—that not be part of our faith-based tradition.”
And I love political tradition or social tradition. I mean, if you’re in the Rotary Club, don’t dump on Lions, right? If you’re in Maryland, don’t be pejorative about people in Virginia. If you’re from Wales, don’t demean the Scottish. The list goes on and on.
Greg McKeown:
But let’s just talk about the list for a second. In addition, because you’ve talked about certain things now, one thing you haven’t talked about is, I think, an additional element, and I’m as politically independent as I think anyone can be almost. But I do observe, perhaps, that there’s a strong element of what you’re describing from the left, too. And I wonder what your observations are about that.
Like, we know when the right has gone too far, right, we have a—
Tim Shriver:
True. The left has contempt just in almost the same pattern. I mean, you can isolate speech structures on the left, find sentences, “The country is in danger because of”—fill in the blank. And their attitudes and values that are destroying the—fill in the blank—social, cultural fabric and threaten—fill in the blank—our children, our institutions. You find the exact same sentence on both sides.
Greg McKeown:
How do you know when the left has gone too far? Let me just pause before you answer. Clearly, the right can go too far. That’s just obvious. And you can’t be a political observant of the last 100 years, particularly of the 20th century, and go, of course, you go too far. We have totalitarian systems on both sides in the 20th century, one on the right—not one, but the second world war, Nazism on the right—but on the left, you have communism on the left that’s destroying. More people died under those systems than even in Nazi Germany, by quite a measure. So clearly, you can go too far, and I don’t mean literally that far, but I’m just curious about your thoughts about how do you know when the left has gone too far?
Tim Shriver:
I would reframe the question, “How do we know when I’ve gone too far? When you’ve gone too far?” The left is amorphous. I mean, who’s on the left? My cousin Bobby—you started with my cousin Bobby. Is he on the left, or is he on the right? I don’t know anymore. I mean, I grew up thinking I was a liberal. Sometimes I am. But, like, when I see some things that come out of the mouths of people on the left, I think to myself, “I’m not on the same. That’s not my party.” So I think these—
Greg McKeown:
Do you think of yourself as a traditional liberal?
Tim Shriver:
I think of myself as an independent now. I mean, I think I’m a registered Democrat, but I think of myself as independent, which is, again, it’s a sign of distrust in the party. So, in some ways, it’s exactly what I’m ranting against. But here’s the question: does someone go too far when they say, “You no longer deserve to have a job or participate or be a part of our community?” That’s too far. Have they gone too far when they say, “You’re evil?”
Yes. That’s too far. Have they gone too far when they say, “You’re no longer human, you’re scum, you’re a rat, you deserve to be”—yes, that’s gone too far. Have they gone too far when they say, “I’m the good people, you’re the bad people?” Well, you could say, well, that’s not so bad. It’s not so bad, but I prefer people say, “You’re good, I’m good. Let’s find a way to understand each other at least.” That’s just common sense.
That’s what you look for with your mother or your father or your children. That’s what you look for in your significant other or your spouse. That’s what you look for from your boss or from your people who report to you at work. Can we find ways to disagree while at the same time treating each other with dignity? That shouldn’t be, you know, the Mother Teresa-level commitment. That should be a human commitment, and we’re not going to make it if we don’t learn how to make that commitment.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I agree completely with all of that.
Tim Shriver:
The world is just too small, you know. We’re not going to get away with, “Americans hate Mexicans,” or “Catholics hate Protestants,” or “Jews hate Muslims,” or “Chinese people hate Japanese people.” It’s just not going to work anymore. I mean, all these ancient ways of building a structure, like, “I can build my country by making sure we hate someone else,” it’s an old strategy for building belonging, and it can’t work in the future. It won’t work. It’s not working well.
Greg McKeown:
And surely it’s the lowest form of unity is to have a common enemy.
Tim Shriver:
That’s it. But it’s a very stubborn pattern. It’s a stubborn pattern, and we got to break it.
Greg McKeown:
Speaking of that stubborn pattern, I want to be here. You are—two uncles who were assassinated. We’ve had two assassination attempts at the time of conversation on the former President Trump. This feels really new and dangerous times.
Tim Shriver:
Yeah. It will be a wake-up call that we know that contemptuous, violent rhetoric leads to contemptuous and violent action. That’s not a question. That’s a scientific, or at least a socially scientific fact. Violent rhetoric leads to violent action, and contempt at high degrees will lead to violent action from people who hear it as a call to violence. So the more we wed ourselves to this old strategy of just dumping on the other guy, humiliating the other guy, dehumanizing the other person, the more we rely on that, the more likely we are to get violence.
So, I think what we got to get people to see is it’s time for a change, and everybody’s got a role to play in making it, and it’s got to become a priority. It’s just like 20 years ago people started recycling, okay? We didn’t use to. We used to throw everything in the same bin. Okay? It took a little while, but now most people will recycle things that can be recycled. We need the same kind of change. We need to cycle out of contempt and cycle into dignity. It’s an easier shift than something as complicated as recycling because everybody can do it. You don’t need a truck to come pick it up.
You don’t need a plant to take it to. You don’t need a new technology to manage it. You just need kind of the spiritual transformation that says, “That’s who I actually want to be. I want to be the person who treats people with dignity.”
Greg McKeown:
I love your whole approach. I love what you’re doing with the new podcast. I love the conversation that we’ve had. I see in this that you’re describing, even though it’s described in beautiful and clear terms, a wicked sort of problem because I think there is a sort of unholy alliance between many different forces that lead us to this precipice. And not least of all is just the general lack of skill there was prior to the contempt to actually listen. Well, anyway, yeah, that’s right.
Tim Shriver:
We didn’t have to. Let’s be honest. I mean, my grandparents grew up Irish Catholic in Boston. I don’t know whether they ever socialized with Protestants, honestly. They didn’t have to. They certainly didn’t have to socialize with Mexicans, or Chinese, or French, or Germans. They just had to figure out how to keep the Irish Catholic group together. And that’s true of every group 100 years ago. And they saw themselves as part of the American ideal because there was a bigger identity there that they felt the Irish Catholic community belonged in. That was fine.
And so did the Italian people. So did the French, and Germans, and Poles. So did, even in those days, many people of color, many Black folks. They saw themselves as part of it; they were invested in making the country what they thought it should and could be. But now we got to figure out ways to navigate all these differences and have our kids marry across these lines and go to different faith-based institutions and ethnic groups and cultural groups and social groups. And we have no choice.
We have to do it. There’s no turning the clock back. You can strongly hold on to your faith if you’re an Irish Catholic like my grandparents were, but you don’t have to hate Protestants anymore. You really don’t. It’s just not going to get us anywhere. And by the way, at least in my view, it’s not very Catholic. Blessed are the peacemakers. How many times do you forgive? 70 times seven. My friend Richard Rohr used to have that over the door of his center: 70 times seven.
Greg McKeown:
Tim Shriver, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining the conversation.
Tim Shriver:
Thank you so much for having me.
Greg McKeown:
For everybody listening, what is something that has stood out to you? You know, what’s a key thought that has penetrated your mind, your heart? Maybe it was something Tim said, maybe it was not something that we’ve even talked about, but you have felt it. What is one thing you can do immediately differently because of it that’s in your sphere of influence? And who is somebody that you can share this conversation with now that this conversation has come to an end? Thank you. Thank you for listening.
