All-School Assembly with Heffner: Inspiration through Dialogue at Newman

Our All-School Assembly featured a guest speaker, Alexander Heffner, a historian and journalist who has done impressive work in the field of civil discourse across the national and international political spectrum. His research feels timely, and we were lucky to have him in our community last Tuesday.

 

Alex fully engaged the combined middle and high school audience, speaking mostly about his many interviews and discussions with assorted political leaders around the country. His main interest in talking with these people was about finding and publicizing commonalities around what it means to pursue “life, liberty, and happiness.” He finds and believes that there are many areas of shared concern that can help to unite our country—such as caring for the elderly, ensuring clean drinking water, and having safe streets. In describing his work, he stressed to our students the importance of dialogue in the practice of seeking out and understanding diverse views and perspectives. Guided by one of his favorite quotes from Abraham Lincoln, “[w]hen new views become true views, I’ll adopt them,” Heffner feels his work is about honoring and inspiring intellectual honesty. While he feels challenged to do this in the current US context of people being “comfortable in ideological silos,” his passion and hope remain strong. 

He invited the audience to be the “fire in the belly of the next generation,” holding diverse views and perspectives central to our democracy, allowing for new truths, putting a stop to money being earned through the encouragement of polarization, and speaking out even when one’s message might not get a thousand “likes.” Notably, and almost as on cue, one Newman student fired a challenge to Heffner—asking why his generation is often looking to the younger generation to remedy what the older ones have caused. And the potential for dialogue was launched. 

Indeed, Heffner introduced many topics that Newman students are sure to be following-up with in their respective classes. We are lucky at Newman to have dialogue-oriented classes where sharing, challenging, questioning, and analyzing multiple perspectives is a mainstay of the curriculum. If you’d like to learn more: Alexander Heffner