Braver Angels' Civic Scholars Council Courageous Citizenship Papers With Descriptions
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Richard Andrus
What does it mean to be a Courageous Citizen?
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We don't have a political problem in the United States. We have a spiritual problem. Any faith that professes a moral and ethical code of "no harm" to others or to oneself can resolve our problems. Christian, Jew, Muslim, or Buddhist are the common great faiths of the world and in the USA. The Buddha offers a resolution with the fourth precept called Skillful Speech. If we held ourselves, our media, and our politicians to the essence of this precept, which is to not cause division or harm with our speech, our nation would thrive and prosper beyond our imaginations.
Sanda Balaban
Civic Prosperity at 250: From Sacred Honor to Shared Flourishing
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Abstract: Repairing ruptured relationships is one of the ordinary costs of citizenship, and democracy runs on people willing to pay them. How many are willing, ready, and able to do so is something institutions shape. It depends on whether people see themselves as having a stake in public life, whether they believe disagreements can be productive, and whether they have skills to act. Civic prosperity is the condition in which identity, trust, and capacity are distributed broadly enough across the social fabric that courageous citizenship becomes the norm. This essay argues for the importance of fostering civic prosperity, on and beyond campus, together, sharing illustrations of campuses already doing so.
Kelsey Blahnik
Courageous Citizenship: The And Way
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When community members commit to relationships rooted in shared humanity despite differences, we have a greater chance for democratic renewal. In an environment where tribal loyalty is currently incentivized, we risk relationships and a sense of acceptance by choosing unpopular dissent and engagement with “the other side” using the proposed model "The And Way" for the sake of long-term rewards: peace and justice. This model addresses the greatest threat to world peace: psychological rigidity. Kelsey often references the “good-bad gridlock” mindset rampant in our political life as a battle between moral opposites. By challenging the gridlock, she advances a both/and model of engagement that pairs curiosity and conviction, accountability and empathy, dissent and belonging.
Thomas Andrew Bryer
National Park Service Volunteers as Courageous Citizens: Keeping the Flame of Democracy Lit
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This essay examines National Park Service volunteers as courageous citizens who strengthen democratic resilience through civil conversation, historical interpretation, and human connection. Drawing on interviews with volunteers and rangers, it demonstrates how parks create civic spaces where people encounter difference, navigate difficult histories, discover shared identities, and practice democratic citizenship.
Robert M. Ceresa
Courageous Citizenship as Institutional Design: Renewing the American Pledge through Civic Pathways
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Courageous citizenship has never been only a private virtue; it is an institutional achievement. Reading the Rosenwald Schools and the Jeanes Teachers as civic architecture, and tracing what displaced them, this essay argues that renewing the American pledge at 250 requires rebuilding the civic pathways that let ordinary people act with consequence.
April Chatham-Carpenter
Role Multiplicity in Practice: Practicing Courageous Citizenship in Contested Civic Spaces
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This essay frames courageous citizenship as a set of communication choices for navigating multiple roles in contested civic spaces. Drawing on experiences in higher education and civic facilitation, it examines four practices, including conversational receptiveness and intentional learning design, which build conflict resiliency, sustain engagement across difference, and strengthen democratic life.
Andrew Jason Cohen
A Declaration of Discourse for America
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The American Founders and their enlightenment predecessors wanted people to have their say and have it matter. This is evident in the Declaration of Independence. In this paper, I lay out a modern-day Declaration—not of independence from a distant power, but from the polarization that now threatens our society. My aim is to encourage people to engage each other using six historically important principles that have been used to justify laws and court decisions. I encourage readers to determine which they endorse and to recognize that other people will endorse different sets.
John de Graaf
Toward a Transpartisan Politics of Limits And Beauty
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John de Graaf suggests that concern about the social and environmental effects of American consumerism concern both Left and Right in America, and that a common effort to challenge consumerism, particularly through public work on restoration of urban and natural habitats provides a common goal to bring us together.
Loretta L. Donovan
Dynamic Leadership: Empowering Braver Angels to Lead Communities As Courageous Citizens
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In an era characterized by political polarization and a "VUCA" (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) environment, American civic life faces the dual challenges of hostile disagreement and widespread "civic inertia". Grassroots leadership is the essential mechanism for converting abstract ideals of civility into sustainable community action. This paper proposes "Dynamic Leadership"—an evidence-based, versatile framework designed to empower volunteer leaders within the Braver Angels movement to navigate these destabilizing tensions.
Ben Fink
From Programs to Politics
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For civic organizations like Braver Angels, moving effectively from hosting debates, workshops, and dialogue sessions (programs) to catalyzing citizen-led change in members' communities (politics) will require a major cultural shift. It will require the organization to take serious stock of its members' actual interests, determining not what they should care about but what they actually do; to analyze the root of communities' challenges in class, power, and exploitation; and to develop a language and methodology that welcomes residents whose most immediate concerns are less "democratic decline" or "toxic polarization" and more "how do I pay my rent."
Will Friedman
Civic Populism, Courageous Citizenship and Democratic Renewal as America Turns 250
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This paper examines civic populist movements and their role as incubators of courageous citizenship that enriches civic life and fights for a fairer economy and more deeply democratic political system. It offers a brief history of such movements in America and examines their relevance to our democratic challenges today.
George B. Handley
The Role of Humanities and Religion in Motivating Courageous Citizenship
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One of the obstacles to civic engagement is how broadly we are willing to imagine and define community. Will our sense of community include or exclude differences? Two resources that are vital to stimulating an imagination capacious enough to balance difference and belonging are religion and literature. This essay explores what both might contribute to a civic imagination that can sustain a healthy democracy.
Romy Hübler
When Engagement is Not Enough: Approaches to Developing Courageous Citizenship
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U.S. public trust in higher education has been eroding, with seven in ten Americans expressing that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. Yet, higher education can be a catalyst for renewing public trust by modeling and preparing its students, staff, and faculty for courageous citizenship. Utilizing the citizen professionalism framework, this essay features a case study of the Office for Social Impact at Towson University. It illustrates how staff members utilized citizen professional practices to move away from transactional service and narrow understandings of civic engagement to instead support the holistic development of students as active contributors to society.
Michael Johnson with Aiden Cinnamon Tea
Relational Democracy and Courageous Citizenship: From Relational Encounter to Durable Civic Capacity
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Courageous citizenship requires more than individual civic virtue. Drawing on Braver Angels, Bali’s water temples, Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s research, and The Basement Talks, we explore the institutional and relational conditions through which everyday citizens can develop the courage, responsibility, and relational capacities needed to sustain democratic life under increasingly difficult conditions.
Christopher Koliba
Democracy Matters: Defining Our Shared Social Contract
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This essay argues that American liberal democracy depends on renewing a shared social contract. Amid declining trust, polarization, contested truth claims, and openness to illiberal leadership, it identifies six standards for democratic life: citizen authority, checks on authority, individual liberty, tolerance, truthfulness, and institutional forbearance. Acknowledging America’s history of exclusion, rights violations, corruption, and misinformation, it calls for democratic renewal rather than abandonment through civic education, dialogue, and reform across ideological difference in public life.
Nancy Kranich
Libraries: Civic Commons of Democracy
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Libraries have promoted an informed citizenry and bridged divides as cornerstones of democracy ever since Benjamin Franklin founded the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731. Today’s libraries serve as civic commons, not only promoting unfettered access to a broad array of ideas but also catalyzing a more engaged citizenship.
Michelle Linford and Matthew Watson
Putting the Social Back into Social Work: Principles and Models for Courageous Citizenship
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Social work’s classically liberal foundations can be restored and protected by promoting viewpoint diversity, peaceful pluralism, and courageous citizenship. Examining ideological homogeneity and reported discrimination within the profession, practical models are presented that foster dialogue, human dignity, self-determination, and collaborative problem-solving across political, cultural, and social differences.
Doug Linkhart and Rebecca Trout
All-America Cities: Using Civic Muscle to Strengthen Democracy and Get Results
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The All-America Cities program celebrates communities that are working collaboratively to solve problems and help everyone thrive, and during the past 77 years, over 500 communities have been recognized. This article describes the principles of civic muscle used by these communities, with success stories from around the country.
Beth A. Malow and Jim Wilson
Harnessing Courageous Citizenship to Move from Zero-Sum Thinking to Negotiable Pluralism
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We discuss the historical roots of zero-sum thinking in the United States. Zero-sum thinking assumes that if one side gains power, status, or recognition, the other side must necessarily lose. It fuels affective polarization, erodes trust, and converts disagreement over policy issues into perceived existential threats. Practical solutions are presented to move from zero-sum thinking to negotiable pluralism, in which cooperation across differences to solve thorny policy issues allows everyone the opportunity to achieve the American Dream.
Johann N. Neem
How Americans Learned to Volunteer Final
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The United States has long been called a nation of joiners, but we often forget that volunteering was new for most Americans. After American independence, ordinary men and women learned to organize and join voluntary associations. The emergence of the United States’s vibrant civic culture depended on both the spread of new knowledge and ample opportunities to put that knowledge into practice. By understanding the conditions that encouraged voluntarism in the past, we can generate ideas to rebuild a culture of citizenship today.
Scott Peters
Due Influence: The Making of a People’s College in Minnesota
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How can higher education restore and sustain public trust? By organizing public relationships that offer citizens opportunities to use their authority as civic agents to exert a “due influence” on higher education’s priorities and work. A case example of citizen professionalism from Minnesota is presented as a source of lessons about what the establishment of due influence involves and requires.
Christy Grace Provines
A Pledge Renewed: Courageous Citizenship in the ‘Attention Economy’ Era
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On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, the conditions under which Americans practice citizenship have fundamentally changed. The risks faced by the nation’s founders were physical and economic; today, democratic participation carries reputational, social, and professional costs. This article argues that the attention economy has created a twenty-first-century challenge for self-government: democracy depends not only on institutions, but on citizens capable of exercising discernment, restraint, responsibility, and meaningful engagement across difference. Courageous citizenship involves the willingness to resist incentives that reward outrage, immediacy, withdrawal, and dehumanization and proposes four practices -- restraint, engagement across difference, principled visibility, and dignity in dialogue. It argues that attention itself has become a critical civic resource.
Komal Razvi, Bobby Milstein, and Anna Creegan
Stewards Rising with Courageous Commitments to Thrive Together
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Shared stewardship is democracy in its most courageous, active form. When systems collapse, people rise—but what does it mean to rise as co-creators and stewards of a thriving future? A 15-year inquiry reveals why stewards rise, which practices matter, and how great strides energize a rising movement to thrive together.
Sam Rechek and Trysh Travis
“Courageous Citizenship”: A Call to Behavioral or to Cultural Change?
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Braver Angels (BA) aspires to transition from a compelling, principled startup to a nationally recognized nonprofit oriented around courageous citizenship. As advanced by Braver Angels, “courageous citizenship” refers to the disciplined choice to work across political differences in pursuit of shared interests. As the organization negotiates this inflection point, we suggest a surprising model for volunteer-led norm development: Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
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Edward Remus and Lucas Steinberg
Kings and Bureaucrats, Dictators and Deep States: Spectres of Caesarism and Bonapartism from the Industrial Revolution to the Age of Trump
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In contemporary political discourse, twin spectres emerge: administrative absolutism exercised by deep states versus democratic despotism driven by plebiscitary dictators. This essay frames current debates over the unitary executive and the deep state within nineteenth-century conceptions of Caesarism and Bonapartism and it traces these concepts into the American Century. The essay argues that executive strongmen and administrative bureaucracies historically co-expand the power of the capitalist state, and this holds true for the Age of Trump.
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Collette Revere
Relearning Citizenship in the Age of Information: Holding Truth and Experience Together
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How do we make room for both truth and lived experience as meaningful sources of information in conversations across political differences? Drawing on original research about real political conversations, this paper explores what conditions make us more likely to listen with curiosity to another person's perspective, disagree without dismissing their experience, and stay engaged with respect and tolerance when someone sees the world differently.
Dennis A. Ross and Chip Webster
The Case for Universal National Service in the United States
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This essay argues that Universal National Service can strengthen America’s civic fabric by bringing young adults from diverse backgrounds together in shared service. A required year of military or civilian service would develop leadership, character, workforce skills, and civic responsibility while addressing national needs and rebuilding trust, unity, and democratic engagement.
John Saunders
A Proposed Model for Citizen Maturity
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A Proposed Model for Citizen Maturity. For citizens to rise to the call of courageous citizenship, they must not only have knowledge and mechanisms for civic engagement; they must also have a character that embraces responsibility for others and the common good. This essay argues for a citizen maturity model to facilitate that character development.
Jonathan Spear
Education as Midwife: K12 Schools Role in Democratic Renewal
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The crisis we face is matched only by the opportunity every day in K-12 education. We must reimagine and recommit to education that prepares young people academically and economically, ethically and spiritually, as citizens prepared for life’s responsibilities, challenges, and opportunities. This paper provides a framework for public, democratic education starting with the inherent worth and potential of each individual and highlights effective practices that can be spread throughout schools and districts.
Sarah M. Stitzlein
Courageous Citizenship--Reclaiming the Civic “We”
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Courageous citizenship entails reaffirming who we are as citizens in the United States today. It requires the humility of acknowledging our limits, the agency of acting with others, and the solidarity of crafting a shared vision. Rather than doubling down on our tribal loyalties, we must intentionally seek out the views of others, distribute the work of solving our shared problems, and build connections across differences. I offer the Braver Angels Citizens Commission on Immigration as a compelling example of how some Americans are doing so.
J. Cherie Strachan
What’s Next for Higher Education’s Civic Engagement Movement?
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This overview of higher education’s U.S. civic engagement movement (CEM) provides insights into how those who want to reinvigorate our institutions’ civic mission should proceed. Past waves were often reactionary and promoted a single pedagogy. The author argues that instead efforts should encompass a wider array of curricula and campus programming interventions promote students’ overall democratic capacity.
Trygve Throntveit
Courageous Citizenship: An American Political Tradition
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This paper recovers a neglected American democratic tradition: collaborative self-governance grounded in what philosopher William James called "civic courage." Rather than treating democracy primarily as a matter of individual rights or majority competition, the paper traces a parallel tradition of citizens working across differences to build shared power and common goods. It moves through New England town meetings, founders like Adams and Jefferson, Tocqueville's account of voluntary association and his warning against atomistic "individualism," antebellum abolitionism, the Civil War, and the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movement. It closes by pointing to contemporary organizations—the Industrial Areas Foundation, Braver Angels, and civics educators—as evidence that courageous, collaborative citizenship persists and can be renewed.
Liane Weintraub and Eric Hamilton
Reframing Courageous Citizenship for a Polarized Age
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Across American history, democratic crises have demanded different forms of civic courage. This essay argues that today’s polarization demands a relational form: the capacity to remain engaged across deep disagreement. Reframing polarization as relational erosion, it identifies the civic capacities and practices needed to sustain pluralism without requiring consensus.
