Village Square Concludes ‘The Asteroids Club’ Season with ‘Seven Deadly Sins’
Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Lucy Morgan and First Baptist Pastor Discuss Morality
(TALLAHASSEE, FL) – April 1, 2014 – In its 2013-14 Dinner at the Square season, The Village Square has played out a scenario: Imagine there is a giant asteroid heading to earth, expected to destroy life as we know it. We’d stop the incessant partisan bickering and do everything within our power to deflect the asteroid, right? Like in the movies?
To date, the series has looked at four American “asteroids” headed directly at us – rising economic inequality, breakdown of the family, climate change and entitlement spending – each a problem that will only grow bigger and harder to “deflect” the longer we ignore it. Stuck inside our feuding partisan tribes, we’ve failed to find common cause against these common threats, preferring instead to argue in the public square about whose asteroid is real; all while the threats continue to build.
The final program of the season will look at the gaping difference in the way that liberals and conservatives perceive morality – from each side of the divide. In today’s partisan din, each “tribe” sees itself as morally grounded and tends to frequently see the other as morally bankrupt. While liberals focus on corruption of political processes by powerful moneyed interests and campaign finance reform, conservatives focus on personal morality and the institutions of society that maintain it. Both sides of the aisle have strong evidence that each moral problem presents challenges to our future, yet their inability to understand what they have in common prevents progress in addressing either.
“Seven Deadly Sins: The Decline of Moral Community and the Rise of Public Corruption” will be held Tuesday, April 8, 5:30 to 7:30 pm at St. John’s Episcopal Church downtown.
Joining us are two respected leaders from very different communities: Tampa Bay Times Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Lucy Morgan and First Baptist Church Pastor Dr. Bill Shiell.
The concept is a joint project of The Village Square and Dr. Jonathan Haidt of NYU’s Stern School of Business and author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.” Differing from a typical debate, “The Asteroids Club” gathers to understand the problem as the other side of the aisle views it.
For more information, visit www.tallahassee.tothevillagesquare.org, call 590-6646 or email info@tothevillagesquare.org. To learn more about the Asteroids Club project, visit www.asteroidsclub.org. A limited number of scholarship tickets are available through Friday, April 4.
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