Tag Archives: dialogue stories

Posted on

When and How You Should End Unproductive Conversations

by

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.

It is one of the questions I’m asked the most often. We’ve all experienced it. You’re talking to someone about abortion or something else and it’s just not going very well. You start doubting whether any good will come from letting the dialogue continue.

If you do decide to end the conversation, you have to figure out how to graciously bring the dialogue to a close, which can also be tricky.

How do you know? What factors should you consider?

Before ending any conversation you should ask yourself, have I used the “three essential skills of good dialogue” today? Steve Wagner at Justice For All believes the three essential skills of good dialogue are:

  1. Asking good questions.
  2. Listening to understand.
  3. Finding genuine common ground when possible.

You can hear me explain the three essential skills in the video below, from 4:41 to 17:43.

If you haven’t used the three essential skills, that very well may be why the dialogue isn’t going well. I’d encourage you to say, “Can we take a moment outside of the debate? I think it’s really important to listen well and not just be thinking of your next argument, and I haven’t done a good job of that today. I want to ask you to do two things. Forgive me for being ungracious to you and not listening to you well. Secondly, I’d like to ask you to give me another chance. Tell me what you believe, and I promise to try to really hear you.”

But what if you have used the three essential skills? Are there some dialogues that are not worth continuing?  Yes.  Is it easy to tell which conversations you should bring to an end? No. 

Posted on

Relating to Relativists

by

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes.

Since I started working as a pro-life advocate in 2011, I have deeply struggled with how to have productive conversations with moral relativists.  I could “win a debate” with them, but I have a loftier goal of actually changing their minds, and I was nowhere near meeting that goal.

For a while my strategy was to ask moral relativists really uncomfortable questions, such as “Is slavery immoral?” But this strategy almost never worked.  If they believed morality is subjective to the individual, they would say, “No, I just don’t like it.” If they believed morality is subjective to the culture, they would say, “It’s wrong now, but only because our culture came to decide that.”  Strangely, no one ever seemed to be uncomfortable after giving those responses.

Next I tried pointing out the logical inconsistency of them on one hand claiming there is no objective morality, and on the other hand implying I had moral failings for disagreeing with them about something like abortion.  That also did not seem to help, either because they could not understand the logic or because they chose to ignore it.  One time I even pretended to steal a guy’s bicycle, but he found that to be more cute than persuasive.

Last fall I tried something different when I met an alternative version of me.

Posted on

6 Tactics That Helped Me Have a Productive Conversation with Three Mormon Missionaries

by

These six tactics not only helped me navigate a 90-minute debate with three Mormons when I didn’t know anything about Mormonism, they can also help you have better conversations with pro-choice people.

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.

I’ve never really spoken with missionaries from the Church of Latter-Day Saints before. I haven’t avoided it, it’s just that for some reason they never went to our neighborhood. That’s why I was surprised the other day to hear the doorbell ring and to open my door to three LDS missionaries asking to pray for me.

You’re probably thinking that I got a big grin (at least on the inside) and immediately welcomed them in. I’m embarrassed to say that I politely declined on impulse. That might have partially been because the impression they gave was that they only wanted to pray for me, and since I believe they would be doing the equivalent of praying to a brick wall, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. But there was also a lazy part of me that just wanted to rest and for them to move on to the next house. I’ve been working 12 to 16-hour days lately and I finally had a Sunday afternoon off, and for a few moments I cared more about that than the three souls standing in front of me. I’m happy to report that once we sat down and got into real discussion, I very much enjoyed myself. I’m glad that they were pushy enough to get past the internal barriers I put up when I saw them.

I was a little nervous when they finished praying, because I have never really studied Mormonism. I know a little bit, but it’s one of those things I thought I would always get to later, “when the time was right.” Now here I was, feeling like I was going into a three versus one battle. Even worse, it was like they were a fully-armored team and I felt like I didn’t have any weapons!

Pro-life and pro-choice people often struggle to have productive conversations with each other. I think there are literally dozens of reasons for that, but one of them is that both sides understandably have an agenda they want to focus on instead of learning what the other person believes. Since I didn’t know very much about Mormonism, this was an opportunity for me to put my agenda to the side and go into “information gathering” mode.

Luckily, the discussion went a lot better than I feared it would, thanks to the six tactics in this list.

Posted on

The Biology Professor Who Hated Our Outreach Exhibit

by

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

The highlights from my debate with a college professor who thought we were a bunch of religious extremists with a deceptive fetal development display.

This last weekend I led a Right to Life of Central CA sponsored Justice For All seminar and outreach at Fresno City College. We had a great turnout at the outreach but a lot of our volunteers wanted to listen in on other dialogues before trying it themselves, so I spent part of the morning doing one of my favorite things: talking to pro-choice people.

Allow me to show you the outreach tools we set up.

Posted on

Sometimes What You Should Say is Nothing

by

It was spring, 2010. I was at Pasadena City College with Justice for All. I was standing inside the barricades protecting the large 18-foot-tall pro-life display. It was a quiet hour on campus. Most students were in class.

I saw her coming from a block away.

She was with her friend “Michelle,” and they were storming toward me. She locked eyes with me long before she got to me. I could tell from her expression that she was angry. I braced myself.