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Seminars

Learning to Disagree: Practical Advice for Polarized Times

310 Cannon House Office Building

In a tense cultural climate, is it possible to disagree productively and respectfully without compromising our convictions? As a constitutional scholar, legal expert, and former litigator, Dr. John Inazu has spent his career learning how to disagree well with other people.

Join us as we host Dr. Inazu for a special seminar on how to engage honestly and empathetically with people whose viewpoints we find strange, wrong, or even dangerous. Drawing on the practices that legal training imparts, Dr. Inazu will discuss how seeing the complexity in every issue and inhabiting the mindset of an opposing point of view can help policy makers navigate and lead a complex society.

CLICK HERE to download and read the first chapter of Dr. Inazu's latest book, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024).


Dr. John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. His latest book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024). He is also the author of Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, 2012) and Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and co-editor (with Tim Keller) of Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference (Thomas Nelson, 2020).

Inazu is the founder of The Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and a Senior Fellow at Interfaith America and the Trinity Forum. He holds a B.S.E. and J.D. from Duke University and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He clerked for Judge Roger L. Wollman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and served for four years as an associate general counsel with the Department of the Air Force at the Pentagon.