Last month, Spirituality & Practice participated in a symposium on spirituality and health. It was an excellent day of plenaries and workshops put together by our friends at Sojourners. Our role there was to share our work on spiritual practices that sustain resilience and calm and thus strengthen democracy.
We brought with us some conversation cards that we made in collaboration with the Fetzer Institute a few years back when we were first working on the Practicing Democracy Project. Each card comes with a quote on the front side, and prompts for reflection and action on the back side. They cover the themes of democracy, freedom, equality, and the common good.
The cards were a huge hit at the symposium — I began to feel like I was giving out slices of cake, not decks of cards! Before I knew it, every single democracy deck had been pocketed by someone invested in spirituality and health. People were hungry!
This was not a controlled study, of course, but the evidence seems clear: 1) people get excited about the values, virtues, and visions of democracy; 2) matters of democracy feel consistent with matters of spiritual and physical health; and 3) people are hungry to talk with others and have conversations about democratic values, virtues, and visions.
While we may be able to procure more professionally printed decks, you can download the cards yourself and start using them immediately with friends, family, colleagues, or your journal.