Eboo Patel's new book, Interfaith Leadership: A Primer, came out in July, which was at least four months too early. In the heat of a bitter national election, a book calling for toned-down domestic diplomacy seemed out-of-sync with the political mood. Why talk with other people when you can vote them into submission?
Now, after an election that has left many Americans feeling baffled, infuriated, and terrified by the beliefs of their fellow citizens, Patel's message seems a little more apt. As a longtime interfaith organizer, Patel specializes in generating peaceful conversations in tense spaces. Meanwhile, one consistent theme of the left-wing election post-mortem has been that Americans—and especially white Americans, of all political stripes—need better methods with which to listen to their fellow citizens.
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