Giftfrom Lexi
A thank-you gift from The Soul of Civility
ThePorchingRevolution
Choose your place.
Invite your people.
Decide who hosts next.
Would you like to porch with me?
If you’ve read The Soul of Civility, even just part of it, and felt inspired to act, I want to help you get started. And if a friend sent you here because they’d like you to join them, welcome. This invitation is yours, too.
The Porching Challenge is an invitation to gather your neighbors and friends from across your community, read The Soul of Civility together, and dream about how to build a renaissance right where you are. My goal is for 100 of you to start porches across the country.
You can begin with a few people, a place to gather, and an invitation.
Join the Porching Challenge
Fill out the short form below and your toolkit is yours to download right away.
The Introduction, Chapter One, and Chapter Two
To share with your guests and seed your first three gatherings.
Questions for every chapter
So you can keep reading together through the whole book.
The idea and the practice
A short guide to porching, and how to host.
Everything a host needs
How to shape each gathering, ground rules, and words to borrow for the asking.
Ready to keep reading? The paperback anniversary edition can be ordered from any bookstore. For copies for your whole group, visit Civic Renaissance Press.
Trouble seeing the form? Open it here.
Why Porch
The porch is a place to see, know, and honor the dignity, humanity, and personhood of the other. Porching is an act of hospitality, a high and noble expression of civility, and a way of life we can practice wherever we are.
We don’t need an actual porch. The porch is a metaphor for the power we each have to welcome others and shape the life around us. For most of human history, these in-between spaces, where the private life of a home meets the public life of a street, were where neighbors became friends and strangers became neighbors. They are where the habits of a free and self-governing people are formed, one conversation at a time.
We cannot control others. We can control ourselves. Across time and place, in the face of destruction and despair, people have gathered others and reclaimed their power to be part of the solution.
People hunger for community, to be seen and to be loved. You can stage a quiet revolution against our atomized, divided, lonely status quo by offering that invitation and making porching part of your life.
You can, too.
How to Porch
Choose your place.
Your porch could be your front yard, your living room, a coffee shop, a dock, or your dinner table. Choose a place where people can gather, and set a date.
Put on the coffee. Keep it simple enough that you’ll do it again.
Invite your people.
Invite people you know, people you know only online, and people you don’t know yet. Consider inviting someone you don’t like, someone you’re willing to get to know beyond your disagreement.
Send them the free chapters in advance, and read together with an eye to building: what could flourishing across difference look like in your community, starting with you?
Decide who hosts next.
Before everyone leaves, decide when you’ll gather again and who will host.
It’s okay to move around. It’s okay to stay in one place. Keep hosting if you enjoy it, or invite someone else to take a turn. Make room for others to offer hospitality, too.
A few things worth knowing
- Small is good. Four to eight people is enough for everyone to be heard. A circle can always grow; it is much harder to make a crowd feel like a circle.
- Hospitality is not performance. Coffee and something to eat are plenty. The point is the welcome, not the menu.
- Keep the time. Ninety minutes is a good rhythm. People return to gatherings that end when they said they would.
- Gather across difference. Across race, geography, generation, and vocation. Invite someone to begin a circle in another neighborhood, and keep bringing people into the fold.
Civility is not politeness. We don’t have to sweep differences under the rug. Agreement is not the goal. Respecting humanity and flourishing across difference is the goal.
Facilitator’s Guide
You don’t need to be an expert to host. Your job is simply to welcome people, keep time, and make sure every voice has room. Read these questions aloud, let silence do some of the heavy lifting, and resist the urge to resolve every disagreement before the coffee runs out.
Ground rules to share at the start
- Agreement is not the goal. Understanding is.
- Speak from your own experience, and listen to understand rather than to reply.
- Assume the good faith of the people in the room.
- What’s shared here stays here.
The First Conversation
Welcome · 15 minutes
Go around the circle. Each person shares their name and a place, a porch, a kitchen table, a front step, where they once felt truly welcomed. What made it feel that way?
Conversation · 60 minutes
- The introduction draws a sharp line between civility and politeness. In your own words, what is the difference? When have you seen politeness used to avoid something that needed to be said?
- Chapter One suggests there is a little bit of Gilgamesh within each of us. What did his friendship with Enkidu change in him, and who has played that role in your life?
- Augustine named the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate. Where does the urge to win, control, or use other people show up in ordinary life: at home, at work, online?
- The chapter sets true civilization against faux civilization: Saddam Hussein’s palaces against Albert Schweitzer’s reverence for life. What is the difference between looking civilized and being civilized?
- The story of the two wolves asks which one we feed. What feeds the better wolf in you, and what starves it?
Closing · 15 minutes
Each person names one small act of welcome they will offer before you meet again. Then decide together: when will you gather next, and who will host?
The Second Conversation
Welcome · 15 minutes
Begin by returning to last time. Did anyone offer the act of welcome they named? What happened?
Conversation · 60 minutes
- Ptahhotep reached the height of power, stepped away, and concluded that what truly mattered were the sacrifices we make to live in community with others. Why might it take the view from the top to see that?
- From Ptahhotep and Isocrates to Confucius, Erasmus, and the Distichs Benjamin Franklin printed, writers across cultures kept arriving at the same advice: restrain your selfishness, don’t gossip, care for those who cannot repay you. Why do you think so many traditions landed in the same place? Which piece of their advice would you most want to keep close?
- The Chinese character ren combines “person” and “two”: our humanness is realized only in relationship. Where have you found that to be true?
- Erasmus refused to join either camp in a polarized age and earned enemies on both sides, and the chapter holds him up as a model of civility. What does it cost to stay in the middle when everyone is choosing sides? Is it worth it?
- Much of this advice concerns small things: greeting people, table manners, holding a confidence. How do ordinary courtesies connect to the larger project of civilization?
- “We can’t change the world or how other people behave. But we can change ourselves.” What is one thing you will change in yourself before we meet again?
Closing · 15 minutes
Decide your next date and host. Then ask each person: who is one person you could invite next time, or invite to begin a circle of their own?
Words to borrow
The hardest part is often the asking. Copy any of these, make them your own, and send.
I’ve been reading The Soul of Civility, and it has me thinking about how rarely we sit down with one another anymore, especially with people who see the world differently than we do.
So I’m opening my [porch / living room / table] on [date] at [time] for a small gathering: coffee, something to eat, and an honest conversation about the beginning of the book. I’d love for you to be there.
You can download the preface, introduction, and first two chapters here: alexandraohudson.com/porchingchallenge
No pressure to read ahead. Just come as you are.
Warmly,
[your name]