• Document

Politics of the Brokenhearted: On Holding Tensions of Democracy

Parker J. Palmer

"We think of heartbreak as a personal, not a political, condition. But I believe that heartbreak offers a powerful lens through which to examine the well-being of the body politic. I want to use that lens to examine the way we hold tensions in politics as well as private life—a critical connection in a democracy that rises or falls on our individual and collective capacity to respond to conflict in a life-giving, not death-dealing way."

Part of the Deepening the American Dream Series published by the Fetzer Institute in 2005, in this occasional paper, Parker speaks to the conflicts and contradictions of twenty-first-century life that are breaking the American heart and threatening to compromise our democratic values.