Check out Part 2 of our On The Other Hand podcast conversation with Cheryl Woodard of the Ecumenical Buddhist Society of Little Rock. Here the conversation turns to living with people who see the world very differently. Cheryl describes the Buddhist image of a shared lifeboat where no one can be kicked off, and why she believes that “you are my problem” no matter what someone thinks or does. She explains how humility and curiosity, including a healthy skepticism about her own views, help her stay in hard conversations, drawing on her years as a volunteer tax preparer. She, April and Glen also wrestle honestly with how to extend compassion when you believe someone is doing real harm, and discuss the power of simply showing up and being present, from the recent peace walk by Buddhist monks to Buddhist work with death row inmates and AIDS hospices. Finally, Cheryl describes how EBS serves the community through prison, library, and hospital meditation teaching, and she offers practical first steps for curious listeners, including free classes and two book recommendations.

Check out Part 1 of our On The Other Hand podcast conversation with Cheryl Woodard, treasurer and teacher at the Ecumenical Buddhist Society of Little Rock, which recently celebrated its 30th year. Cheryl, a retired bookkeeper and the daughter of an Episcopal priest, tells how a chance meeting with some remarkably calm Berkeley Buddhists led to a lifetime of practice, and how that practice found a home in Little Rock. She explains what Buddhism is (and isn’t), why it was always a communal path rather than a retreat from the world, and how its many traditions share space at EBS in Little Rock. Along the way she describes the Buddha’s three core teachings (do no harm, be of benefit to others, and train your mind), why meditation is more like a science lab than a calming exercise, how Buddhism views suffering and the question of God, and why so many people comfortably hold Buddhism alongside other faiths.

What happens when you put Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and Independents in the same room at a coffee shop and just let them talk?

"Maybe they're not a fascist. Maybe they're not a communist trying to upend the world... maybe they're not any of these pejoratives that we assign to people simply because they hold a particular idea." – Phillip Fletcher

In this audio only version of our TV program "A Braver Arkansas," hosts April Chatham-Carpenter and Glen White first dig into affective polarization — why we come to dislike people rather than just disagree with their ideas — and they put themselves through Braver Angels' own bias self-assessment exercise. They then bring on Dr. Phillip Fletcher, community activist and pastor in Conway, to talk about his "Civil Discourse Coffeehouse" gatherings. Fletcher shares what actually happens when strangers who've clashed online sit down face to face — including his metaphor for how people come to see a fuller picture of an issue once they're willing to look at it from another angle, and why that's a lot harder when the belief in question isn't just an abstract idea. He also gets into what he does differently when a topic is especially charged, why the guardrails he sets almost never get tested in person, and one simple thing anyone can try this week if they want to bridge a divide with someone they know. Glen and April close out with their own reactions to the conversation.

This audio only version of our TV program "A Braver Arkansas," a TV partnership between Braver Angels Arkansas and Arkansas TV, Arkansas's public television network, was first aired August 4, 2026. A Braver Arkansas premiered Tuesday, July 7, 2026 at 6 p.m. on Arkansas TV. A new episode is shown every two weeks, and all episodes are available on demand after they air by searching for the show A Braver Arkansas in the Public Affairs section of the Arkansas TV YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@arkansastv.

In the final part of our conversation, Dr. Hampton turns to what she's learned about building community across division. She talks about what it means to make someone feel seen — a lesson she says she learned by living through three years when almost no one looked her in the eye — and about a moment decades later, at her 50th high school reunion, when a former classmate spoke up on her behalf and changed the room. Glen and April ask her directly about current divisions, including concerns in the Jewish community following the war in Gaza, and Hampton talks about the difficulty of hearing criticism of one's own community without immediately going on the defensive. She introduces the idea of a "bridge too far" — the point at which a community finally decides to act, as Little Rock's business leaders did after federal troops arrived in 1957 — and closes with her thoughts on hope, purpose, and what she'd say to people who feel too discouraged by today's politics to stay engaged.

In the second part of our conversation, Dr. Hampton traces her path from Central High to a career spent almost entirely helping other people find their footing. She talks about arriving at Earlham College and discovering, for the first time, that she wasn't the strongest student in the room — graduating as a C+ student and doubting she could go to graduate school at all. A conversation with a professor at the University of Chicago, and later a decision to leave her first marriage and move to New York on her own, opened a career in higher education administration that took her to Wisconsin, Iona College, and Southwestern University, mostly working with students who didn't fit traditional admissions criteria. Hampton then explains what drew her back to Arkansas after three decades away — the presidency of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation — and describes a major project she led: a four-year effort with UALR and the Japanese American National Museum documenting the wartime internment of Japanese Americans at Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas. She reflects on why she resists being called a leader, and what she thinks that word obscures about how change actually happens.

Glen and April talk with Dr. Sybil Hampton, who at 15 became one of a small group of Black students to integrate Little Rock Central High School in the years following the Little Rock Nine. Hampton describes the family and church network that prepared her for that role — her parents' work with the NAACP, her paper route for the Arkansas State Press, and a home life built around what she calls "the long game." She explains how the Little Rock School Board's pupil placement law forced Black students through a screening process before they could enroll, and how two board members opposed her admission after she was quoted defending fellow students. Hampton was placed as the only Black student in her grade, sat through three years in which almost no classmate spoke to her, and describes the silence as harder to endure than open hostility. She talks candidly about what carried her through it — her parents' insistence that she never cry at school, and the "foot soldier" framing her father gave her, distinguishing the quiet work of desegregation from the more visible roles of the Little Rock Nine.

This episode is an audio only version of our TV program "A Braver Arkansas," a TV partnership between Braver Angels Arkansas and Arkansas TV, Arkansas's public television network. It was first aired August 18, 2026. A Braver Arkansaspremiered Tuesday, July 7, 2026, at 6 p.m. on Arkansas TV. A new episode is shown every two weeks, and all episodes are available on demand after they air by searching for the show A Braver Arkansas in the Public Affairs section of the Arkansas TV YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@arkansastv.

In this episode, hosts April Chatham-Carpenter and Glen White open by demonstrating something Braver Angels calls the LAPP skills — Listen, Acknowledge/Agree, Pivot, Perspective — including an unscripted admission from Glen about times he's gotten it wrong, and a live role-play on a genuinely divisive topic that shows how the skills work (and don't) in real time. Then they sit down with Dawn Groover, a retired hospice nurse from Carroll County who found Braver Angels while she was losing the ability to talk to her own sons about politics. What she describes isn't a tidy fix — it's a slow, sometimes humbling process that changed how she listens, what she reads, and eventually where she'd place herself on the political spectrum. She's since helped start a new Braver Angels alliance in Northwest Arkansas. Glen and April close with a franker-than-usual discussion of the psychology behind why these conversations are so hard in the first place.

Check out Part 2 of our On The Other Hand podcast conversation with Dr. Daniel Fudge, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the Ozarks. In this half, Glen and April dig into Daniel's work with Civic Arkansas and the Arkansas Collegiate Civic Leadership Academy, including how he keeps a program built on non-partisan ground rules, working even with speakers as different as a former Republican governor and a sitting Democratic state senator. Daniel offers a practical, Stoic-influenced framework for civic engagement he uses with students, then turns to a topic with real teeth: how the 24/7 news cycle is reshaping political trust, and a specific approach he recommends for sorting reliable information from noise. The conversation closes on a debate worth hearing in full — a proposal that would change who gets to vote in Arkansas primaries, and what Daniel thinks it would mean for an already low-turnout state.