What is Don’t Hold Me To This?

A new conclusion seems to have become fixed in our political, cultural, moral, and theological landscape. Have you felt that change? It has felt to me like an ever-shrinking narrowness, a tightening dogmatic exclusivity across all the important domains of our conversations. If you have ever self-censored a question, a remark, or a curiosity for fear of being branded right-wing or left-wing, liberal or conservative, traditional or progressive, then you’ve experienced this New Conclusion. Its demands are simple and unbending: you must discard those with whom you disagree—the foundation of our friendships must be an unshifting, lock-step agreement in the minutest of details on an endless set of topics. And if we look at the surface of our public discourse as displayed most clearly across the corporate news media, we could be forgiven for thinking the New Conclusion has become carved in stone, as rigid and merciless as any old dogmatism.

But what if it’s not true?  What if this new state of being is not as necessary as it asserts itself to be? What if we don’t have to accept the rules and boundaries it seeks to impose? What if our political, cultural, moral, and theological conversations and relationships can occur on a level beneath any of our conclusions?  What if can talk freely and creatively, with imagination in our hearts, with improvisation at our core, with human commitment as our catalyst and with friendship as our guide and goal? What if we can disagree and still be the deepest of friends?

Don’t hold me to this is a cultivation of that sort of conversation, and an invitation into the possibility of that kind of friendship. The form is pretty simple: we will publish a written piece every other week (maybe prose, maybe poetry, maybe something else), and then post a conversation responding to that written piece the following week. You can find the written pieces in your inbox by subscribing at Substack, or you can find them here at the website. You can listen to or watch (yep, there’s video!) the podcast on these platforms:

And anywhere you can give us a like or a follow, please do, and a thousand thanks in advance for doing it.

An episode talking about our aims and aspirations for Don’t Hold Me To This is available now.

Thanks for taking part,

Jeremy Reeves
for Don’t Hold Me To This

Listen to or watch the conversation that is companion to this piece.