An Uncommon Conversation
Rachel Stark, NCAA
They come together, even though they are so far apart.
An advocate from a lesbian rights group. A leader in a Christian sports ministry. The chief diversity officer from the largest university in the country. An athletics director from an evangelical Christian college. A transgender swimmer. And nearly 45 others.
Their paths converge, if only for a couple of days, on the campus of Houghton College, a small Christian school located in the rolling countryside of western New York. It is an unlikely setting for an unlikely undertaking.
“I believe this conversation is one of the most important conversations going on in our country today,” Houghton President Shirley Mullen says, welcoming the group to the third iteration of an NCAA program called Common Ground. “That is a big claim, I know. But let me explain.”
The participants listen from their seats at round tables, clustered inside a field house on a corner of the campus. Freshly penned name tags display their school or organization and preferred gender pronouns.
We are in a culture, Mullen tells the group, that knows how to launch inflammatory tweets into cyberspace, but not how to stay at the table and engage with each other. Her hope: that this conversation can be a model for other conversations in society.
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