JAB resilience tour in Israel with former Pro Basketball player Jared Armstrong
Prohuman Foundation advisor Jared Armstrong joined Faune Riggin on Real Talk with Riggin to discuss his JAB Resilience Tour in Israel, where the former pro basketball player is building courts and running camps to encourage friendship across communities and provide kids with joy amid wartime chaos. He highlights basketball’s universal appeal and shared plans to expand the nonprofit’s work globally.
ARMSTRONG: I think basketball and sports are the best unifiers in the world. It’s something that’s not political. It’s also something where you have to come together for a common goal. It doesn’t matter your skin color, whether you’re white, black, Christian, Muslim, Jewish. . . when you’re on a basketball court, on a soccer field, on a football field, you guys have one objective, and that’s to win.
The Great Books and Great Books: An Education for Liberty
In Civitas Outlook, Pano Kanelos portrays the Western tradition as a living, contentious conversation that cultivates intellectual humility, critical self-reflection, and the virtues of liberty by inviting readers to join an ongoing dialogue instead of mastering a fixed body of knowledge.
For the Western tradition, rightly understood, is not a political project. It is an epistemological one. It is a mode of inquiry—a sustained, centuries-long conversation about what it means to be human. The books are not the tradition itself; they are its record, its artifacts, and its interlocutors. They are how we enter what earlier generations called the Republic of Letters—a kind of city of the mind in which human beings, separated by time and place, nonetheless speak to one another.
And it is a cacophonous, polyphonic conversation. Aristotle sits uneasily beside Francis Bacon, who seeks to supersede him. Karl Marx and Adam Smith square off. The tradition persists not by consensus but by contestation, reinterpretation, and renewal. Its structure is dynamic, unstable, and alive. It represents not a settled body of knowledge, but an ongoing struggle to understand an infinitely complex cosmos.
Listen First, Talk Later: A Tactical Guide to Peace
Kent Lenci shared his story with fellow Prohuman Foundation advisor Michael Lee on Lee’s podcast, When we Disagree, about successfully de-escalating a volatile public confrontation over politics through patience, curiosity, and the surprisingly disarming process of working together to find time for private dialogue.
LENCI: So the task, it turns out, of communicating by email and just shooting messages back and forth ended up being, I think, a really critical component of our ultimately successful conversation.
I think what was most important was that now we were working on something together. It seems mundane and you wouldn’t imagine that it could be perceived as a common enterprise. But we were trying to schedule a meeting. . .
So the back and forth that had ended with him literally yelling about me transitioned really quickly to, ‘Oh, I can’t do that because I got this,’ and ‘oh, so sorry. I’m busy then,’ and, ‘best regards’ and ‘sincerely,’ and ‘I hope we can make this happen.’
What Song Would You Want to Be Remembered By?
Prohuman Foundation advisor Shaka Mitchell hosted a live recording of the Come Together Music podcast at the Tomorrow City USA conference. He invited Mayor Keith James of West Palm Beach, FL, and retired Los Angeles County Fire Battalion Chief Chad Sourbeer to share unexpected favorite songs and tracks they’d like to be remembered by, revealing personal stories of independence, service, legacy, and the power of music to uncover common ground and deepen community ties.
MITCHELL: Nearly 40% of Gen Z says that they do not want to go home for family holidays because they’re anxious about having political conversations with their family. I thought. . . we’ve got to do something about this.
Some friends started getting together for something we called ‘song swap.’ It’s not really a pathbreaking idea. We got together and we listened to music. . .
So, music was bringing us together. But. . . I found out that we were learning more than just new music. We were learning about one another. When we asked for a song category about family, I heard my friend Dave talk about what it was like to drop his baby girl off at college. When we talked about a certain instrument, I heard my friend Matt talk about the relationship he had with his father.
I really believe that music helps us find deeper connection with one another. It’s such a sticky element. . . It helps us recall memories. It helps us recall even emotions.
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Opinions expressed in selected articles do not necessarily reflect those of the Prohuman Foundation. We value diverse perspectives that enrich our understanding of topics close to our mission: to promote the foundational truth that we are all unique individuals, united by our shared humanity.