Don’t build a moat around your mind.

Security interests often drive homebuilding and community planning. Gated communities keep us in, and them out, or so we hope. Electronic security systems protect us against intruders (and preoccupy police who answer frequent false alarms when they should be patrolling streets). High fences, rear garages, more locks on doors and bars on windows: Are we safer for all these measures, or do they only feed our anxiety?

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When we worry that our stuff is under assault, that we might lose it to vandals who want to steal what is ours and leave us little, we tend to build defenses stronger. Sadly, we become in doing so more aware of our vulnerability and feel more, not less, insecure.

Among the losses in our social security efforts is exposure to new people – strangers who may be different from us and might expand our own lives by becoming friends. Welcoming strangers in a virtue in every religion. What about welcoming ideas different from our own?

Insulating our minds from “dangerous” ideas closes us off to surprises that might enrich and expand our lives. Do you only feel your mind things it already finds tasty? Why not challenge your intellectual palate this year?

Read something new regularly from someone with radically different views than yours. Add a news channel or a paper or a web site that has a different slant. Acquaint yourself with ideas that will stress your own, instead of only reinforcing them. Invite conversations with people whose “otherness” is apparent. Engage in ventures that push your comfort zone.

Civil wars exist everywhere, not just in Iraq. We are too divided along lines of ideology – whether liberal or conservative, evangelical or mainline, Texas or A&M. Our religious communities reflect homogeneity in worldview as much as skin color or education or zip code. Tensions mount as we keep others at a distance.

One antidote to civil war is civility. Civility does not mean giving up strong convictions, letting your culture get crushed in a blender, or yielding core beliefs to syrupy spirituality. It means having lively exchanges that transform all involved.

Surely the God who made the world with such colorful imagination would not want us to live in ghettoes of black and white ideas. In the interest of neighborliness, why not make your mind more hospitable this year? Strange things might happen by welcoming strangers.