John Morehead
For over twenty years, John Morehead has been sitting down with the people most Americans are taught to avoid: Muslims, Latter-day Saints, Pagans, Satanists, and plenty of others outside his own Evangelical Christian tradition. He didn't do it to win arguments or convert anyone. He did it because he believes real trust only gets built face to face, and he's spent two decades proving that even the deepest religious divides can hold a real friendship.
John is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy and hosts Multifaith Matters, a podcast built on the same conviction: understanding someone doesn't require agreeing with them. His research digs into why trust is so hard to build across belief, pulling from psychology and neuroscience as much as theology, and he teaches at Multnomah Biblical Seminary and William Jessup University. He's written and edited several books on interfaith engagement, including A Charitable Orthopathy and Encountering New Religious Movements.
John co-hosts Can We Trust Each Other? because he's convinced the skill of staying at the table with people you disagree with isn't just a religious skill. It's the one skill this moment is short on everywhere.
Charles Randall Paul
Randall Paul spent his first career building things you could see: he developed over forty commercial real estate projects worth more than $450 million. Then he walked away from it to study something harder to build: trust between people who can't stand each other's politics or religion. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago writing about how to respectfully fight over things that can't be resolved, which is either a strange career pivot or exactly the right training for what he does now.
Randall is the founder and president of the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, where he's spent over two decades running what he calls Heart & Mind Conversations: real, high-stakes dialogues between people who fundamentally disagree, held everywhere from Utah to Russia to the Middle East. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has served as a lay pastor, he built his life's work around engaging critics of his own faith as seriously as he engages critics of anyone else's. He created a framework called the Way of Openness, built out of one core idea: you can hold your convictions and stay open to somebody else's at the same time.
Married more than fifty years, with five kids and sixteen grandkids, Randall has had a lot of practice staying in relationship with people who see the world differently than he does. He co-hosts Can We Trust Each Other? because he thinks that skill is the one democracy runs on.