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We Need to Build

Field Notes for Diverse Democracy

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We Need to Build

By: Eboo Patel
Narrated by: Vikas Adam
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About this listen

“You don’t create societies by burning things down, You create societies by building things.”

From the former faith adviser to President Obama comes a fresh manifesto for those who seek to promote positive change and build a more diverse and just democracy


The goal of social change work is not a more ferocious revolution; it is a more beautiful social order. It is harder to organize a fair trial than it is to fire up a crowd, more challenging to build a good school than it is to tell others they are doing education all wrong. But every decent society requires fair trials and good schools, and that’s just the beginning of the list of institutions and structures that need to be efficiently created and effectively run in large-scale diverse democracy.

We Need to Build is a call to create those institutions and a guide for how to run them well.

In his youth, Eboo Patel was inspired by love-based activists like John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Badshah Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Their example, and a timely challenge to build the change he wanted to see, led to a life engaged in the particulars of building, nourishing, and sustaining an institution that seeks to promote positive social change—Interfaith America. Now, drawing on his twenty years of experience, Patel tells the stories of what he’s learned and how, in the process, he came to construct as much as critique and collaborate more than oppose.

His challenge to us is clear: those of us committed to refounding America as a just and inclusive democracy need to defeat the things we don’t like by building the things we do.

©2022 Eboo Patel (P)2022 Beacon Press
Christianity Civics & Citizenship Politics & Government

Critic Reviews

"A centrist call to actively build—rather than passively critique—civic institutions."
Kirkus Reviews

“Eboo Patel holds a singular place in American life and thought. His expertise on the pluralistic religious reality of twenty-first-century life has influenced virtually every major field—from education to the workplace to political policy and culture. We Need to Build comes at precisely the right moment to become a key handbook for navigating the transformative healing—the building—that our world of fracture and disarray so urgently demands.”
—Krista Tippett, author of Being Wise and host of On Being

“Eboo Patel has long served as one of America’s most trusted and impactful leaders for religious pluralism. In his latest book, We Need to Build, Patel provides an invaluable and must-read road map filled with practical wisdom and timely prescriptions to help all of us better build the thriving organizations and communities and healthy democracy we so desperately need.”
—Rev. Adam Taylor, president of Sojourners and author of A More Perfect Union

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