Common Tables
December 22, 2008
What would you do if you wanted to, say, help everyone in the world to get along? If you were Dave Corey, you would invite them to dinner.
The Colorado man, along with his wife, Kay, started Common Tables a year and a half ago. The plan is to make it easy for people of different faiths or belief systems to meet four times over six months to share a meal. (Each group contains four units, which can be an individual or a couple. Meals are at participants' homes. ) Currently operating in over 100 cities, Common Tables collects names of interested people, and waits until they have the diversity they're looking for. (Of course they have to live close enough to each other for this all to make sense.)
Why supper? "There's just something magical about breaking bread together," Corby says. "It's true in every religious tradition I know of, an importance placed on getting to know each other. It forces us to look first at our similarities, because everybody eats. It's starting from a place of recognizing our similarities rather than our differences."
Common Tables provides conversational guidelines but, Corey says, "Very few of the groups even use them. When they get together, they know what they want to talk about."
Mealtimes Matter Video
from Miriam Weinstein
About Miriam
Miriam Weinstein is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. As a journalist, she has won several awards from the New England Press Association. Her work has appeared in Boston Magazine, the Boston Globe magazine, Hope, and ParentSource. A former staff member for North Shore Weeklies and freelancer for Essex County Newspapers, she writes restaurant reviews and food columns as well as features on a wide variety of subjects. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with her husband and has two grown children.
The Surprising Power of Family Meals
In her book, The Surprising Power of Family Meals, Miriam Weinstein shows how this basic human institution helps nourish and strengthen our families today.