Dear everyone, you are cordially invited to come to my house for dinner.

For a while now I’ve been pondering how I can get more engaged here in my town, a subject that TBH I talk and write about far more than I actually do. I wanted to take action. At just the right moment, I stumbled across The Lovable City, a new initiative of the nonprofit Civic Dinners that I wrote about in This Is Where You Belong.

Even people who like to harangue each other on the internet may drop their weapons when t...