When Eleanor Roosevelt took the chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1946, she was asked to produce an international bill of rights from a commission of 18 member states, several of whom actively disagreed about whether rights were individual or collective, what counted as a right, and whether the document should be legally binding or aspirational.

A local church needed to fund and build a new sanctuary entirely from congregational donations — the kind of decision that normally dies in endless committee meetings where everyone has an opinion and no one can agree.