The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research can be actively taken up and transformed as it moves through social worlds. Drawing on (...) fieldwork with actors in education and juvenile corrections in the US Pacific Northwest, we found that they employed the biology of early life adversity not only to promote prevention but also to argue for changes within their own institutions that would allow them to better serve children and youth who have experienced adversity and trauma. Our study shows that biosocial narratives are neither inherently liberatory nor inherently oppressive but that the situated narrative choreographies in which they are enrolled are essential for their political effects. In our case, we show how these biosocial narratives have been articulated with knowledge and practices from restorative justice and trauma-informed care to reimagine the social meaning of the biology of early life adversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contemporary IlluminationsReading Donne's "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day through Three Twenty-First-Century PoemsTheresa M. DipasqualeIn his contribution to the 2017 volume John Donne and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Judith Scherer Herz, Jonathan F. S. Post explores "a nearly endless landscape of comparisons and contrasts" that unfolds between Stephen Edgar's 2008 poem "Nocturnal" and Donne's "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day."1 Post's essay illuminates what Calvin (...) Bedient, in the same volume, calls the "great glacier-gloom" of Donne's "Nocturnall," its devastated "solemnity."2 In doing so, Post renders largely moot many questions that have preoccupied critics of Donne's poem: whether or how this poem reflects Donne's experience; whether the woman lamented by the speaker is a fiction or a historical person lamented by the poet; and if the latter, whether the poem mourns the 1617 death of John Donne's wife, Anne More Donne; the 1627 death of Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford; or the Countess' near-fatal illness in 1612–13.3 These biographical and historical questions are not without value, but they draw the critic's attention away from more compelling questions regarding the "I" of the poem—a persona who claims not to be a person at all, but an inscription, a grave, "A quintessence" derived or "expresse[d]/... even from nothingnesse."4In this article, I widen and intensify the pool of light cast on Donne's "Nocturnall" by Post's presentist and intertextual analysis of Edgar's poem, examining three of the many other twenty-first-century poems that tap into Donne's poem, allude to it, quote it, adopt its structure, or respond to the anguish it expresses.5 Each of the three I discuss is [End Page 1] luminous in its own right but also a potent critical response to Donne's five-stanza poem. Each teaches something different about Donne's lyric. The poets whose work I consider—Liz Lochhead, Jay Wright, and Meena Alexander—all address twenty-first-century concerns; they grapple with questions and sorrows beyond the scope of Donne's conscious imagining yet latent in his poem. Each picks up where critics leave off when they "assume," as Alison R. Rieke notes, "that the speaker... is a husband or lover, possibly Donne, who experiences grief upon his wife's or mistress' death."6 Each takes up the challenge that Donne's persona issues when it denies that it is either "a man" (30) or any other living thing.In the first stanza of "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day," this anti-persona observes that "all" other things around it are "Dead and enterr'd" and "yet" that "all these seeme to laugh, / Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph" (8–9). If it is an incised text rather than a human being, the poem's "mee" can no more speak than laugh; it is as silent as the grave it marks or as the dead flesh interred there. Indeed, it goes on to claim that it is "every dead thing" and that love's alchemical "art" has "expresse[d] / A quintessence even from" this mass of nonliving objects, this "nothingnesse" (12, 14–15). Struggling to define its anti-essential essence, it declares itself a mass burial site: "I, by loves limbecke, am the grave / Of all, that's nothing" (21–22). An epitaph, dead things, nothingness, a grave: all these are silent. And yet, in Donne's poem, they strenuously assert their nonbeing; they pulse with a paradoxically audible sense of self. After "Compar'd with mee" in the final line of the opening stanza, the reader encounters sixteen additional instances of the first-person singular in the poem's forty-five lines: "my" appears once, "mee" five times, and "I" eleven times. And the "I" issues a directive to readers: commanding, in the opening line of stanza 2, "Study me then, you who shall lovers bee" (10). But those who obey this order, making themselves students of the poem's inscribed nothingness, find themselves dismissed in the poem's final stanza. Having insisted that its "Sunne" will never "renew... (shrink)

Academic integrity is a complex problem that challenges how we view action, intentions, research, and knowledge production as human agents working with computers. This paper proposes that a productive approach to support AI is found at the nexus of behavioural ethics and a view of hybrid app-human agency. The proposal brings together AI research in behavioural ethics and Rest’s four stages of ethical decision-making which tracks the development of moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation and finally moral action combined with (...) insights taken from Actor-Network Theory. This framework, bluntly named the Academic Integrity Model, positions AI as an effect of an entangled hybrid of human-technology actors moving through distinct but related steps towards ultimately mobilising ethical learning behaviours. This model highlights the importance of developing socio-techno responsibility in students and suggests that approaches to address academic integrity performances such as contract cheating, collusion and plagiarism should include considerations of the complex nature of app-centric students. (shrink)

This article addresses resilience in relation to climate change. Currently, our communities are not resilient to climate changes due to a strikingly limited political and scientific framing of climate change as solely a problem of emissions and individual behaviour. Owing to vulgarized interpretations of individual incentives for climate action, contextual barriers to action and the efficiency of individual climate action, this causes an action deficit on both collective and individual levels. We argue that a paradigm shift is needed in order (...) to engage with more adequate academic analysis and efficient policies. This new paradigm should focus on the capacities of societal institutions, which reflect precisely the level of climate resilience in a society. Resilience is not about societal and political immovability when faced with crisis of the dimensions of the climate crisis. It is about changing our society and politics and building institutions that enable us to properly respond to crisis. (shrink)

The authors examine the experiences and ideals of African American working-class mothers through 20 intensive interviews. They focus on the women's negotiations with racialized norms of motherhood, represented in the assumptions that legal marriage and an exclusively bonded dyadic relationship with one's children are requisite to good mothering. The authors find, as did earlier phenomenological studies, that the mothers draw from distinct ideals of community-based independence to resist each of these assumptions and carve out alternative scripts based on nonmarital relationships (...) with male partners and shared care of children. (shrink)

In an increasingly globalized food economy, local agri-food initiatives are promoted as more sustainable alternatives, both for small-scale producers and ecologically conscious consumers. However, revitalizing local agri-food communities in rural agro-industrial regions is particularly challenging. This case study examines Grant and Chelan Counties, two industrial farming regions in rural Central Washington State, distant from the urban fringe. Farmers in these counties have tried diversifying large-scale processing into organics and marketing niche and organic produce at popular farmers markets in Seattle about (...) 200 miles away. Such strategies invoke the question, “How are ‘local’ agri-food networks socially and geographically defined?” The meaning of what constitutes “local” and/or “sustainable” systems merits consideration in the linking of these rural counties with distant urban farmers markets. Employing historical, in-depth interview and survey research, we analyze production and consumption networks and the non-market systems that residents in these counties access for self-provisioning and food security. (shrink)

How flexible is language? To what extent does language 'absorb' individual differences, for example physical interaction, in knowledge acquisition within a domain? Current neuropsychological findings show that conceptual knowledge is embodied. When reading the word 'cinnamon', supportive neural activity includes brain areas usually engaged in perceptual tasks. Such findings suggest that perceptual and somatosensory processes influence the conceptual knowledge of the competent language user. Here, I explore what I name the 'plasticity' of language, to hone in on characteristics of language, (...) which, once language is in place, might lessen the necessity of physical interaction with the environment during knowledge acquisition. Linguistic knowledge is acquired by way of structures that contain representations of previous physical interactions. This could explain how a person's experiences transcend the boundary of the individual and meaningfully translate into linguistic knowledge accessible to others, as seems to be the case in so-called interactional expertise; expertise acquired without physical interaction. (shrink)

This article examines the ethical dilemmas that can occur due to university and industry cooperative arrangements. The values that Conant (1952) and Merton (1942) ascribed to university science are used as a measure of the evolving university-industry relations in the 1980s. Examples of the types of relations being forged are discussed and possible conflicts of interest are explored. The author argues that the goals of the university are and must remain different from those of industry for the good of the (...) entire society. The transformation of the university into a research institution for industry could result in the university not adequately training the scientists of tomorrow, and simultaneously, not discharging its duty to do basic research as it focuses on the more applied research that industry desires and funds. (shrink)

In this engaging and provocative study, John Peter Kenney examines the emergence of monotheism within Greco-Roman philosophical theology by tracing the changing character of ancient realism from Plato through Plotinus. Besides acknowledging the philosophical and theological significance of such ancient thinkers as Plutarch, Numenius, Alcinous, and Atticus, he demonstrates the central importance of Plotinus in clarifying the relation of the intelligible world to divinity. Kenney focuses especially on Plotinus's novel concept of deity, arguing that it constitutes a type (...) of mystical monotheism based upon an ultimate and inclusive divine One beyond description or discursive knowledge. Presenting difficult material with grace and clarity, Kenney takes a wide-ranging view of the development of ancient Platonic theology from a philosophical perspective and synthesizes familiar elements in a new way. His is a revisionist thesis with significant implications for the study of Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian thought in this period and for the history of Western religious thought in general. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and feminist posthumanists Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. We explore the implications of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ for early childhood education. With its emphasis on a moving away from the dominant (...) role of human vision in educational research we show how videoing and photographing works as an apparatus in an analysis of data from an inner-city school in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are struck by children’s seeing with the ‘eyes of their skin’ and ‘seeing’ with/in the world, as their obvious distress is felt when a small tree sapling has been mowed down in a nearby park. We analyse the event with the help of a variation on Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming-child’: ‘becoming-little’, and Anna Tsing’s ‘the arts of noticing’. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. We exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through 4 and 5 year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s temporal diffraction to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: the extractive, exploitative, colonising mining practices of White settlers. These are still part of the land on which the park was created but are in/visible beneath the ‘skin’ of the earth. (shrink)

A population at the intersection between criminality and victimhood, sex workers1 have contact with myriad service providers in the fields of mental health, housing, child welfare, and criminal jus...

Interactional expertise is here to stay. Undoubtedly, in some sense of the word, one can attain a linguistic expert level within a field without full scale practical immersion. In the context of the idea of embodied cognition, the claim is provocative. How can an interactional expert acquire full linguistic competence without the simultaneous bodily engagement and real life interaction needed to get the language right? How can one understand the concept of hammering if one has never seen a hammer or (...) felt the weight of the iron head on a fragile thumb? Here I will explore a strange and second-hand way in which bodily engagement could have an impact on our linguistic abilities; this is via the so called mirror neuron system. Since the mirror neuron system blurs the distinction between first and third person activity it can help us understand some of the enigmatic aspects of interactional expertise and pose further questions for research.Keywords: Mirror neurons; Interactional expertise; Contributory expertise; Embodied knowledge; Evolution. (shrink)

The third book of Lucretius' great poem on the workings of the universe is devoted entirely to expounding the implications of Epicurus' dictum that death does not matter, 'is nothing to us'. The soul is not immortal: it no more exists after the dissolution of the body than it had done before its birth. Only if this fact is accepted can men rid themselves of irrational fears and achieve the state of ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, on which the Epicurean (...) definition of pleasure was based. To present this case Lucretius deploys the full range of poetic and rhetorical registers, soberly prohibitive, artfully decorative or passionately emotive as best suits his argument, reinforcing it with vivid and compelling imagery. This new edition has been completely revised, with a considerably enlarged Commentary and a new supplementary introduction taking account of the great amount of new scholarship of the last forty years. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag kommentieren die Autor:innen zunächst den von Drerup entwickelten Orientierungsrahmen und folgen den basalen Schlüssen des Autoren, zeigen aber auch Leerstellen und eigene Schwerpunktsetzungen auf. Der kritische Teil des Beitrags konzentriert sich auf die Kommentierung der Leitlinien für die Unterrichtspraxis für Lehrkräfte, die von Johannes Drerup zur als Hilfestellung für Lehrkräfte als Basis für einen am Kontroversitätsgebot orientierten Unterricht entwickelt wurden. Das diesen Leitlinien inhärente Vorhaben Drerups, den zweiten Grundsatz des Beutelsbacher Konsens’ zu konkretisieren, wird aus Sicht der (...) Autor:innen diskutiert. Sie zeigen auf, welche Grenzen gültiger Meinungen in der Rezeption des Beutelsbacher Konsens’ bereits formuliert wurden, um „radikal offene Kontroversitätspostulate” zu vermeiden. Die Autor:innen argumentieren außerdem gegen das von Drerup angelegte Bildungsverständnis der Demokratieerziehung und dem darin angelegten Rollenkonzept von Lehrer:innen als wissen(schaft)svermittelnde Akteure, die im Zentrum des Unterrichts stehen. Diese zugrundeliegende Prämisse hat aus Sicht der Autor:innen ungünstige Konsequenzen und führt zu einer verengten Perspektive auf die Lehrkraft. Die Autor:innen plädieren vielmehr für eine subjektorientierte Bildung, die die Lernenden und ihre mitgebrachten Konzepte und Vorstellungen in den Mittelpunkt stellt und nicht die Rolle der Lehrkraft. So kann der Blick geweitet werden für die Potenziale, die die Demokratiebildung bereit hält. (shrink)

Jane Addams‘ Beitrag zur Philosophie des Pragmatismus wurde lange Zeit neben jenem der klassischen Vertreter*innen wie Peirce, James oder Dewey vernachlässigt. Auch wenn sich dies mittlerweile in eine anhaltende Addams-Rezeption gewandelt hat, so wird bis heute die Verbindung von Philosophie und Sozialer Arbeit, also der Bezug von Theorie und Praxis in Addams‘ Werk ausgeblendet, beziehungsweise ausschließlich getrennt verhandelt. Ihr Pragmatismus kann jedoch nur vor dem Hintergrund der Verschränkung von Philosophie und Sozialer Arbeit in seiner ganzen Tragweite erfasst werden. Eine verschränkte (...) Lesart macht deutlich, dass Addams ihren Pragmatismus dezidiert kritisch und orientiert am sozialen integralen Ideal der Demokratie ausrichtete. Dieser Begriff lässt sich mit zwischen den Konzepten von Solidarität und Vulnerabilität aufspannen. Diese fungieren als zwei zentrale Begrifflichkeiten in Addams‘ Sozialphilosophie, auch wenn diese nicht explizit benannt werden. Addams verknüpft darin nämlich einerseits Vulnerabilität und Solidarität miteinander und bringt beide vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Sozialphilosophie mit Demokratie in Verbindung. Darüber hinaus bringt Addams hier eine machtkritische Perspektive mit ein und ermöglicht damit andererseits auch Anknüpfungspunkte für heutige Konzepte zu Vulnerabilität und Solidarität. (shrink)

As políticas de privatização da educação e as formas pelas quais se materializam têm assumido contornos sem precedentes no tempo presente e são emblemas das mutações da face social do Estado no provimento e garantia do direito humano à educação, como consequência da ascensão e capilaridade dos princípios neoliberais no tecido social que se apoiam, por sua vez, na primazia do capital financeiro e na concentração da riqueza. No Brasil, o direito à educação é matéria do texto constitucional nos títulos (...) “II – Dos direitos e garantias fundamentais” e “VIII – Da ordem social” (BRASIL, 1988), além de outras disposições e tangencia, em maior ou menor medida, todas as legislações infraconstitucionais. Pelo fato de ser fundante e crucial para a garantia do direito humano à educação, a defesa da oferta, currículo e gestão da educação pela esfera pública constitui-se em uma pauta candente para as pesquisas acadêmicas e para o ativismo social, uma vez que se trata da defesa de direitos em risco e de contraposições às mecânicas de poder que contribuem para a corrosão da esfera pública. Balanços analíticos e interpretativos de evidências empíricas, realizadas por pesquisadores sobre o fenômeno da privatização da educação em diferentes países e territórios têm desvelado reconfigurações normativas, práticas gestoriais e desenhos curriculares elucidando a magnitude do alcance das políticas e práticas mercantis e privatistas no âmbito educacional, em escala mundial. As reformas educacionais de cariz privatista induzidas por atores privados têm sido orquestradas por regimes ou modelos de governança da educação denominados como “governo empresarial” por Dardot e Laval (2016), como gestão corporativa da educação (Croso e Magalhaes, 2016) ou ainda por parcerias público-privadas (Robertson e Verger, 2012). Em substância, os processos privatistas se concretizam mediante uma apropriação teórico-prática das políticas educacionais de forma orgânica e multiforme, incidindo sobre a gestão escolar; a formação de docentes e de gestores; assessorias pedagógicas; a oferta de tecnologias educacionais; os sistemas privados de ensino que padronizam projetos curriculares, dentre outros insumos pedagógicos, além do incentivo à programas de escolha parental que disputam os fundos públicos (Adrião, 2018). Essa miríade de formas de privatização da educação ocasiona efeitos nefastos à consolidação da educação como direito público e subjetivo, conquista consagrada em cartas constitucionais da grande maioria dos países do globo, dentre outros códigos legais. No Brasil, pesquisa financiada pela FAPESP e desenvolvida no âmbito da Rede Latino-Americana e Africana de Pesquisadores em Privatização da Educação (ReLAAPPe) sob coordenação geral de Theresa Adrião intitulada Mapeamento das Estratégias de Privatização da Educação Básica no Brasil e coordenada em nível estadual por pesquisadores/as de treze instituições públicas de pesquisa de diferentes regiões do país, mapeia e analisa tendências de privatização materializadas nas redes educacionais dos estados e do Distrito Federal, nas dimensões da oferta educativa, gestão educacional e do currículo (Adrião, 2018)[1]. A pesquisa elucidou a inserção de organizações privadas, fundamentalmente de natureza empresarial, na definição e ou operacionalização de programas educacionais sob a tutela dos entes subnacionais entre 2005 e 2018. Face ao avanço dos multifacetados formatos da privatização da educação, o presente dossiê revela elementos para a problematização do modus operandi do setor privado na escola pública em distintos contextos, de maneira a focalizar criticamente dimensões contíguas entre esta efeméride e a agenda globalmente estruturada para a educação (DALE, 2004). Trata-se de um esforço coletivo derivado de ações investigativas conectadas ao supracitado coletivo de pesquisa para dar visibilidade à teleologia empresarial que tem se reverberado na esfera pública, cuja aquiescência de governos ultraconservadores e determinações históricas da conjuntura atual têm encarregado de conformar. As análises aqui disponibilizadas constituem-se em importantes alternativas analíticas para dissipar narrativas hegemônicas que produzem colapsos na cidadania e nos Direitos Humanos dos estratos historicamente empobrecidos. (shrink)

In disciplines traditionally studying expertise such as sociology, philosophy, and pedagogy, discussions of demarcation criteria typically centre on how and why human expertise differs from the expertise of artificial expert systems. Therefore, the demarcation criteria has been drawn between robots as formalized logical architectures and humans as creative, social subjects, creating a bipartite division that leaves out animals. However, by downsizing the discussion of animal cognition and implicitly intuiting assimilation of living organisms to robots, key features to explain why human (...) expertise is crucially different from robot expertise are neglected. In the absence of clarification of fundamental cognitive principles of LOs, cognitively robots may appear persuasively closer to humans when they are in fact not. In this paper, I will discuss essential features of organic cognition to emphasise why animals are not like robots at all. The purpose is to add a third category when comparing humans and robots to make a tripartite division that consists of humans LOs, and machines. I will argue that LOs, adapted to ever-changing circumstances, are qualitatively different from robots. Humans, in the sense of belonging to the biological class of LOs, also share this central feature. In addition, however, humans alone possess and use language in a way that turns cognition from a predominantly online to off-line activity, 625–635 2002) that introduces truly abstract thinking. In the end I introduce the concept of ‘Linguification’ to dissect the particular mechanisms sustaining abstract thinking in the explanation of what makes humans distinct from robots and LOs. (shrink)

AI for social good is a thriving research topic and a frequently declared goal of AI strategies and regulation. This article investigates the requirements necessary in order for AI to actually serve a public interest, and hence be socially good. The authors propose shifting the focus of the discourse towards democratic governance processes when developing and deploying AI systems. The article draws from the rich history of public interest theory in political philosophy and law, and develops a framework for ‘public (...) interest AI’. The framework consists of (1) public justification for the AI system, (2) an emphasis on equality, (3) deliberation/ co-design process, (4) technical safeguards, and (5) openness to validation. This framework is then applied to two case studies, namely SyRI, the Dutch welfare fraud detection project, and UNICEF’s Project Connect, that maps schools worldwide. Through the analysis of these cases, the authors conclude that public interest is a helpful and practical guide for the development and governance of AI for the people. (shrink)

A prominent argument in the climate ethical literature is that individual polluters are responsible for paying the costs of climate change.1 By contrast, I argue that we have reason to excuse individual agents morally for their contributions to climate change. This paper explores some of the possible constraints agents may face when they try to avoid harming the climate, constraints that might be acceptable reasons for excusing people’s contributions to climate change. Two lines of arguments are discussed. The first concerns (...) the soft internal constraint: that democratic citizens do not experience their individual failures as failures per se. In other words, they do not psychologically ‘feel’ they are doing anything wrong.2 The second argument concerns the soft external constraint: a number of studies have shown that many consumers report that while they are concerned about environmental issues, they struggle to translate their concern into green acts.3 Put differently, while individual citizens may think they are morally obliged to avoid harming the climate, they struggle to fulfill these obligations. I argue that these constraints do not constitute reasons for not blaming individual agents. Instead, individual agents can be morally excused for contributing to climate change because external constraints on agency make climate change a case of imperfect duty, that is, a duty that is hard to fulfill. (shrink)

In the highly contentious abortion arena, the new oral abortifacient technology RU486 is one among many actors. This article offers an arena analysis of the heterogeneous constructions of RU486 by various actors, including scientists, pharmaceutical compa nies, medical groups, antiabortion groups, women's health movement groups, and others who have produced situated knowledges. Conceptually, we find not only that the identity of the nonhuman actor-RU486 -is unstable and multiple but also that, in practice, there are other implicated actors—the downstream users and (...) consumers of the technology. If we try to follow all the actors, we find a fuller and more historicized arena, and, ironically, we too can be construed as implicated actors in it. (shrink)

In this article, I present a philosophy-of-language assignment which emerges as the hero in a fable with the following trio of villains:ness, Parroting, and Boredom. Building on Penny Weiss’s “Making History of Ideas Classes Relevant”, and serving students taking an introductory course which covers Western theories of meaning, the “You are there” essay conquers Abstractness by requiring students to make a connection between the material and their lives, rendering theories relevant. It conquers Parroting by requiring them to apply theories to (...) new examples. And it conquers Boredom by producing papers whose originality can not only surprise but also remind the instructor reading them how meaningful the original theories are. In addition, I present a way to adapt the Weiss framework such that it’s inclusive, and discuss my experience piloting and negotiating the assignment. As appendices, I include materials which an instructor can use to scaffold the assignment. Note that beyond dispatching Abstractness, Parroting, and Boredom, the assignment invites collaborative/cooperative learning, fosters learner autonomy, and lends itself to online course delivery. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 1999 Parliament of the World’s ReligionsJim KenneyThe Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions (CPWR) is delighted to announce the convening of the 1999 Parliament of the World’s Religions, December 1–8, 1999, in Cape Town, South Africa. Nestled against Table Mountain and overlooking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Cape Town is home to many races, religious traditions, and cultural varieties. Religious, spiritual, cultural, and civic leaders, groups, (...) and communities there are working in partnership with CPWR to make the 1999 Parliament an unforgettable gift to the world.In the spring of 1988 the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions was formed with the commitment to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the first Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893. The 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions was one of the most extraordinary interreligious events of all time. Almost eight thousand participants came together to celebrate the commonalties and diversities of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions and to explore religious and spiritual responses to the critical issues that face the human community.Part of the legacy of the 1993 Parliament was a widespread conviction on the part of religious and spiritual leaders and participants from the grassroots that what had taken place in Chicago must continue. The parliament testified to a new spirit emerging around the world, characterized by new interreligious encounter, understanding, and cooperation. In the wake of the 1993 event, the council began to shape two initiatives designed to foster interreligious dialogue and shared action in metropolitan Chicago and around the globe. To highlight and punctuate these ongoing efforts, CPWR made a powerful commitment that, beginning in 1999 and every five years thereafter, a new parliament would be convened somewhere in the world.The diversity of the global community has never been more apparent. Today, metropolitan centers like Chicago exhibit an unprecedented variety of cultures. Advanced technology and communications have transformed the world into a global village. As a consequence, awareness of the richness of the human family in its racial, ethnic, cultural, social, religious, and spiritual dimensions is growing worldwide. The beauty and promise of this diversity is that we are mysteries and opportunities to one another. We are strangers who can become neighbors and friends. Simply in sharing who we are with each other, we all can broaden our horizons, deepen our [End Page 201] understandings, and get in touch with new sources of compassion and vision, courage and hope.At a Parliament of the World’s Religions, people from around the world—teachers, scholars, leaders, believers, and practitioners—come together to experience astonishing spiritual and cultural variety, to exchange insights, to share wisdom, to celebrate their unique religious identities; in short, to be amazed, delighted, and inspired. At the same time, participants wrestle with the critical issues facing the global community, learning about the world situation, and seeking the moral and ethical convergence that leads to shared commitment and action.The Parliament experience unfolds as a spectacular opening ceremony welcomes thousands of adherents of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. In the days that follow, participants eagerly engage in interreligious encounter and education through lectures and workshops, plenary sessions, and performances. In shared observances, meditation, and prayer, persons from all walks of life find inspiration and renewal. And in chance meetings in corridors and on the street, each finds that the world is paradoxically both a smaller and a richer place than she or he ever imagined.In a period of heightened spiritual interest and renewal, the 1999 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, South Africa, will offer countless opportunities for discovery and inquiry. Participants will be able to touch their own traditions at deeper levels. They can explore the origins, development, and perspectives of unfamiliar paths. They can compare and contrast beliefs and practices from widely separated places and times. Through lectures, workshops, and plenary sessions, through worship, prayer, or meditation, and through chance meetings with people from around the world, the parliament event will offer everything from occasions for personal spiritual growth and exposure to transformative approaches to social engagement to new friendships and an... (shrink)