“A HOUSE DIVIDED UNTO ITSELF CAN NOT STAND.”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The series, “Bridging the Growing Divide”, brings together speakers from opposite sides of the most pressing issues of our day, including religion, medicine, politics, law, the media, business, and the environment. What brings the speakers to the shared podium is the fundamental human respect that they have, nevertheless, been able to maintain for each other within our increasingly in-human and polarized times.
During their offerings, the speakers will share their respective and respected angles of vision, in order to build, thereby, that precious middle-ground upon which alone we can stand.
Those angles of vision, complemented by perspectives from the audience, will be inscribed on the Concord Covenant. A working document, the covenant offers best practices, sensibilities, and thoughts with respect to the central problems, challenges, and opportunities of our time. In the spirit of applied American Studies, the series would thus move beyond, we trust, memorable evenings alone.
The original Concord School of Philosophy was devoted to the “art of conversation”, as a cultural impulse, whereby dedicated minds arrived, together, at insights greater than any one individual alone could attain.
Since our first gatherings in 1979, the promise of “Conversational Philosophy” has been carried on into our day and age. Upon it we build.
“To barely exist through these years was something; to gain a hearing was more; to adhere steadily to a high and heroic purpose was more; to be spiritual, without being religious in the sectarian sense, was still more; and, through all these years, to do honest work, to steadily uphold the interests of intellectual and spiritual truth, in the larger sense, has been to do what has never before been done in the history of American thought and letters.”
1884 Boston Herald editorial.
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For more information, contact: Susan Clarke at info@concord-ium.us