Blog

System Failure, System Reboot

By August 24, 2011

By Edd Conboy Systems thinking has become one important way of making sense of experience in all its complexity. So much so that we sometimes forget that a “system” is a construct, and not some sort of independent “fact out there” sculpting and defining those experiences. Thinking in terms of systems does have the advantage…

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Endings and Beginnings

By August 16, 2011

By Chris Phillips “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” —T. S. Eliot The very first Socrates Café dialogue I held at Collage II coffee house in 1996 in Montclair, New Jersey, was on the question,…

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A Fundamental Review of Fundamentalism

By August 1, 2011

By Pia Infante Andrew Himes recently published a fascinating look at his family’s history and relationship with religious fundamentalism called Sword of the Lord. With the notion of fundamentalism, in recent years, being associated primarily with terrorism or irrationality, this complex and nuanced dialectic about it, from the perspective of a son and grandson of…

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Empires of Illusion

By July 27, 2011

By Les Adler A quirky, but striking piece of public art, leavened with a twist of Central European humor, marks a downtown street corner in the Slovakian capital city of Bratislava. One comes across it suddenly: a life-sized bronze figure in a hard hat or helmet, head resting on hands, partly emerged from a man-hole…

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If Philanthropy is Strategic What About Nonprofits?

By July 12, 2011

By Jill Blair On June 22nd Chris Gates, Executive Director of PACE (Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement), wrote a blog post for TWI in which he argued that in this “new world” of “strategic philanthropy” nonprofits need to approach funders with an appreciation for their experience in and knowledge of the field – to consider…

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