Publication

In this essay, Trustworthy Leadership: Can We Be the Leaders We Need Our Students to Become?, Diana traces a career of insight that speaks to the honest development of authentic and integral students, educators, leaders, and diverse communities. As well, she unfolds the lessons and challenges that inevitable conflict brings to such educational communities. Rarely do educators weave such vast experience with such a deep mind.

A welcome to the Fetzer Institute's retreat center, with essays on the seasons by author Parker Palmer.

This essay was written by Carol S. Pearson out of concern about the great challenges facing the United States and the world today. Its purpose is to identify the strengths that can help us tap into what is best about us, and guard against our weaknesses, so we can use our power as wisely as possible and in ways that promote the common global good. To do this will take the maturing of the American dream.

In this essay the renowned religious historian Elaine Pagels provides a convincing exploration of the ways we have interpreted equality as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. More than ever, she says, we need to ask, who is included in the American dream? What do we make of this dream in a waking reality? How shall we take this vision to shape our sense of who we are — as a people, a nation, a community?

Author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam, Nomani shares her perspective on realizing an Islamic dream that creates progressive, inclusive, compassionate, and peaceful communities. “We have abandoned spiritual enlightenment for ritual prayer and dogma. This is a struggle that has challenged all faiths….It is time,” she says, “that we rise to a higher expression of Islam, create a new reality, and reclaim the principles of social justice, women's rights, pluralism, and tolerance with which Islam was born.”

What does it mean in this day and age to explore a global dream? John Paul Lederach, professor of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame, writes a rare travelogue reflecting on what it means to be fully engaged in the world. "My vocation falls somewhere between a Hopi rainmaker and VanGogh's Potato Planter,"  he writes. His travelogue carries within it many touchstones that will open your heart and mind.

As the inaugural essay in the series, Jacob Needleman asks, "Then, what of the American dream? Is it a vision or an illusion? Do we need to deepen this dream or awaken from it? Can anyone doubt the importance of this question? In one form or another, it is a question that has been gathering strength for decades, and it now stands squarely in the path not only of every American, but, such is the planetary influence of America, of every man and woman in the world. What really is America? What does America mean?”

This essay by Gerald G. May is a compelling journey to the perennial bottom of who we are, at our best and our worst, and how to use that knowledge to live together from a place of spirit and compassion.

Founder of the Wildflowers Institute and 2006 Purpose Prize Fellow Hanmin Liu writes about the often invisible strengths and resources in communities, what he calls "informal capital." Read more about the models and processes that support communities in their efforts toward realizing their goals and their dreams.