They Sang with a Thousand Tongues: The Poetry of Diversity
By Bayo Akomolafe
Let me tell you a story about how the world began. I promise you the story is not completely untrue.
Yoruba elders say that when the world began, there was only sky and water. The Supreme Being, Olórun, ruled the firmaments, while the Divine Feminine, Olokun, was master of the raging seas. One day, Obatala, a son of Olórun, grew restless and sought to create a world…
To Change Everything, It’s Going To Take Everything We’ve Got
by John Foran, via Common Dreams
OK, here’s the idea. We’re in a crisis so deep, so knotted, so unprecedented, and so urgent that, well, we have to change everything, pretty much. Or else.
And there’s no one to do it for us. There’s just us. Just-us. Justice.
And who are we? We are everyone, everywhere, who wants to do this. Everyone, everywhere, who cares what happens to everything—each…
Civic Enterprise | Rethinking the Think Tank
Why Washington’s stuffiest institutions need to reconnect with America.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter and Ben Scott, via Washington Monthly
The debilitating weakness in our democracy today is the growing disconnect between government and citizens. Most Americans now believe that our political system is broken. It is indifferent to the views of the majority. It is captured by monied interests. And…
Transpartisan | A Working Definition
via Mediator's Foundation
Partisan: adopting as one’s own a single political party’s point of view on virtually all public policy issues and aggressively defending it
Bipartisan: oriented towards finding consensus or agreement between two major political parties (e.g., in the USA, the Democratic and Republican Parties) with little or no interest in other perspectives…
We Were Global Citizens Before We Were Born
by Mark Gerzon, from Kosmos Journal
The truth is: we were already global citizens before we were born. It began with our own DNA. The genes that provide the blueprint for our bodies are more than 99% identical to the genes of all other humans. Genomic research has now established exactly who our ancestors are and where they came from. Our genes are, in fact, an evolutionary “Global Positioning…
Editorial | Activists for the Evolution of Life
As I look out my window I see a vision of natural beauty that takes my breath away. There’s a special tree I have watched grow from a little twig to a mass of green foliage quivering in the wind with squirrels running up and down the trunk. A little chipmunk scurries into the woodpile outside my door every now and then and sometimes a little bunny, too. My beloved temple dogs, Sophia and Willy,…
New Governance | The Future of Power
Dear Reader,
What is good governance? Wouldn’t it be participatory, transparent, responsive, and tolerant of different views? And in using its power and authority to shape the institutions that regulate societies, wouldn’t extreme economic disparity be seen as a disadvantage?
Maybe questions like these seem naïve. Do we even ask them anymore? It seems increasingly clear that if we want to…
Extreme inequality as the antithesis of human rights
by Philip Alston, via Open Democracy
A world in which the richest 1% owns 48% of global wealth, and in which this imbalance continues to accelerate, is obscene. Radical inequality inevitably sustains extreme poverty just as surely as it sustains extreme wealth. And extreme poverty is best defined as a condition in which the vast majority of human rights cannot possibly be realized. In other…
Call for Proposals | Kosmos 2016 Seed Grants – Igniting Civic Engagement
Dear Reader,
Kosmos is pleased to announce the second year of the Kosmos Seed Grant initiative. Two Kosmos Seed Grants of $2,500 each will be awarded in Spring 2016 to individuals or organizations working to advance social change, specifically by encouraging and enabling civic engagement.
Guidelines for applicants are as follows:
Any (501-C-3) non-profit organization, registered in the…
Call for Proposals | Kosmos 2016 Seed Grants – Igniting Civic Engagement
Dear Reader,
Kosmos is pleased to announce the second year of the Kosmos Seed Grant initiative. Two Kosmos Seed Grants of $2,500 each will be awarded in Spring 2016 to individuals or organizations working to advance social change, specifically by encouraging and enabling civic engagement.
Guidelines for applicants are as follows:
Any (501-C-3) non-profit organization, registered in the…