Wanda Krause
Wanda Krause is currently assistant professor and coordinator of the Gulf Studies Program at Qatar University.
Before coming to Qatar, I taught Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. I hold a PhD (2007) in Politics of the Middle East from the Department of Politics at University of Exeter, UK. I wrote my dissertation on Arab Gulf…
Bye-bye 2012 Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Start Loving The Apocalypse
It is about 1994, picture a 15 year old Hendrik, bending over his bikes handlebar cycling against the wind in flat and rectangular reclaimed Netherlands. I’m cycling with gloom, it is the season, the Dutch autumn is dark, dreary and wet. But that is not the only thing bringing me down on this day. I just read that the world is going to drastically change in 1997, major disasters are going…
Business as an Agent of World Benefit
“Awe is What Moves Us Forward”
A Special Gift from a Guiding Light
It was perhaps 20 years ago, yet I remember my first meeting with Willis Harman in vivid color. Fresh out of my doctoral dissertation research on the idea of Appreciative Inquiry, I was taking the next big step, working on an interdisciplinary understanding of the relationship between images of the future and human…
Occupy the US: Musings on Horizontal Decision-Making and Bureaucracy
The year 2011 has breathed new life into horizontal models of democratic decision-making. With the rise of the 15 May movement and the Occupy movement horizontal decision-making became one of the key political structures for organising responses to the current global economic crisis. While this decision-making process has arguably never been as widely practiced as it is today, it has also never…
Marianne Maeckelbergh
Marianne Maeckelbergh is lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, Netherlands. She has 15 years experience as an activist, organising and facilitating participatory democracy.
She is the author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy.
Charter for Engaged Spirituality in the 21st Century
Introduction
Scholars of religion point to “the Axial Age” (roughly the first millennium bce) as the period of the dawn of the great classical religions that we know today. These days, it’s often suggested that we have entered a second great “turning on the religious axis,” a Second Axial Age. If the first brought the individual to the fore, the latter…
The End of the Classroom
From LeMonde, November 14, 2012, article by Maryline Baumard
"And the window panes return to sand/The ink returns to water/The desks return to trees...": pictured as a schoolboy's daydream by French poet Jacques Prévert in Page of Writing, in 1945, this process of physical breakdown is now becoming a reality. The disintegration of what seemed to be the very heart of the…
The Oneness Declaration: Sixteen Hallmarks of the New Consciousness
1. I am part of the world. The world is not outside of me, and I am not outside of the world. The world is in me, and I am in the world.
2. I am part of nature, and nature is part of me. I am what I am in my communication and communion with all living things. I am an irreducible and coherent whole with the web of life on the planet.
3. I am part of society, and society…
Embodied Spirituality, Now and Then
The Living Body
Embodied spirituality regards the body as subject, as the home of the complete human being, as a source of spiritual insight, as a microcosm of the universe and the Mystery, and as pivotal for enduring spiritual transformation.
Body as subject: To see the body as subject means to approach it as a living world, with all its interiority and depth, its needs and desires, its…
The Future of Religion: Four Scenarios, One Dream
Religious globalization, new religious movements, transnational religions, global proselytism, multiple religious identities, ecumenical services, religious syncretism, secular and postsecular spiritualities—all these are among the many remarkable trends that shape the religious landscape of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Despite the rampant materialism still dominant in an…