Your One Wild and Precious Life: End of Year Campaign
We are full of wonder and gratitude to announce that, due to the generosity of our most committed donors, we have already received over $8,000 in gifts, which bring us more than halfway to our end of year campaign goal of $14,000. We need you to join us in building a culture of dialogue and healing in the public sphere. Your contribution makes you a standard-bearer in the cause to build a culture of encounter and mutual respect.
Our theme for Festival of Friendship 2021
Photo courtesy of: Sister Thea Bowman Cause for Canonization
by Suzanne M. Lewis
We are full of wonder and gratitude to announce that, due to the generosity of our most committed donors, we have already received over $8,000 in gifts; this brings us more than halfway to our end of year campaign goal of $14,000. We need you to join us in fostering dialogue and healing in the public sphere. Your contribution makes you a standard-bearer in the cause to build a culture of encounter and mutual respect.
We have found that the best tools for fostering true dialogue and effecting real healing within our broken culture are humanities education and free cultural events.
Humanities Education
Despite an overall increase of 29% in bachelor’s degrees awarded over the ten-year period ending in 2016, the steady decline in the number of humanities degrees conferred has only accelerated. In 1967, 17.2% of all degrees conferred were in the humanities. By 2014, that figure was down to 6.1%. Why should this precipitous drop concern us?
The very name “humanities” provides the answer: the various subjects that make up the humanities provide a curriculum for becoming more human. The more we lose touch with the humanities, the more we lose access to certain dimensions of our own humanity.
“Where scientific observation addresses all phenomena existing in the real world, scientific experimentation addresses all possible real worlds, and scientific theory addresses all conceivable real worlds, the humanities encompass all three of these levels and one more, the infinity of all [imaginable] worlds.” ― biologist, Edward O. Wilson
The humanities teach us how to extract and absorb facts from a document, how to interpret data, particularly in relation to the whole field of knowledge, and how to evaluate whether a claim is true or false; they also show us how to formulate an argument and find evidence to support our own claims; most importantly, they put us in conversation with others who grapple with the same human questions that preoccupy us, expose us to other perspectives, and open us to continuous learning – even teaching us how to learn from those with whom we disagree.
A quick visit to a handful of social media platforms, or a cursory scan of the headlines for competing news outlets, provides overwhelming evidence of how the tragic decrease in humanities education has had devastating effects on our public discourse.
“Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.” ― English literature scholar, Stefan Collini
With these considerations in mind, Revolution of Tenderness has founded Convivium: A Journal of Arts, Culture, and Testimony, Convivium Press, and the Festival of Friendship. Each of these initiatives provides educational tools and programming to introduce humanities education into the public sphere. We sell our journal, and all other educational resources, at cost so that they may be accessible to the greatest number of people. Our free cultural programming offers content from pre-eminent scholars and experts while modeling the practice of respectful dialogue.
Free Cultural Events
The annual Festival of Friendship, our largest free and open cultural event, contributes a celebratory dimension to our educational work. This year, though we had to move the Festival online, we had nearly 1,300 attendees, a new record for us!
While our printed texts, videos, and other materials provide crucial substance, our events confer a body with living, human features. Without this living body, learning becomes a dry and toilsome duty, a “prize” to capture and use, or a meaningless intellectual exercise. Instead, our free events serve as life-giving feasts for the human heart and mind.
Our next exciting project will involve a commission for a new piece of music from composer Richard Danielpour, who spoke at the Festival of Friendship last month. The projected performance will take place in early 2021. We’ll provide further details as they become available.
Our working hypothesis, that “all things cry out in unison for one thing: Love” (13th Century friar and poet, Jacopone da Todi), allows us to “assume an extended shared world” (Stefan Collini) and meet anyone and everyone with curiosity and an embrace. Our festive gatherings serve as laboratories, where speakers and performers present their findings and launch new experiments in human flourishing.
Your generous support for Revolution of Tenderness makes you a creative protagonist who generates a culture of dialogue in the public arena. Please contribute to our end of year campaign today. Revolution of Tenderness is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. All donations are tax-deductible.
The Festival of Friendship as a Courtyard of the Gentiles
“The Courtyard of the Gentiles calls for the sharing of a common thirst in a universal, comprehensive, catholic perspective: the opening to each other as [what gives] dynamism to human life.” He called for, “respectful encounters, in sincere dialogue and in a passionate search.”
Road to the Temple, by Victor Zaretsky
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI announced a new project, very dear to his heart, called the “Courtyard of the Gentiles.” His desire was to open a space for dialogue among peoples of different faiths or no faith. He described the modern world as "a windowless building of cement, in which man controls the temperature and the light; and yet, even in a self-constructed world, we draw upon the 'resources' of God, which we then transform into our own products. What can we say then? It is necessary to reopen the windows, to see again the vastness of the world, of heaven and earth, and to learn to use all things in a good way." This statement expresses our own vision at Revolution of Tenderness. Taking St. Paul's motto, "Test everything; keep what is good" as our own, we seek to reopen the windows Pope Benedict spoke of. Now, more than ever before, this is an urgent undertaking.
Pope Benedict XVI took, as his inspiration for the initiative, the name for the open air atrium at the Temple of Jerusalem, “a space in which everyone could enter, Jews and non-Jews, …[to engage] in a respectful and compassionate exchange. This was the Court of the Gentiles… a space that everyone could traverse and could remain in, regardless of culture, language or religious profession. It was a place of meeting and of diversity.” Our various initiatives, especially the Festival of Friendship, seek to provide similar spaces where “respectful and compassionate exchange” can happen.
Pope Benedict reminded us that Jesus said, “The Temple must be a house of prayer for all the nations (Mk 11: 17). Jesus was thinking of the ‘Court of the Gentiles,’ which he cleared of extraneous affairs so that it could be a free space for the Gentiles who wished to pray there to the one God... A place of prayer for all the peoples...”
In fact, Jesus would teach along the Eastern border of the Courtyard of the Gentiles, in a space called, “Solomon’s Portico,” where faithful Jews and nonbelievers alike could listen to his teaching and ask him questions. After his Ascension into heaven, St. Peter and the other Christians continued the tradition of meeting in this sacred space of public dialogue: “Many signs and wonders were done among the people at the hands of the apostles. They were all together in Solomon’s portico” (Acts 5:12).
In explaining the problem contemporary men and women face today, Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “The limit is no longer between those who believe and those who do not believe in God, but between those who want to defend humanity and life, the humanity of each person, and those who want to suffocate humanity through utilitarianism, which could be material or spiritual. Is the border perhaps not between those who recognize the gift of culture and history, of grace and gratuity, and those who found everything on the cult of efficiency, be it scientific or spiritual?” (The Courtyard of the Gentiles, 2013).
The Pope emeritus concluded his remarks on the significance of opening a new Courtyard of the Gentiles with these insights: “The Courtyard of the Gentiles calls for the sharing of a common thirst in a universal, comprehensive, catholic perspective: the opening to each other as [what gives] dynamism to human life.” He called for, “respectful encounters, in sincere dialogue and in a passionate search.”
Come visit the Courtyard of the Gentiles that we have set up online this year. We want to welcome you to our own Solomon’s Portico so you can meet our friends and become one of them.