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.
Loyalty to a Fact
by Suzanne M. Lewis
When I was 17, I had an internship at the Justice Department and would have to get a connecting train at Foggy Bottom as part of my commute. One afternoon, I was standing on the platform about 5 steps behind a man in a suit. We were the only ones on the platform. I saw him lift his sleeve to check his watch, so I called out to him, "Excuse me, sir, can you please tell me the time?" He didn't answer, so I raised my voice, "Excuse me, what time is it, sir?!" Still no response! So I shouted in exasperation, "HEY MISTER WHAT TIME IS IT?!!!!!" Can you believe he still didn't answer?! I thought some pretty rotten things about him and his suit and his watch (which I did not say out loud). Then another man approached the first one, tapped him on the shoulder, and the two began a very animated conversation... with their HANDS… in American Sign Language. Man, did I feel stupid and ashamed.
My laptop recently crashed; despite all my best efforts, I could not revive it. I drove an hour and then waited 3 hours for help at the Apple store. Finally Mike from tech support came out to examine my machine. He asked me what was wrong, listened with compassion, then plugged in the computer and pushed start... and it started. Evidently it hadn't been plugged in all the way. I said, "Was that the easiest fix of your whole evening?" And he lied: "No.” Then he ran diagnostics on the laptop and shared useful information so that I didn't feel I'd gone all the way out there and waited so long for nothing.
Mike saw more that evening than I had been able to see back at age 17 in Foggy Bottom. While Mike could have no idea of my current circumstances or what may or may not be preoccupying me, he treated me like a person who could have perfectly valid reasons to make the mistake I made. Rather than judging me to be stupid, he suspended that judgment. Mike is today’s Revolutionary of Tenderness.
Faith isn't "believing" that the other person could be coming from an entirely different circumstance in which there are good reasons not to recognize that one's computer needs to be plugged back in. Faith is loyalty to a fact: the knowledge that the other person is a mystery, who might be struggling or disabled, and who therefore needs to be approached with respect, compassion, and tenderness. Faith is the capacity to see all the factors at play - including those that are invisible and yet true.
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