The Pope’s Love in Truth, his third letter to the bishops of the world, is written in the context of the current global economic crisis. The Pope views the current crisis as an opportunity for us to discern and to create a new vision for our future. In his latest encyclical, he doesn’t focus on specific systems of economics or reconstructing the global economy. Instead, he reminds us that our markets are shaped by our culture, and that it is up to us to focus on the common good
Tag Archives: culture
First Impressions: Kiev
By Jim Selman | Bio
I am in Kiev, Ukraine this week. This is my first time here. In fact, it is the first time I have been in this part of the world or to a country using the Cyrillic alphabet. I am not prepared to write a travelogue since I just arrived a day ago, but sometimes first impressions are fleeting but useful. In this case, my first impressions are reflections on an ‘old’ country that (from what I can tell) has yet to be discovered by the tourism industry. Even at one of Ukraine’s
Fear II
By Jim Selman | Bio
I just finished reading a piece in the Jan/Feb issue of the Utne Reader called Overcoming Fear Culture and Fear Itself by Julie Hanus. It is a great commentary on how our society has become wracked with all sorts of fears. She points to the fact that fear is a major fuel for lots of politicians and businesses, but that we pay a very large price
Culture and Intergenerational Support
The Science Daily reports that cultural expectations impact the benefits of intergenerational support.
Intergenerational Support and Depression Among Elders in Rural China: Do Daughters-In-Law Matter?, a study published in the July 2008 Journal of Marriage and Family, stated that in the province of Anhui in rural China, assistance from daughters-in-law with household chores
Serene Ambition
I was talking with a fellow recently who was asking why this blog is called Serene Ambition™. He thought that the two words didn’t seem to go together. He could get ‘serenity’ and also understand ‘ambition’, but together they made no sense to him. In our normal way of relating to the world, you can have serenity (meaning inner peace, calmness, maybe even joy) or you can be ambitious (meaning committed to creating or accomplishing something in the future)—but not
How can we talk it through?
By Shae Hadden | Bio
The premise being that we CAN talk it through…This is the question that epitomizes the possibility that the World Café represents. It is the question that informs Anne Dosher, the 80-something ‘Elder’ of the World Café and Board member of the World Café Community Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to developing and disseminating this and other innovative dialogue approaches. I recently had the privilege of interviewing this gracious, generous and engaging lady—the human embodiment of what I imagined the World
The Art of Conversation
I was watching the CBS show “Sunday Morning” on the weekend and it had a segment on the dying art of conversation. The point was that with all our technology and almost real-time connections available with email, handhelds and social networking sites, people seem to have lost the ability to have conversations. It was a thought-provoking and, I think, mostly true observation about what is happening to us. The show also showcased a new book by Stephen Miller called
Does Getting Older Mean Getting Wiser?
By Lauren Selman | Bio
I
recently watched one of my favorite shows, "Sex in the City." This show
features four protagonists that constantly prove that 30 is the new 20
and uncovers their relationships in the city of New York. In this
particular episode, the older women were poignantly juxtaposed against
young starlettes to emphasis they’re "getting older". The plot
circulated around the question about aging that Carrie posed at the
Elder Employees
I am perplexed by the fact that companies have been laying off older workers for years as part of various downsizing projects. I understand the drive to cut costs. Under normal demographic conditions, laying off older workers would even make some sense from a strictly financial point of view, since they generally command higher salaries than younger workers. The fact is, however, that those same companies are moaning about shortages of qualified people and the difficulties they’re having in
Resignation
For a long time, I have had the point of view that one of the biggest problems of aging in our contemporary culture is that it leads most people towards a ‘state of resignation’. Resignation is the mood we can get caught in when we ‘give up’, when we stop living into the future as possibility. It is the mood of succumbing to the belief that circumstances are bigger than we are. It is a mood of defeat that generates comments like: “Why bother since we can’t do anything about it anyway?”