About The Washington Institute
Learning to see oneself as responsible— for love’s sake –for the way the world is and isn’t. A worthy ambition for Everyman, for every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve, isn’t it?
And yet to have eyes that see is more complex than we imagine. In one sense, of course, it is a perennial challenge. Human beings in every age have had a hard time seeing beyond themselves. The world, the flesh, and the devil make it so—whether we are pre-modern, modern, or postmodern.
But we feel our own time. We know its rhythms, we know its graces and curses. Living in the information age—the “info-glut culture” as James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, has so tellingly described our moment as the 20 th becomes the 21st-century –gives us windows into a breadth and depth of knowledge that our forebears could not have imagined. The speed and volume of contemporary life is FAST and HIGH, 24/7.
Finding still-points, people and places where reflection is prized, is hard. But it is critical—if we are to avoid the danger to the soul, individually and socially, that Billington warns us about, viz. that we can know so much and yet care so little, that we can have so much knowledge and yet so little wisdom.
Sifting and sorting our way through the info-glut of a modern-becoming-postmodern world, being contra mundum where it matters and therefore people who prize the integral relation between reflection and responsibility--- in a word, wisdom –is the heart of the mission of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture.
We are not interested in knowledge for its own sake— never ever. Rather our concern is for a way of knowing that connects what we believe with the way that we live… our convictions about God, human nature, and history, with the reality of everyday experience. From beginning to end we are most interested in understanding why, how, and that “mere Christianity” shapes life, from the most personal areas of human concern to the most public arenas of human responsibility.
Faith… vocation… culture. The biblical vision of life and the world, pondered and practiced for many centuries in myriad cultures… forming what we do and why we do what we do… forming our responsibility for history, for the way culture is and isn’t.
The end? That we might develop eyes to see the world as God does. Or in the words of Bono, poet of Dublin and conscience to the world, “to feel the world” as God does.
The Washington Institute is a still-point...connecting knowing and doing, heart and mind, belief and behavior, worldview and way of life.
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