Our project of civilization is at a crossroads, besieged by ideological polarization, social disruption, and environmental cataclysm while institutions grow weaker and the future grows uncertain. To counter this grim picture we need to create a narrative that inspires a collective sense of purpose and boundary-crossing community building. This project seeks to incubate widespread social engagement inspired by the confluence of many ways of knowing.
We bring together small groups of distinguished scientists, humanists, artists, and public intellectuals from diverse cultural backgrounds to spend five days immersed in deep discussion about our current challenges. The groups then work to generate broad cultural impact through organic community building and social media public events. The venue is an essential part of the experiment, a sixteenth-century private church in Tuscany, a sacred pilgrimage place with roots from the 1200s. Our project thus returns to the birth of the Renaissance to rethink the human condition and forge new pathways toward our individual and collective flourishing.
We believe that a purposeful intellectual leadership can be a force for positive change only if it creatively engages with the public. For this to happen, its voice must be amplified to a wide cultural landscape. We plan to generate widespread public impact through content creation and diverse channels for network building: the group discussions will be documented in a podcast series available anywhere, hosted by NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge; a series of position papers co-authored by the participants, published in well-known venues; white papers suggesting new research directions; disseminating the contents globally with the public through network-building interventions, so as to inspire active community building. Our mission is to create impactful messages that will generate active conversations and inspire positive change from the public sphere to academia and beyond.
