When people talk about the attributes of cultures of peace, they often invoke frameworks of social justice, equity, pluralism, and human rights. This latter category is usually discussed in terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. The declaration has proven especially useful for peace builders of all kinds in that its thirty articles, which clearly and specifically define the rights of all humans, help us avoid the pitfall of becoming overly abstract in our approach to the topic. All this great information notwithstanding,...
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On Friday, 12/14, we celebrated our last Dialogue Nights of 2018! Just in time for the holidays, our topic for the evening was "Love: A Force Stronger Than Hate." Attendees practiced love through a paired dialogue activity where they asked each other a series of personal questions. Then in small groups, we discussed the following questions: 1) What is love to you? 2) Do you feel love is scarce or abundant in our world today? Why? 3) Do you believe we were born with the ability to love or do you believe we have to learn how to love? 4) How do you think we can cultivate...
On Friday, November 30th, we held our 14th Annual Ikeda Forum, which explored the timely theme: "How Do We Practice Human Rights? A Dialogue on Dignity and Justice in Daily Life." More than one hundred participants joined our three panelists (Catia Confortini of Wellesley College, Elora Chowdhury of UMass Boston, and Jason Goulah of DePaul University) to discuss what it means to live in dignity, what a culture of human rights looks like, and what each of us can do in our daily life to create this culture. Participants shared a number of human rights "determininations...
What better way to honor the Ikeda Center’s twenty-fifth anniversary as an institute devoted to peace, learning, and dialogue than to host an event engaging young people in a participatory investigation of the characteristics of genuine, transformative dialogue? Called “Creating Hope Together: What Is the Role of Dialogue?”, the October 19th Dialogue Nights for students and young professionals was inspired by themes from the writings of Daisaku Ikeda, including his 1993 lecture at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, considered the Center’s founding lecture.
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On September 24, 1993, Daisaku Ikeda lectured at Harvard University on the topic, "Mahayana Buddhism and 21st Century Civilization." Speaking at the invitation of eminent Harvard faculty Harvey Cox, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Nur Yalman, Mr. Ikeda outlined many of the themes that would inspire the founding of the Center later that year. These themes include: the wisdom of recognizing the cyclical continuity of life and death, providing a more balanced vision of existence; the necessity of ending our excessive focuses on our differences as humans; the benefit of judging religious practices...
The publication of Peace Justice, and the Poetic Mind, co-authored by Stuart Rees and Daisaku Ikeda, provides a nice opportunity to highlight our section devoted to poems on peace-related themes. It features works from fifteen poets, ranging from Emily Dickinson to Kahlil Gibran, Sonia Sanchez to Wendell Berry. Both Rees and Ikeda are poets, and the section features contributions from each. The Rees poem is called ...
On July 27th, nearly sixty university students and young professionals turned out for the seventh Ikeda Center Dialogue Nights, this time on the theme of “Breaking Gender Stereotypes: Revealing Our True Nature.” To open, Ikeda Center Program Manager Lillian I welcomed everyone and explained how the thinking of Center founder Daisaku Ikeda helped shape the evening’s approach to the topic. She said that for Mr. Ikeda, the “important thing is not that society come up with a particular model for how men and women ought to behave, but that people first and foremost make tenacious effort to live...
The enthusiasm evident at the Ikeda Center’s third Dialogue Nights event of 2018, held on May 18, belied the evening’s organizing topic: “The Apathy Epidemic.” Instead, the energetic presence of more than forty Boston-area university students and young professionals modeled a compelling answer to the evening’s subtheme, which asked: “What Is the Cure?” The evening was a collaboration between the Ikeda Center and Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA) Next Gen. Read an in-depth article on the event here!
On April 21, we hosted our first-ever student-led peace dialogue. The topic was nuclear weapons abolition. In preparation for the event, the students had been encouraged by peace educators Betty Reardon and Zeena Zakharia to ask generative questions of themselves and others about nuclear abolition. In so doing, they deepened their thinking about the topic and increased their motivation to act. "No one is an expert," said Dr. Reardon. "We are here to learn together!" During the event, the students shared findings from their research and led small group discussions on...
The occasion of fifty years passing since the tragic, wasteful assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., has inspired an abundance of valuable commentary on Dr. King's legacy. Chief among the points being made is that it wasn't race or civil rights per se that brought King to Memphis, but a sanitation workers strike. His decision to appear and speak on behalf of the workers was of a piece with his growing commitment to what he and others were calling the Poor People's Campaign. The logic behind the campaign was that the creation of the "beloved community" involved the seeking of justice and...
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Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue
396 Harvard Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: (617) 491.1090 Fax: (617) 491.1169