Our first Dialogue Nights of 2019, and our tenth overall, featured the theme "Failing Forward: Making Your 2019 Resolutions Stick." More than 50 Boston-area university students and young professionals to engage in activities and dialogues aimed at deconstructing the fear of failure that pervades society. Throughout the evening, participants engaged with thoughts on transcending failure from Daisaku Ikeda, including this one: "The worst mistake you can make is to give up on yourself and stop challenging yourself for fear of failure. Keep moving forward with a firm eye on the future, telling...
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We are excited to announce our return to the publishing of multi-author volumes with the December 1st release of Peacebuilding Through Dialogue: Education, Human Transformation, and Conflict Resolution. Here's what Melanie Greenberg of Humanity United says about this "groundbreaking" book.
“This vibrant, insightful volume sheds new light on dialogue processes that serve as the DNA of peacebuilding and help bridge the chasms of deeply divided societies. The book is especially groundbreaking in its focus on the links between ‘inner peace,’ including dynamics...
Few issues today incite greater political factionalism within developed nations than the matter of refugees seeking safety within these relatively more peaceful places. For the most part, debates center on the challenges—or in the view of many, the problems—that refugees present to the receiving country. Without denying that refugees do indeed present a range of challenges, it is fair to be concerned that there is so little discussion of the actual plight of the refugees and the dire circumstances of displacement in which they find themselves. The Ikeda Center’s November 2, 2018, in-house...
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,...
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...
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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