A WELCOMING PHILOSOPHY
The aim of Universal Table is to promote tolerance and social trust along many dimensions of life—or those are the words we have been using in our official mission statement. But each time we use them, we realize we are trying to describe something far broader—something that encompasses welcome, difference, surprise and inclusion, truthfulness and authenticity, and an equal place for each of us and what we hold most dear. These are the true goals of Universal Table: Finding the We in Them, the Us in You.
Our major activities are the books we create and publish through Wising Up Press, and the Universal Table workshops and research projects that both develop and support them. Our areas of particular interest are social forces and psychological resiliency, illness and meaning, spirituality and embodiment—and the complex challenges and lasting rewards of living up close and personal with pluralism in social, family, religious, and academic life.
What distinguishes our approach is an equal emphasis on the why and the how of living well with difference. Through our research projects, we are developing new interpretations of chronic areas of social discord, interpretations that make it safer for us to interact from a position of respect and appreciation with people who have very different world views and value systems.
We are equally interested in specific techniques, including the use of the arts, movement, and other embodiment practices, that can help us change our patterns of direct personal interaction, so we can live out our best intentions. What ways of thinking, imagining, listening, speaking and being with one another truly expand our worlds? For real, sustainable change takes place at the day by day, person by person, word by word, gesture by gesture level—and it isn't easy and it isn't simple. But fascinating, rewarding, energizing, inspiring, and worth all the effort—without a doubt.
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