NEW RENAISSANCE
VISION
We are in desperate need of a cultural and spiritual reset. Since the Enlightenment, the west has progressively become entranced by a secular god–the god of materialism, technology, consumerism, and “progress.” And as the western project has spread across the globe, humanity’s attention is increasingly becoming absorbed and controlled—witness our slavish devotion to screens, our consumption of mindless entertainments and our craving of creature comforts and cheap consumables served up by the global “machine.”
The world’s most powerful organizations—multi-trillion-dollar technology companies—continue to promise utopia, but seemingly exist primarily to capture and monetize our precious attention. We all know this, of course, but we can’t seem to break the trance.
The Scottish scientist and writer Iain McGilchrist has put his finger on the fundamental problem. In his magisterial books, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, as well as in his many public conversations, McGilchrist details how society has become captured, individually and collectively, by a way of thinking and seeing that is dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain. The area of our brain that is supposed to serve a specialized function (to dissect, analyze, grasp and control) has usurped and eclipsed the critical role of the right hemisphere (the more insightful, wise, creative and holistically oriented area of the brain). As a result, we are suffering epidemics of mental illness, loneliness, addiction and polarization.
McGilchrist calls us to recover the hemispheric balance exemplified in those extraordinary eras in human history when reason was balanced with intuition, abstraction and mechanism balanced by embodied experience and wisdom. Classical Greece that issued from Athens or the Italian Renaissance that issued from Florence.
We find ourselves very far from this kind of balance today. We live in a left-hemisphere dominated world.
It’s time for a New Renaissance. And there is hope. A new wave of thinkers, artists, religious teachers and scholars is on the rise, offering persuasive and inspiring alternatives to the reductionist materialist story and worldview that has prevailed in the modern age.
New Renaissance is a nexus for leaders from various disciplines and faiths to learn from one another, mutually explore big ideas and tackle complex challenges together, in hopes of nurturing a cultural rebirth. We are particularly interested in exploring the foundational questions of existence, including the nature of consciousness, values, and meaning and how the answers to these questions can transform how we encounter the world and each other.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Interdisciplinary Conversations
We deeply value the role of science in our unfolding understanding of the world. We believe bringing the scientific disciplines (physics, neuroscience, biology, etc) into conversation with philosophy, humanities and religion is essential to realizing the potential for human flourishing.
Inter-spiritual Conversations
Christianity, of course, has played a central role in western culture. We believe a New Renaissance could emerge from Christianity if we truly had “the mind of Christ”. But we believe there is deep wisdom embedded in all of the world’s sacred traditions. We believe in the importance of bringing religious traditions into conversation with each other, with an earnest willingness to explore, dialogue and partner with others of good faith. We can be motivated by genuine curiosity and by something Bishop Krister Stendahl called “holy envy.”
INITIATIVES
Genesis 2.0: Reanimating our story of the world
The great catholic writer and teacher Fr. Thomas Berry wrote:
It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story—the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it—is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story.
Berry was lamenting the absence of a story that makes sense of the world–a story of the cosmos, of God, and of our place in it all. He knew the story he had inherited from his own Judeo-Christian tradition was not quite adequate. Not only did it not quite integrate what we have learned from the realms of scientific discovery, but it has served to disconnect us from our responsibilities as caretakers of the earth. On the other hand, he knew the story science was telling–a reductive, materialist story–failed to integrate the sense of the sacred and served to objectify and instrumentalize the world.
The ancient Judeo-Christian story of the world began to lose purchase over time as science began to tell what seemed a more compelling story. But the story science told was a decidedly disenchanted one, and finally in the 21st century is beginning to lose its purchase, even increasingly among intellectual elites. Yes, the new atheists are yesterday’s news. But Berry was right: We need a new story.
We see the makings of a new story as new thinkers arise and new paradigms are being adopted. It will be a story that integrates ancient wisdom with modern frontiers of discovery. It will be a story that animates the world. As Christians, we believe Christ can and should be at the center of this cosmic story.
PUBLIC EVENTS
New Renaissance Festival
A large, multi-day annual gathering in Sundance, Utah in 2027 where leading figures from the fields of science, arts/humanities and spirituality convene to tackle humanity’s biggest questions.
Campus Events
Campus events to communicate the work and results of the institute to university students. These are modest-sized events at distinguished universities.
Publishing
We will soon launch YouTube, podcast, substack and social media channels that will leverage the substantial existing audiences of our partners.
Team
Executive Director: William Turnbull
Director: Zachary Davis
