Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World

This book is as much, perhaps more, an exhortation to action than a piece of social science research. In an age when the idols of the tribe or the centrality of self are aggrandized, is it possible to restore a sense of human purpose that extends beyond place or person? To answer this question a core of 100 people, determined as "capable of sustaining commitment to the common good in the face of global complexity," were interviewed, not so much to "prove hypotheses" but to develop "fertile insights" for further research and action in order to "kindle a common fire and forge a new synthesis of practical wisdom." This requires people who can regard space as hospitable, inhabited by mentors and others capable of demonstrating that one can and ought to make a difference in the world; people who can develop habits of mind to engage others and a symbolic world, including the world of story and faith, capable of sustaining a committed consciousness. Two "interludes" describe those who exhibit that concern for the commons, and an epilogue suggests an individual and collective strategy to nourish the sense of the collective. (From the Publisher)