Welcome to Waging Wisdom. My name is Charles Strohmer, the author of this blog. I’m American, but my wife and I lived in the UK for a few years, where she co-founded a preschool. After returning to the States, I traveled to England many times on trips to speak to a wide variety of groups about wisdom-based ways of doing life. England in fact became my home away from home – apparently my purpose there was to keep the rail system and the Tube funded with my countless ticket purchases.

More than thirty years ago I became convinced that the agency of wisdom is vital for advancing peaceable initiatives in areas where human diversity is normative, cooperation is essential, and human flourishing is desired – from family life to foreign policy. In other words, across the spectrum of life. Wisdom-based approaches, I learned, and often the way, give us ways to think and act outside of the confines of ideological thinking and acting. As the years passed, I became increasingly convinced that wisdom-based approaches were especially critical for times such as ours.

For many I worked with individuals, small groups, NGOs, institutions, and churches to think about and to develop wisdom-based approaches in areas such as education, the business world, family and social life, cultural development, environmental stewardship, and especially the arts, communication, and inter-religious engagement. I continue to work in those areas but my chief focus in recent years entails advancing peaceable wisdom-based approaches for improving international relations, with a special focus on diplomacy, negotiations, and mediation in the context of the United States and the Middle East, including Christian, Muslim, and Jewish narratives in that big context.

For me personally this has meant a lot of unlearning and, on the other hand, learning wisdom in all sorts of surprising ways, including from creation, from the historic wisdom literature, through prayer, and in conversation with persons who are not like me. Everyone, I believe, has gifts of insight and understanding from God so that we may learn wisdom from one another in order to ease adversarial relations and improve the life of our families, communities, nations, and world.

This blog seeks to discuss many of the above areas in short posts related to current events. If you happen to be interested in a more detailed and academic approach, I invite to spend some time on my main website.

Thank you,
Charles