Welcome to Waging Wisdom, an open, safe, and distraction-free place for thinking, writing, and commenting about wisdom-based ways of thinking about contemporary life and living it wisely. We would love for you to join the conversation occasionally or just follow along quietly to see what develops.

Launched as a special project in January 2014, this blog remains something of an experiment. It seeks to offer practical wisdom-based ideas as a viable resource for advancing projects and ambitions in which human diversity is normative, cooperation is essential, and human flourishing is desired. That covers a lot of ground, of course, from family life to foreign policy.

In all areas of life today, beneficial relationships across differences seems to be becoming a thing of the past. We can find examples of damaged, disordered, or broken relations in our own personal lives, our families, our cities, our nations, and in international relations. The latter became especially self-evident to everyone on an international scale after September 11, 2001, when the United States and many other nations (of all sorts) began changing their foreign policies to respond to that unprecedented terrorist attack.

Through many of those international changes, and as responses to those changes, and as responses to those changes – you get the picture – we as individuals, communities, and nations seem to have gotten caught in a negative downward spiral. By losing touch with the voice of Lady Wisdom, who “cries” to all of us (as the ancient sages put it), we are increasingly unable to build cooperative and peaceable relations with one another.

If you want to know what is often missing in aggressive, adversarial, broken, or enemy relations, it is wisdom. Rigid adherence to various kinds of beliefs and policies fosters enmity, sectarian violence, conflict, and war. Most people don’t want this but they are not sure how it can be changed for the better.

Reliance on wisdom is vital for turning things around. Here’s why:

Lady Wisdom does not try to make as wide as possible the gulf of dissimilarities between human beings or diverse cultures. Although she is wise about conflicting core beliefs, including the religious ones of different faiths or of those who claim no faith, she nevertheless seeks to bring diverse peoples cooperatively and peaceable together, reasonably and responsibly, sans violence, to build on basic interests and concerns that are held by all peoples everywhere.

There is a lot of that taking place today, despite the gloomy picture painted by the news media, thanks to its organizing principle: if it bleeds, it leads. If your gaze is typically on the brutish, the nasty, and the violent you will not have heard about the successes of people who have sought Lady Wisdom’s help to turn situations around for the better.

The ways of wisdom are paths of peace, or shalom, say the ancient sages. This blog tries to show why this is possible, how it has occurred, and what might yet be possible.

Thank you for stopping by.

Here is the first post on this blog, which gets the conversation going. We sincerely hope that you will avail yourself of the “comments” area if an article catches your eye. Affirm or disagree. If the latter, be constructive not rude. Thank you.