Dear HumanDHS network friends
Please find below the December 2007 Newsletter from the The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love.
Kind regards
Brian Ward
The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love
President’s Corner
Dear Friends
As the New Year approaches, I wanted to provide a brief holiday reflection, as well as updates on research and publications of importance.
Love, Give, Live: A Holiday Reflection
In every era people seek after a true and happy self. One’s “true self” generally has been described in terms of emotions such as love, kindness, inner peace, gratitude, awe, humility, forgiveness, tranquility, and happiness, and in terms of actions that contribute to the lives of others - not just the nearest, but also the neediest. There are some who speak of these emotions as “spiritual emotions” or “religious affections” (Jonathan Edwards) but they are actually inherent in our natural humanity, a point made well by Dr. George Vaillant in his exciting new book on SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION (Broadway Books, in press), which will be featured in one of my next newsletters, along with an interview from George. To the extent that religion helps brings forth these emotions through spiritual practices, beliefs and rituals, it saves; to the extent that it does not it destroys. George makes some great points.
Of these spiritual emotions the greatest of all is love – a warm and generous love that contributes to the lives of others. I shall follow C.S. Lewis and call this Gift-love. What exactly is Gift-love? Here is a simple and down-to-earth definition that I have arrived at: When the happiness and security of another mean as much to me as my own happiness and security, or in some cases more, I love that person. Most people can quickly understand this definition when they look over the bed of their sleeping newborn, or when they have close friends. They may, however, doubt love as a possibility in wider circles. Yet the world is full of amazing people who do small things with great love day in and day out, and are self-fulfilled and happy in the process.
Gift-love is expressed in many different ways because human needs vary. Love includes a mother loving her child in a moment of celebration and carefree play, but it also includes the compassion she feels should that child cut a knee, or a quiet moment of attentive listening. “Love” has an abstract quality, so focusing on its concrete expression has more practical power and obvious application in the world. Gift-love is like the hub of a wheel, sending out spokes of expression in different directions, depending on what is needed. I wrote most of this little meditation on “The Wheel of Love” on a late night bus from Washington, D.C. to Cleveland on June 27, 2004, but it is a model about which I have written for three decades:
Strengthen us in the different ways of love -
Celebration: Let us see all lives as your gifts calling us to thankful celebration;
Forgiveness: Enable us to forgive and make our apologies meaningful;
Carefrontation: Strengthen us in the courage to confront evil in its many forms, including injustice, with wisdom rather than malice;
Mirth: Inspire in us the warm humor and mirthful joy;
Listening: Humble us for attentive listening so that others feel valued;
Loyalty: Keep us loyal especially to those who are shattered by life;
Compassion: Deepen our awareness of the suffering of others and
give us the desire to relieve it;
Helpfulness: Prompt us to lend a helping hand to those around us;
Respect: Give us a reverence that frees us from the desire to manipulate others;
Creativity: Help us to use our creative gifts for the good of humanity.
All these ways of love have something in common. Whether we are listening attentively, or writing a thank you note, or teaching a child to read, or extending forgiveness, or donating to a charity, or knitting a scarf for the needy; all these ways of love are fulfilling for us as givers. Everyone can be great because anyone can love. Gift-love is not self-diminishing, but rather enhancing. As Kierkegaard argued, there is nothing wrong with love of self; the problem is that we do not know how to love ourselves rightly. How do we love ourselves rightly? When we love our neighbor as ourselves.
In the first recorded exhortation of such love, Leviticus 19:18, we read “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Here love, with all its warmth and emotional depth, is contrasted with bitterness and the spirit of revenge. In this sense, love casts out these and other negative emotions that, over time, are like acid on metal, destroying not just those around us, but our own bodies. I have long noted another passage in the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs 11:13, which reads, “those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed.” We are refreshed not because we can be assured of some reciprocal action of kindness, or of any reputational gains, but simply because we are engaged with the positive emotional energy of love, and it is in such giving that we live best. To love is to be in harmony with oneself, and it is therefore its own reward. I believe this is what Francis of Assisi meant when he prayed, “For it is in giving that we receive.”
If this sounds unappealing, consider the alternatives. Short term, anger can be necessary for self-preservation, but long term such emotional states destroy happiness and health like acid slowly eroding metal over time. Our hearts just cannot take it. As cardiologist Redfield Williams has shown, the most hostile among us have a 20 percent mortality rate by age 50, and the least hostile have a mere 2 percent rate. And so often even short-term anger is misplaced, or turns into a vicious rage, and in the aftermath we wish we would have handled things with more dignity and restraint. So how do we avoid a vortex of unhealthy hatred, a rage for revenge against the universe, a deadly indifference to the needs of others? The one perennial answer is to win with love. In the end, for the sake of others primarily, but also for our own happiness and health, we can most fully and resiliently cope with the stress of a life by cultivating the emotional state of love, by keeping our hearts in the right place. Thus did psychiatrist Hans Selye, the discoverer of “the stress response” in 1936, prescribe altruism and love. As they say in grief therapy, there comes a point in time when we must determine for ourselves whether to become “more bitter” or “more better.” At the moment of our deaths we cannot be filled with both bitterness and tenderness. These are the two mutually exclusive ways. No matter what the circumstances, love is the test of a good life, and of happiness in the classical sense of a life well lived.
So what fundamental human need does love respond to in all its different expressions? It must respond to something in us all that is profoundly basic and universal, for without being loved we resort to destructive and self-destructive behaviours, including suicide in its immediate and more gradual forms. Love responds to the deepest of human needs – the need for significance. It reflects back to the beloved the significance, dignity, and even sacredness that has otherwise been obscured. The need for significance is not the quest for fame or renown. Rather, in navigating through life, people all need to feel that their existence is not some social or cosmic mistake.
It is so easy for our words and actions to make someone else feel insignificant, and in this sad process we feel somehow elevated in our own desire for hierarchical status. Some people are masters at manipulating a social network in order to create a sense of such insignificance for a victim that he or she is driven to death. This is nothing less than murder by social psychological methods. But love affirms people and thereby relieves them of insignificance.
Happiness as the Fruit of Gift-Love
People seek their true selves, and they seek happiness. The two are more or less one. Happiness has to do with flourishing over the whole of a lifetime. Yet no one gets out of life alive, bad things happen to us all, and there are many disappointments that must be faced. If we wallow in self pity and bitterness, there can be no happiness. So what is the ultimate source of happiness? Contribute simply and with warmth to the lives of others. The great spiritual paradox of life is this - in the giving of self lies the unsought discovery of a better self. It is love alone that lets us flourish over the whole of a lifetime, and when we live such a life even the simple hedonic pleasures of the moment are enriched.
Those who act from love, rather than from self-interest or duty or social pressure, engage a part of the human psyche in which selfishness is overwhelmed by concern for and attentiveness to others. The universal loving self has a consistent serenity about it and is deeply free. Indeed, recent studies on the compassion hormone, oxytocin, also show that is contributes to both a feeling of calmness and of trust.
We never perfectly arrive at wise and effective Gift-love, but it is the possibility of ultimate relevance that lures us forward and provides direction to our lives. People take other directions - hatred, power and greed - but these directions are objectively false and always destructive of our own lives and of those around us. We may have the illusion of happiness, but in the end, no one will come to our funerals. Real happiness has everything to do with our capacity for concern, understanding, sympathy, as well as joy and humor, and an appreciation of the good and the beautiful in life. Our emotional lives must be formed and ordered by love if we are ever to be happy.
Some people, perhaps overly stimulated by consumerism, never arrive at a pursuit of happiness that is higher than immediate physical gratification. This sort of happiness is based on hedonic pleasure as produced by some external stimulus that is immediately pleasurable but does not endure. So we consume more exotic coffees, buy expensive computer game systems, and possess extra “things” on the “hedonic treadmill.” We are constantly on the run to secure more material goods. Appreciation for simple gifts and natural wonders subsides. The bottom line is that we are trapped by consumerism, and in the process are more bored than happy. Our children, if they hear the call of a shared humanity, or sense that these “things” matter more than love, may react against the emptiness. We may ourselves have some hopeful moment of crisis when we realize that “some things are more important than things” (to coin a phrase) and that it is never too late to love.
Love is so magnificent that we can do good in the world even though people may be unkind, dishonest, jealous, small-minded, cynical, and critical behind our backs. Win with love anyway. It is so magnificent that we can do good in the world even when change seems unlikely, our actions seem insignificant, and people doubt our authenticity because they doubt love itself. Win with love anyway. It is so magnificent that we can do good in the world even when we are stricken with illness, frail with old age, and at death’s door. Win with love anyway. Those who frown on love can still be loved, and there is a special sort of value in this. If there is a God, God is love, and love will find the way.
Best Wishes,
Stephen G. Post
www.whygoodthingshappen.com
www.StephenGPost.com
P.S. Feel free to email me at www.stephen.post[@]case.edu for presentations on Why Good Things Happen to Good People (www.whygoodthingshappen.com). I try to fit in most Greater Cleveland requests, including libraries, churches, synagogues, reading groups, classes, hospitals, hospices, schools, volunteer organizations, assisted living centers, chambers of commerce, etc.
——————————————————————————–
Research Notes
Wow! A new study using puppets shows that babies aged either six or ten months (i.e., younger than a year old) can identify kind and hurtful characters, and are attracted toward the good ones. Yale University researchers (PI Kiley Hamlin) show that babies this young can judge whether people are nasty or nice. The central character in the puppet show tries in vain to scale a steep hill, and receives either a friendly push up the hill by a “good Samaritan” puppet, or is pushed back down by an evil puppet. After the show, the babies were encouraged to reach out for the puppets, and almost all favored the Samaritan. It looks likes babies can pick up on helpful behavior pretty early, and are attracted to it! We already know, from studies conducted last year, that babies as young as 18 months (PI Felix Warneken of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, PLoS Biology, July 2007) can spontaneously assist adults they have never seen before. (What is interesting to me is that there is no obvious sense of personal gain in terms of reciprocity or reputational benefit in children this young. Of course, this wonderful natural tendency can be inhibited by innumerable factors, and not every baby is attracted to the Samaritan in the first place.)
(see Hamlin, JK, Wynn K, & Bloom P, et al. Nature 450, 557-559, 2007)
Interesting! We have the first study suggesting that generosity has a genetic component. Israeli researchers (PI Ariel Knafo) suggest that some of us are more destined than others to have a generous personality. A total of 203 people took part in an online task in which they could either keep or give away money. Genetic tests revealed those who had certain variants of a gene called AVPR1a were on average nearly 50% more likely to give money away. The study, by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, appears online in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior. The gene AVPR1a plays a key role in allowing a hormone called arginine vasopressin to act on brain cells. Vasopressin, in turn, has been implicated in social bonding. The researchers found greater altruism in players in whom a key section of the gene, called its promoter, was longer. The promoter is the region that determines how active a gene is. In this case a longer promoter makes the gene more active. The researchers point out that a version of AVPRa also exists in voles, where it also promotes social bonding. This, they say, suggests that altruism has a long rooted genetic history. (I believe that some percentage of generosity is genetic, but that environment, mentoring, media, acculturation, and personal choice are all just as important as where we start out genetically.)
(see http:/news./bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2hi/health/7133079.stm)
Remarkable! In another interesting study using brain scans, Duke University researchers (PI Scott Huettel) have found that the tendency to help others without an obvious benefit to self is located in an area called the posterior superior temporal sulcus. This study appeared in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
(see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6278907.stm)
So, a God of love is best! In another worthwhile study, researchers (PI Gail Ironson) followed 100 people with HIV every six months for four years. Faster progression was indicated by the loss of CD4 cells. All analyses were controlled for age, gender, race, education, baseline disease at entrance into study, and HIV medications. There were some key findings:
*“One’s view of God is associated with disease progression. People who view God as loving have slower disease progression over four years (i.e., they maintain a higher level of CD4 cells and lower levels of HIV virus over time). Conversely, those who view God as punishing lose CD4 cells faster and have higher levels of HIV virus over four years.”
*“Those who do not believe God loves them lose CD4 cells three times faster than those who believe God loves them.”
The effects pf spiritual orientation were stronger than the effects of depression or optimism on disease progression. (for information, contact dironson[@]comcast.net)
And finally, philanthropy feels good! Researchers (PIs William T. Harbaugh & Paul Zak) have built on research that came in the spring of 2006 (PIs Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman of the National Institute of Health) showing that decisions to donate show activity in the midbrain region associated with pleasures such as food and sex. They also found that the brain’s reward centers are activated when female subjects were asked to voluntarily donate money to causes.
(This is not to suggest that such benefits occur when someone gives for selfish reasons. The next study should compare people who donate genuinely, and those who only do so because they want to feel good.)
——————————————————————————–
Announcements
Title: The Flame of Love: Scientific Research on the Experience and Expression of Godly Love in the Pentecostal Tradition.
Principal Investigators:
Margaret M. Poloma, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Akron, (Akron OH)
Stephen G. Post, Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (Cleveland OH)
Matthew T. Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Akron (Akron OH)
Grantee: The University of Akron and The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love
Description: Grant award from The John Templeton Foundation
Start date: December 2007
End date: December 2010
Summary Statement:
This grant supports a three-year project that will provide the scientific and theological foundation for a new interdisciplinary field of study: the science of Godly Love. Godly Love is defined as the dynamic interaction between divine and human love that enlivens benevolence. This interaction provides the conceptual frame for a scholarly investigation of the Great Commandment: love for God and love for neighbor as self. Although this command finds expression in many religious traditions, The Flame of Love project limits its investigation to the broadly-defined pentecostal tradition. This tradition includes historic Pentecostal denominations, neo-pentecostalisms found in mainline and independent congregations, as well as others who adhere to a pentecostal worldview in which the Holy Spirit is deemed an active force in daily life. The primary goal is to use multiple methods to investigate the phenomenon of Godly Love, with the expressed purpose of fostering a wide-ranging interdisciplinary dialogue. The resulting discourse has the potential to provide answers to the pressing questions of our day. These questions include:
1) To what extent can emotionally powerful experiences of a divine flame of love move us beyond our ordinary self-interested concerns and help us express unlimited love for others?
2) How can the perceived influence of Godly Love be objectively measured through rigorous social scientific methods, and how might this knowledge be applied to the benefit of our communities?
3) How might measures of Godly Love emerging from this project cast light outside the Pentecostal tradition and illuminate core concerns of the human condition?
This study is a joint venture of the University of Akron and the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love and includes the following interdisciplinary activities:
· Formation of the Institute Core Research Group: twelve prominent scholars drawn from theology, religious studies, and social science who will collaborate in the creation of qualitative and quantitative data collection instruments and who will develop a framework for a new interdisciplinary dialogue on Godly Love
· Completion of in-depth interviews of nationally and internationally prominent exemplars of Godly Love in the pentecostal tradition, as well as their collaborators and beneficiaries
· Development and implementation of a national survey on Godly Love conducted by the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute (under the direction of John C. Green)
· Funding of six additional sub-projects (up to $150,000 each) through a Request for Proposals to address specific issues within the broader topic of Godly Love
· Organizing and hosting of two Summer Institutes that will provide week-long intensive scholarly discussions of Godly Love, as well as mentoring to young scholars
· Support for scholarly publications of the highest quality, including five monographs and four edited books
In addition to establishing a new field of interdisciplinary, scientific study, this project seeks to transform social science by taking the audacious step of moving beyond naturalism in a way that takes God seriously as a perceived actor in human events, while also advancing the agenda of an empirical theology. In addition, the project is intended to influence opinion leaders and to change the way that people think about their own spirituality and relationship with God.
Title: Love and the Pursuit of Happiness
The John Templeton Foundation has awarded a grant to the Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR) at Emory University for research on the ancient ideal of “the pursuit of happiness.” The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (IRUL) located at Case Western Reserve University collaborated with the CSLR to make the project possible.
Titled “The Pursuit of Happiness: Scientific, Theological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Love of God, Neighbor, and Self,” the research project begins in the Fall of 2006 and will run five years with a total budget of $1.5 million. It will analyze the concept of “the pursuit of happiness” using the methods and insights of science, theology, ethics, law, politics, and the behavioral sciences. Eighteen distinguished scholars from a variety of specialties will collaborate as senior fellows, and each will be expected to write a book or a series of articles. The fellows also will distill their work into popular articles and deliver public lectures on the Emory campus.
The project is unusual in its emphasis and methodology. The senior fellows will consider happiness at the intersection of two axes. One axis is the relationship between personal fulfillment or wellbeing and unselfish love. The other axis is the relationship between the teachings of religious traditions and the findings of science.
Project architects, who will continue to oversee and participate in it, are John Witte, Jr., Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics at Emory and CSLR director; Stephen G. Post, president of IRUL and a professor in the Department of Bioethics at the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University; and Timothy P. Jackson, associate professor of Christian ethics at Emory. Philip L. Reynolds, Aquinas Professor of Historical Theology at Emory, will direct and coordinate the project. Several other distinguished scholars, including Michael J. Perry, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory, and Michael E. McCullough, associate professor of psychology and adjunct professor of religion at the University of Miami, will serve as advisors. Jackson, Reynolds, and Perry are CSLR senior fellows.
“Most famously formulated in the American Declaration of Independence, this ancient and enduring Western ideal is grounded in various Hebrew, classical, Christian, and Enlightenment sources,” said Witte. “The project will retrieve some of the rich traditional teachings captured in this ideal and reconstruct them for our day in light of the new findings of the social sciences and the new liberties of democratic constitutionalism.”
Post explains that religious traditions, now with the support of a growing number of significant studies, exhort people to pursue their own happiness as a by-product of loving God and neighbor. Yet in today’s industrial nations, where people are on the whole much better off materially than were their parents and grandparents, research has shown that people’s estimation of their own happiness is lower than it was 50 years ago.
“What have we lost, and how can this project help clarify an emerging image of human fulfillment that is both deeply unselfish and deeply happy? This project has tremendous cultural implications, and pertains to all aspects of life, from marriage and how we raise our children, to civic engagement and education, to law and political life, to global love for a shared humanity,” said Post.
Reynolds adds, “My own scholarly approach to happiness begins with the theologian Thomas Aquinas, for whom happiness was the perfection of human nature and the necessary motive for all human action. But the topic has wonderful potential for bringing into conversation diverse approaches across all periods, religious traditions, and academic disciplines, including both the arts and the sciences.”
The Center for the Study of Law and Religion is home to world class scholars and forums on the religious foundations of law, politics, and society. It offers expertise on how the teachings and practices of Christianity, Judaism and Islam have shaped and continue to transform the fundamental ideas and institutions of our public and private lives. The scholarship of CSLR faculty provides the latest perspectives, while its conferences and public forums foster reasoned and robust public debate. www.law.emory.edu/cslr
The mission of the John Templeton Foundation is to pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science through a rigorous open-minded and empirically focused methodology, drawing together talented representatives from a wide spectrum of fields of expertise. www.templeton.org
A Letter From a Course Award Winner:
Dear Dr. Post:
Helen Wagner and I applied for a grant in 2005 in order to introduce to our students the emerging concern for caring for the planet. Because of your generous gift of $5000, we were able to bring Dr. Paul Apodaca to campus to speak on the Native American perception of caring for the earth. Dr. Apodaca is a local scholar, a professor at Chapman University here in Orange County, and a curator at the Bowers Museum. He addressed both our students and the faculty. Not only did he give an address to the assembled Connelly community, but also visited classrooms to carry on dialogue with students, and lunched with faculty. Following his presentation, we invited Anna Lappe, an associate of Wangari Mathai (Nobel Prize Winner from Kenya for her Green Belt Initiative) to address Connelly on the relationship between food and the health of people, and the globe that provides our nutrition. Afterwards, we shared a lunch of locally grown food, using a vegetarian menu. She, too, visited classes and talked with students in small groups. We considered that intitial program successful, and are most thankful to the Institute for Unlimited Love for selecting our high school as a recipient of a grant. We want you to know that our students are indeed more thoughtful about the environment, and about the care of themselves. To celebrate, the city of Anaheim gave us two trees at the end of the year which the students planted to provide natural shade for two classrooms, thus making the use of air conditioning less necessary. We hope to dedicate those trees this year to Wangari Mathai, and our own naturalist, Margaret Carlberg, who has been on our faculty, and currently runs a gardening program here. She is also instrumental in the Bolsa Chica Wetlands Project which has successfully saved this precious shoreline environment for California. All of this has led Helen and me to continue. This year, we invited Immaculee Ilibagiza to campus. She wrote Left to Tell, a diary of her experience during the genocide in Rwanda that resulted in the killing of her parents and two of her three brothers along with a million other Rwandans. Her presence here was a true inspiration to the students, not only to regard the world as their home, but to see themselves as spiritual persons whose love can truly make this a better world. She spoke of peace, (our theme this year is “praying for peace”) and she not only inspired us with her presentation but with her profound spirituality. Immaculee visited our classrooms, and the students at Connelly were intrigued by her courage, her spirit and her prayerfulness. None of us will ever be the same. Now, we are realizing that our initial prize from your organization has launched a Distinguished Speakers Series here at Connelly. Next year, our theme is justice. We are considering Sr. Prejean who wrote Dead Man Walking, and are again considering Wangari Mathai as well as President Carter, and Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, a current book which describes his efforts to open schools for girls in Afghanistan. We are focusing on Mortenson because we see the possibility of linking with one of his schools, since we also are an educational institution that serves girls at the high school level. Your grant initialized an ambitious project to bring Connelly into the “real” world, where the needs for compassion, spirituality, and unconditional love are so pressing. We thank you for that seed money, and will continue to seek to make our Dinstinguished Speaker Series life-changing for the Connelly community.
Sincerely,
Jane DeJovine, Ph.D.Instructor, Religious Studies
Connelly High School
——————————————————————————–
Events
I want to bring your attention to Sandra Zernor, who runs a program for kids. Here is what Sandra (sandraz1@cox.net) writes to me:
Most kids today think being bad is “cool” and being good is “uncool.”. My mission in life is to change that perspective. I have created a program called “IT’S GOOD 2B GOOD!” for 10-12 year old kids. It’s a 3 hour interactive exciting program filled with games, stories, video clips, activities and discussion aimed at getting kids to see that being a good person is cool, or that “It’s Good to be Good.” How do I do this? I start by giving them lots of cutting edge scientific data on the benefits of doing good (helping others, giving to others, being kind). I break it up into 4 categories: they’ll be happier, their self-esteem will improve, their physical health will improve, and the world will be a better place. I then discuss with them the fact that just because there are benefits to doing good doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Sometimes it’s not easy, but they can develop a quality that will make it easier: moral courage. We discuss what moral courage is and how to develop it and strengthen it and use it in their lives. I help them apply the concept of moral courage to what is probably the most prevalent problem in schools that hurts many kids: verbal bullying. Following the discussion on moral courage I share several stories of kids who have made a difference in many people’s lives by the moral courage they had. These inspiring kids are all in the same age group as the participants and shows them, and I emphasize it, that the kids in the audience are no different than the kids who have made a difference in so many lives. It’s just a matter of wanting to make a difference. Finally, I review all the information and topics we covered and give each kid a small journal to keep as a gift. The journal has a quote at the top of each page from a famous person ( such as Anne Frank, William Penn, George Patton, Nelson Mandela, Booker T. Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Audrey Hepburn,etc.) on the topic of goodness and space below to write. I encourage the kids to do one good thing each day for a month and write it down in the journal. At the end of the month they can look back and see all the good they have done. As an educator I know that young kids need to understand concepts in a concrete way. Therefore, as I go through the program I put the concepts in a concrete form. Here are 3 examples: While I show a video clip of a scene in which several characters pass on to another person the kindness shown to them, I pass out strips of paper and have the participants create a paper chain. At the end of the video I hold up the chain and ask: “How is this chain like the video you just saw?” With some prompting they usually understand that when you do a kind act it tends to get passed on to other people, just like the links in a chain. That chain of kind acts can go on and reach many people, perhaps even all the way across the world. I also try to help them understand the impact of kind ts by showing them a large bowl filled with water. I drop an M&M into the middle of the water and ask the kids to tell me what happens to the water. They tell me it ripples out. That leads to a discussion of how kind acts have a ripple effect, possibly starting out as a small ripple, but becoming larger and larger. They may or may not ever know how much of an impact they are having, but they can always know it never stops with one person. I then drop another M&M into the bowl and ask the kids to tell me what happens when the ripple reaches the edge of the bowl. They tell me it ripples back to the middle. I help them understand from that the good you do for others always comes back to you. A final example is a large circle I hold up. The circle has a map of the world on it and the words around it: “I’m making the world a better place.” In the middle of the circle the shape of a puzzle piece is missing. I ask for a volunteer to come up and describe what he/ sees, give him the missing puzzle piece and ask him to put it back. I then tell them: Every one of you has something special and unique to offer the world that no one has ever had, and no one will ever have. If you don’t contribute your unique gift to the world, the world will always be missing something. You may not know what your special gift is yet, but you will find it. And when you do the world will be a better place.
The program has been quite successful, based on the feedback I have received from the evaluation forms the kids fill out after the program. Here are some samples:
“It was so amazing and inspiring…I am not lying about your presentation! I loved it! You helped bring out the good in me! Thanks a million.”
“You were great! But I still wish you could come every day and not go…You were awesome! I’ve learned a lot from you. Thank you so much for coming!!”
The program is adapted to fit each audience. It can be adapted to secular audiences, Christian audiences, and Jewish audiences (see “It’s Good 2B A Mensch!” on my website).
Visit WWW.ITSGOOD2BGOOD.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION.
——————————————————————————–
Publications
If you are looking for holiday gifts, please consider the following:
Stephen Post and Jill Neimark, Why Good Things Happen to Good People
(www.whygoodthingshappen.com), published by Broadway Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. (2007)
Stephen G. Post, ed., Altruism & Health: Perspectives from Empirical Research,
published by Oxford University Press (2007).
Andrew Michael Llescher and Daniel L. Worthen, The Altruistic Species: Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious Perspectives on Human Benevolence,
published by the Templeton Foundation Press (2007).
(www.templetonpress.org)
Thomas Jay Oord, Editor, The Altruistic Reader: Selections from Writings on Love, Religion, and Science, published by the Templton Foundation Press
(www.templetonpress.org) (2007).
Bill Kramer, Unexpected Grace: Stories of Faith, Science, and Altruism, published by the Templeton Foundation Press (2007).
(www.templetonpress.org)
Sir John Templeton, Pure Unlimited Love: An Eternal Creative Force and Blessing Taught by All Religions, published by the Templeon Foundation Press, 2000.
(www.templetonpress.org)
And perhaps the most distinguished reference work of 2007, soon to receive many top awards (after rave reviews at the recent meeting of the American Academy of Religion), edited by the absolutely inspiring Yudit Greenberg, Director of Jewish Studies at Rollins College, The Encyclopedia of Love in the World Religions, a two-volume authoritative work with a Foreword by Diana L. Eck of Harvard University, published by ABC-CLIO Press.
(www.abc-clio.com)
(I should add that Harvard’s Dr. George Vaillant is a member of the Institute’s International Advisory Board. He is, I believe, one of the finest minds of his generation. His new book, Spiritual Evolution, will be available from Broadway Books in several months. Prediction - this may well be the best book of 2008. More to come…)
Institute for Research on Unlimited Love
Room 214, School of Medicine
Case Western Reserve University
10900 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44106-4976
www.unlimitedloveinstitute.org