As in all his books, Heckler draws from personal experience: training his horse, cultivating presence in aikido dojos, consulting with business executives, raising children. A masterful and encompassing book, Holding the Center develops from the fulcrum of the self in the natural world. Many of Heckler’s lessons arise from his life as a householder and father. Community is a larger family—we make alliances to “take care of what matters to us.” But, as Heckler teaches, that takes listening to others with an open heart, and learning what the needs of others are.The world can be a sanctuary, if we find a balance between instinct and choice. Richard Strozzi Heckler sounds an important call about the interplay between power and generosity in these subtle and luminous essays.

Memoir of a former MIT President, as well as professor, corporate director, and advisor to American government agencies and to museums and foundations. Howard Wesley Johnson has been associated with MIT for more than forty years and been a major influence on the modernization and expansion of many of its programs. He will be most remembered as a management educator and as MIT's president during the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s. The title of his memoirs reflects his central, usually lonely position in those days, trying to hold together an institution often torn apart by the turmoil of the times. Johnson was more successful at navigating the minefields on campus than were many other college and university presidents, perhaps because he was always willing to listen to both sides and because his values were in the right place--against the war in Vietnam, in favor of increased participation in the university by women and minorities, and concerned about environmental issues. As a professor and administrator at MIT, a corporate director, and an advisor to American government agencies and to museums and foundations, Johnson consistently sought both to understand and to apply the principles of good management.

Politicians and pundits often scorn polarization and compromise--the intransigence of the former and the feebleness of the latter--without suggesting an alternative way. Polarization, when opposing forces are equal or close to equal in strength, leads to stalemate. Compromise threatens to betray one's conviction about what is essential. Ideally, a leader must combine conviction about what ought to be done with an open-minded awareness of unintended consequences. The social sciences are or should be based, largely, on the premise that people are historical and social beings. Holding the Center follows this tradition, while focusing on the "trimming" aspect. In nautical terms, trimming indicates an adjustment of one's vessel to accommodate one's environment. In politics, it is to find common ground between extremes, not for the sake of compromise, but because reason does not have a single location on the political spectrum. The twelve chapters in this book are brought together by Goodheart's argument that the Whig trimming tradition is the heart and soul of politics in the West, and that both democracy and democratic culture depend upon the trimming tradition's advocacy of toleration. What is needed now, he notes, is a transformation in our political culture in which humility and the admission of error enter the list of political virtues. Non-parliamentary democracy with its separation of powers depends for its proper functioning on compromise, especially in a time like ours of crisis and divided government.

What to do?--Our task will be to define a center anew that can hold things together when everything is falling apart. We must know why the center is the center to hold ourselves together.

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.

In The Center Cannot Hold Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally funded NGO as it underwent dissolution, Hanchey traces the conflicts between local leadership and Western paternalism as well as the unstable subjectivity of Western volunteers—including the author—who are unable to withstand the contradictions of playing the dual roles of decolonializing ally and white savior. She argues that Western institutional and mental structures must be allowed to fall apart to make possible the emergence of decolonial justice. Hanchey shows how, through ruination, privileged subjects come to critical awareness through repeated encounters with their own complicity, providing an opportunity to delink from and oppose epistemologies of coloniality. After things fall apart, Hanchey posits, the creation of decolonial futures depends on the labor required to imagine impossible futures into being.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." These words from Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" provide Why the Center Can't Hold with its organizing theme. And although Yeats was describing the grim atmosphere of post-World War I Europe, O'Neill regards the poem's pronouncements as eerily predictive of the state of the world as we are currently observing it. O'Neill takes them as predictive of the agency in particular of the United States-the "Center"-in bringing about in the world the more general chaos we are now observing (relative to various refugee and migrant crises, the emergence of sophisticated and even postmodern forms of militant and cyber terrorism, banking and other monetary crises, environmental catastrophes under the aegis of climate change, the defunding of public higher education, the persistence of virulent forms of racism and other types of intolerance, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the marginalisation and even outright elimination of human labor forces, etc.). O'Neill provides historical analyses that illuminate why this is the case, and he also asks what changes in the United States - in its politics, in its socio-cultural formations, and in its beliefs and (supposedly common) values - might help us to avoid the seemingly inevitable (and lamentable) destruction that lies ahead.

2021 Illumination Book Awards, Gold Medal: Christian Living INTERPRETING THE PARABLES OF OUR LIVES By the time most of us reach adulthood, we have experienced enough to begin to understand our own personal narratives. It’s tempting to focus on discouragement or pessimism, even cynicism. But there’s a brighter, better way. In this collection of heartwarming true stories, Christopher de Vinck reminds us of life’s many graces, and he challenges us to embrace our experiences with hope, humor, gratitude, and wonder. Whether revisiting a boyhood hobby of photographing the neighborhood raccoon or musing upon the possible uses of a decades-old Santa suit, de Vinck takes his readers to scenes, sights, and sensations of the daily, ordinary gifts that are not so ordinary after all. Read The Center Will Hold to stir your own poignant memories, or share it with family and friends as an invitation to simple joy. Its pages speak with eloquence, in language common to us all: wisdom, light, and love.

The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy functions as a textual site where white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Within this text, white women philosophers critique the field of philosophy for its complicity with whiteness as a structure of power, as normative, and as hegemonic. In this way, the authority of whiteness to define what is philosophically worthy is seen as reinforcing forms of philosophical narcissism and hegemony. Challenging the whiteness of philosophy in terms of its hubristic tendencies, white women philosophers within this text assert their alliance with people of color who have been both marginalized within the field of philosophy and have had their philosophical and intellectual concerns and traditions dismissed as particularistic. Aware that feminist praxis does not necessarily lead to anti-racist praxis, the white women philosophers within this text refuse to telescope as a site of critical inquiry one site of hegemony (sexism) over another (racism). As such, the white women philosophers within this text are conscious of the ways in which they are implicated in perpetuating whiteness as a site of power within the domain of philosophy. Framed within a philosophical space that values the multiplicity of philosophical voices, and driven by a feminist framework that valorizes de-centering locations of hegemony, interdisciplinary dialogue, and transformative praxis, The Center Must Not Hold refuses to allow the white center of philosophy to masquerade as universal and given. The text de-centers various epistemic and value orders that are predicated upon maintaining the center of philosophy as white. The white women philosophers who contribute to this text explore ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, taste, the nature of a dilemma, questions of the secularity of philosophy, perception, discipline-based values around how to listen and argue, the crucial role that social location plays in the continued ignorance about the reality of oppression and privilege as these relate to the subtle forms of white valorization and maintenance, and more. Those interested in critical race theory and critical whiteness studies will appreciate how the contributors have linked these areas of critical inquiry within the often abstract domain of philosophy.

Over the past forty years, congregations, businesses, other organizations, and communities across the United States have become increasingly divided along political and ideological lines. In When the Center Does Not Hold, David R. Brubaker, with contributions by colleagues Everett Brubaker, Carolyn Yoder, and Teresa J. Haase, offers relevant, practical mentorship on navigating polarized environments. Through easily accessible stories, they provide tools and processes that will equip leaders to both manage themselves and effectively lead others in highly polarized and anxious systems. Coaching includes guidance on key characteristics of effective leadership in times of polarization: refusing contempt, honoring dignity, broadening binaries, seeking first to understand, inviting disagreement, and staying connected. With years of combined experience in the fields of conflict transformation and organizational and leadership studies, Brubaker and his colleagues offer hope. Here, readers learn from leaders and communities that continue to renew the covenants that bind them, courageously address deeper needs that drive conflict, and hold on to a moral center while navigating the storms of polarization.