THE PROGRAM DIRECTOR’S VIEWPOINT
The Lodge at Pony Farm is designed to be a place where creative conversation can take place on subjects that matter, on topics that can change our lives, and in a way that helps to bring about that change. The form of those conversations will vary. Sometimes a presenter will offer ideas or perceptions; people gathered to listen will then respond and interact with one another; and everyone will learn something new and come to know and experience different thoughts and feelings than they would have become aware of otherwise. What could be more worthwhile?
Not everyone will be able to come to The Lodge to engage in these conversations, so we are also going to engage in another form of conversation that is becoming increasingly popular in our world – the blog. But it will be a particular form of blog, or at least more of a particular purpose.
To give an idea of the conversations we have in mind, I offer a quotation from a little book entitled "Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives", by Theodore Zeldin, a fellow and former dean at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. He writes:
“For most of history, people aspiring to be conversationalists have too often avoided subjects which went too deep or were too personal. They cheated: instead of saying what they thought, they repeated fashionable formulae or found epigrammatic ways saying things they did not believe.
I hope the new century will be more adventurous. Mere personal advancement or respectability can no longer be the main purpose of conversation. What is missing from the world is a sense of direction, because we are overwhelmed by the conflicts which surround us, as though we are marching through a jungle which never ends. I should like some of us to start conversations to dispel that darkness, using them to create equality, to give ourselves courage, to open ourselves to strangers, and most practically, to remake our working world, so that we are no longer isolated by our jargon or our professional boredom. We cannot reproduce the Renaissance; history cannot be made to repeat itself; but we can create something akin to it, to suit ourselves.
That is what I call the "New Conversation.”
I invite you to join us in New Conversation at the programs being offered at The Lodge at Pony Farm, announced and described elsewhere on this website. I also invite you to join in this online conversation, if you will, hoping that you might express thoughts or feelings that are important and true for you in relation to whatever the topic might be of a given blog. Let’s together seek a new sense of direction for our lives, our relationships, and our world.
Douglas M. Williams
Program Director, The Lodge at Pony Farm
October 8, 2008
