Private philanthropy has the capacity and responsibility to make high-intuition, high-risk, long-term bets that are less influenced by technology and market drivers, and decoupled from popularity contests and elite politics. This positions philanthropists as actors in futures that others cannot yet see and enables them to work upstream of the agendas of investors, markets, media, and even governments, bringing opportunities forward that otherwise would not have been feasible to maximize beauty and intelligence, reduce injustices, and enrich humanity.

This takes incredible courage, insight, sensitivity, and commitment. It requires Belief.

Four hundred years ago, education underwent a transformation. "New technological and economic changes were outpacing the thinking of the [political] leaders." Traditional worldviews that once unified all knowledge and belief were fragmenting under emerging methods of knowledge production. The revolutionary technology was the printing press, the emerging economic system was capitalism, and the new methodology for producing knowledge was empirical science.

Unfortunately, the opportunity for an integrative "education-centric social system... that would place human development and the free flow of information at the center of social life on a global scale" was coopted by "capital and the nation state upgrading and expanding school bureaucracies and improving the reach of public education as part of building national economies.”

All of this is happening again with a similar revolution in technology, economic system, and knowledge production. If individuals and institutions continue to make easy, safe, known choices, if we continue to build on top of the legacy system, the resulting transformations will involve increasingly general, but superficial “AI” used to enforce a global techno-feudalism, and that, when applied to scientific research, will produce empirically validated knowledge, while reducing humans’ cognitive capacity and prioritizing economic consolidation over the creative discovery of novel paradigms.

We need novel education institutions working to integrate "new sciences, as well as religious aspects of human culture... for the design of educational configurations capable of catalyzing a universal reform of all human institutions." The Divinity School is an example of this new kind of academy, one that forges leaders who can see deeper into reality, make decisions that benefit the whole, and align humanity with the natural intelligence of the universe.

If students of The Divinity School are successful, instead of the technocracy described above, the resulting civilization will be undergirded by an increasing sensitivity to relationship. The key technological innovation will be systems that better surface, coordinate, and develop the perceptions and insights of individuals and communities. The economy will dramatically increase innovation contextualized to local environments and values, and knowledge production will deepen our intuitive capacities and embodied, sensory integration with the world around us. The Divinity School combines training in perceptual clarity and character development with study of the application of process-relational metaphysics across physics, biology, cognitive science, and other foundational fields. Our faculty and students are already piercing existing paradigms with tools and policies that guide us toward life-affirming futures.

There are great and terrible opportunities ahead. In the coming years, fundamental questions will be reconsidered: What is life? What place do feeling and emotion hold in decision‑making? How will religion, community, and spiritual life thrive amid radical technological change? What is humanity for? The answers that gain prominence will shape everything.

When the first benefactors endowed Oxford or MIT, they could never have foreseen antibiotics, silicon chips, or space telescopes. Likewise, we cannot predict every breakthrough that will emerge from The Divinity School. What we can promise is that our work will guide institutions toward technologies, policies and infrastructure that should be built in every conceivable future.

All gifts are stewarded through a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor and are tax‑deductible in the United States. Contact us to learn more about our plan for the next four hundred years.*

Reference

Stein, Z. (2022). Education must make history again. Remembering Comenius in a time between worlds. Perspectiva Press.