Mission and Vision

MISSION AND VISION

We seek to create a broad “community” with people from many traditions, called together by a vision of healing and transforming our world. We include in this call both the outer transformation needed to achieve social justice, ecological sanity, and world peace, and the inner healing needed to foster loving relationships, a generous attitude toward the world and toward others. The policies and movement we are preparing will encourage a habit of generosity and trust, and the ability to respond to the grandeur of creation with awe, wonder and radical amazement.

Furthermore we say, there is a strong set of needs that we call, meaning needs: people want their lives to have some higher meaning and purpose than simply accumulating money, power, — they want their lives to be connected to something about which they can feel that it has transcendent value.

And they hunger for personal relationships, families and communities in which they can experience themselves as being cared for and recognized in all of their specificity and uniqueness (and spiritual in the broadest sense) beauty — not only for what they can “deliver” or “do” for others, not for how they will be “of use,” but simply because they are valuable and deserving of love and caring just for who they are as embodiments of the sacred.

We will bring to fruition our embodiment of policies and ways of being the the world that are truly generous, while building loving bridges across the cultures and faiths found in our region and in our world.

Together…. Let us bring forward into every policy “principles and values of love, kindness, generosity, care. Let us see and treat each as sacred beings worthy of respect and dignity.**

(**Note OWHR Institute-Quebec instills and promotes the values we have also found outlined by the progressive peace organization, Network of Spiritual Progressives (N.S.P.), headquartered in Berkeley, California.)

 

The Purpose of the Institute

The purpose of the Our Way Home Research Institute for War Resistance and Policy Alternatives-Quebec is to promote global justice, freedom, peace, sustainability, and an understanding of the importance of ethical action.

The Institute engages in research and social activism on current social, international, and ethical issues, it analyzes these issues, and communicates about these issues with aspects of the local and world communities in a variety of ways. This includes working with justice-oriented groups, writing essays and scholarly papers, putting on talks and conferences, and disseminating relevant information through the Internet or by other means. The Institute is committed to clarity of thought, to critical assessment of ideas, to honesty in communication, and an understanding of the importance of ethical action.

The Institute provides a framework for
-- Developing and coordinating the concerns about global ethics and justice in which the Director and Staff and its project collaborators are currently professionally engaged; and for extending these concerns to further areas;
-- Enhancing an understanding of issues pertaining to global justice and ethical action in the larger community  and within university-based communities (Students, Faculty, Staff, Administration, and the Community at large); and for encouraging systematic dialogue about these issues; and
-- Increasing the involvement  of people of all ages throughout the community in ethical action that may help to promote global justice.

 

Global Justice and Ethics

Justice can be thought of as appropriate treatment, and injustice as inappropriate treatment. What counts as appropriate and inappropriate is, of course, an extremely complex question which will be addressed over time.

The OWHR Institute for War Resistance and Policy Alternatives-Quebec focuses upon global justice issues that are claimed to involve ethically inappropriate treatment of individuals throughout human societies across the planet. And it is concerned with the issues regarding what type of action is the right or ethical way to respond to possible, or to identified, injustices.

Injustices typically result from the influence and control that more powerful individuals and groups have over others. The resulting injustice may be deliberate or inadvertent. At the forefront of global justice issues are the topics of war and terrorism, of genocide, of ethnic, racial and gender conflicts, of the environment, of world hunger, of the sustainability of life on the planet, of the appropriate nature of human economic endeavors, of the equality of human beings, of individual freedom, of human rights, and of the operation of human societies in accordance with true democratic principles.