with thanks from Fourth World ! You’re also welcome to become a member.

Our Preoccupation

 Promoting Creative Habits

Our non-profit organization promotes literacy and creative arts appreciation while encouraging and inspiring volunteerism and collaboration in the publication of artistic, literary, philosophic, scientific, religious, and musical works.   In addition to publishing an international  journal each year, we offer a variety of community programs and group activities—including learning exchanges, day camps, mealtime conversations and book discussions along with music, theater, dance and arts events—to promote creativity and cooperative expression.

We worry that many of our modern vices, including a love for technological super-saturation, have made the world cognitively and creatively narrow, a frenetic and yet less authentically human place. 

This contemporary rush towards instantaneous, mass-communication paired with a shortage of meaningful human encounters and a loss of leisurely reading and creative habits have all conspired, to give us little time for the reflective practices which have helped all democratic civilizations thrive: reading, writing and creative exchange with others.

Fourth World is concerned that if our society suddenly forgets to continue to develop, sustain and promote new forms of group reflection and creative expression, we also risk becoming unimaginative, machine-dependent. Isolated with one another, would we grow unable to productively associate at all?  Globally we have seen, in just one generation, a drastic decrease in interpersonal interactions (including all-important mealtime conversations) and this is having significant consequences for today’s cyber-generations. We are always “connected” but yet suffer from staggering rates of isolation and a lack of meaningful social interactions.  

Just one more indicator of the most problematic "long, steady" decline in the world today, non-readers have nearly tripled since 1978 and now 25% of all American adults haven’t read a book (in any form) in the last year.  Do these rapid losses in the very elements of creativity - reading and writing; an appreciation for and practice of the creative arts; and thoughtful, civil and ideas-based exchanges with others - signal the beginning of an end to culture as we know it? And, since Mesopotamia’s first book and the advent of Socratic discussions, has there been a civilization which has thrived with declines in literacy and a general lack of ability to work creatively with others?

Our Members

Are we living through the extinction of civil conversation and our collective human ability to create communities based on the exchange of complex, often contentious ideas?

We worry that we’re losing the habits of individual and group creative practice,  and the consequences are dire. 

Without meaningful, creative exchange and inter-generational cooperation and conversation, without the daily cultivation of reading and writing habits beyond digital scrolling, how will our communities address shared challenges and grow?  Without creative cooperation, what does the future hold?

AN INVITATION TO MEMBERSHIP

We hope you decide to join our efforts to safeguard mealtime conversations, creative expression and cooperative, thoughtful exchange.  Members receive receipt along with complementary digital excerpts of pending publications and a complementary issue of the Fourth World Journal.  

Members are always invited to participate in our literacy and creative arts programs and activities.  Members also can freely submit any and all creative works for publication consideration.  

And, as a Member of Fourth World, you will—perhaps most importantly—receive a heartfelt thanks for helping to protect the 6,000 year old secret of all thriving civilizations: reading, writing and other forms of creative exchange.