BRC HISTORY

Boston Research Center for the 21^st Century
396 Harvard Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Phone: (617) 491-1090 - Fax: (617) 491-1169
Virginia Benson, Executive Director

Our Purpose

The Boston Research Center for the 21^st Century (BRC) is an international peace institute that envisions a worldwide network of global citizens developing cultures of peace through dialogue and understanding. We sponsor public forums, educational seminars, and dialogue circles that are collaborative, diverse, and inter-generational. BRC also produces multi-author books that have been used in over 220 college and university courses.

"In our work, we single out initiatives reflecting a broad humanism that is consistent with Buddhism," executive director Virginia Straus explains, "and we create programs that help to strengthen cultures of peace."

The Boston Research Center for the 21st Century was founded in 1993 by Daisaku Ikeda, who is a Buddhist peace activist and president of Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a religious association with members in 190 countries.

The Center fosters dialogue among scholars and activists on common values across cultures and religions, seeking in this way to support an evolving global ethic for a peaceful twenty-first century. Human rights, nonviolence, environmental ethics, economic justice, and women's leadership for peace have been focal points of the Center's work over the years. Current programs and publications focus on women's leadership for peace, global citizenship education, and the philosophy and practice of community building.

Our Programs

Since 2002, our public events have included an ongoing lecture series cosponsored by the Wellesley Centers for Women to honor women of courage. Linda Stout became the first speaker in the series when she delivered the Fannie Lou Hamer Lecture on Economic Justice (2002). The Jeannette Rankin Lecture (2003) featured a talk by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA). In 2004, a Woman of Courage lecture honoring environmentalist Rachel Carson was delivered at the BRC by Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Most recently, in winter 2005, Dr. Gloria White-Hammond delivered the Harriet Tubman Lecture on Human Rights.

Re-imagining Self, Other, and the Natural World, the Center's 10th Anniversary Conference (September 2003), explored three philosophies of interconnectedness. Fall of 2004 marked the inaugural Ikeda Forum for Intercultural Dialogue. This first Ikeda Forum was entitled Re-Awakening East-West Connections: Walden and Beyond. In-depth summaries of these events are available on the Events pages of the BRC website.

Among the Center's books, Abolishing War (1998) was updated in 2002 with an online dialogue between peace scholars Elise Boulding and Randall Forsberg. Buddhist Peacework (published in 1999 in association with Wisdom Publications) offers firsthand international views of Buddhist approaches to cultural change. The Center's most popular titles include a series on the Earth Charter and Orbis Books' Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions (1999) and Subverting Greed: Religious Perspectives on the Global Economy (2002). The Center's first education book, Educating Citizens for Global Awareness, was edited by Nel Noddings and recently published by Teachers College Press (2005). The Center's books have been used in university courses in ethics, peace studies, education, and comparative religion by professors in over 120 American colleges and universities in over 200 courses to date. Order information can be found at www.brc21.org/book.html

Past programs have include a biannual conference series on global ethics, forums on women's leadership for peace, Global Citizen Awards, and a series of books on common values. The BRC has also sponsored many conferences such as From War Culture to Cultures of Peace: Challenges for Civil Society (1999), a conference series that was designed to support the work of the United Nations which declared the year 2000 the International Year for the Culture of Peace. Other past conferences include the following:

The Conditions for Abolishing War: Cultures and Institutions

Religion and Ecology: Forging an Ethic Across Traditions

Religion and Transnational Civil Society in the 21st Century