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I was very moved, in our discussion Wednesday evening, by Bharath's call for us to speak together about what which is real, about that which matters...and also heartened by the opportunities Liz held out, for us to learn how to speak together differently. That feels to me like something the world needs: a different way of talking among ourselves and others.
What this suggests, I think, is that we need less an organizing principle or topic (as some of us were suggesting below) than a different mode, a different way of interacting, one in which we don't each default to our area of professional expertise (or, I think, to our idiosyncratic, personal vulnerabilities?--not sure about this one!).

I've been recording elsewhere (close by) what I've been learning from Rebecca Goldstein's new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. The central character, who has gotten fame and fortune by publishing a book on The Varieties of Religious Illusion (which has an appendix rebutting all the arguments for God's existence) muses towards the end of the novel,

"his Appendix was only an appendix, and...has little to do with the text...the text is written not out there but in here, in the emotions that are so fundamental that we spread them onto a world of our imagining, or onto a world of our making, so that we end up beholding a world that is lavished with ...our vertiginous bafflement at the self that is inviolably me and here and now, and with our desperate and incomplete sense of the inviolable selves of the others that we need so crucially, and with our fear of all that's unknown out there and that can hurt us, and with our suspicions that almost everything out there will turn out to be unknown and able to hurt us....and then what happens?

This is what happens....The rituals of purification; and the laws of separation....The communities that define themselves in distinction from others, and the hatred in those others who can burn them alive....The elected circle of disciples, and the ordeals that try their faith..."

This is the challenge, I think (one Metanexus might well like to see us take on): Might we create here, among ourselves, a different sort of "happening"? One without such rituals, such laws, such distinctions, such disciplines, such disciples, such ordeals....?