SMALL WORLD

Welcome to humanity . Our mission is to encourage people to understand this planet as a common home.

We believe this is the most crucial and perhaps most difficult task of the next fifty years. Solutions to our profound social, economic, and environmental challenges must be built on the bedrock of mutual understanding and respect for eternal differences or they will continue to founder in the quicksand of myopia and greed.

We will engage you, therefore, in a conversation with the world. We will invite you beyond accustomed horizons.

The Humanity Foundation is a small, independent, non-profit enterprise, without political or religious affiliation. We thank our far-flung writers and photographers for their enthusiasm and patience; Harris Bucklin of Westvaco Corporation for the munificent contribution of this paper; and each of many other meliorists who have encouraged this journey.  

Please join us, as we dedicate ourselves to creating a magazine that opens a window for every reader, allowing the fresh, necessary breezes of our shared humanity to temper our fears and encourage our dreams, a magazine that invites us by its excellence and endurance not only to walk in the shoes of our fellow human beings but also to work at their work and play their games, to cook at their fires and visit their homes, to witness their theater and sit in their classrooms, to hear the songs in their concerts and sermons from their pulpits, to know the justice and challenges of their lands, so that by sharing their lives we might understand better how to sustain the necessary diversity and complexity of this Earth in the hope of a more positive future.

Tony Balis

FINER LOOK

Good design requires sensitivity toward all aspects of our interaction with objects and information. Just as a single part has no meaning in isolation, a single means has limited capacity to invigorate human intelligence.

For humanity to stimulate the poetry that is so important to the human spirit, design and editorial architecture must be equal, engaged partners. Only then can this magazine foster a dynamic union of conversing creators, including you.

Quickness to judge and tendency to guard a view point originate in attachment to convenience, habit and convention. Our challenge is to remain attentive, to keep an open mind, not to limit perception. Difference helps broaden vision; contrast serves to enrich perception.

All the individual parts, visible but perhaps unnoticed, remain unique and needed, working to serve their cooperative essence. By keeping our senses open, we tune into the invisible and find ourselves moved toward a place of more inspired understanding.

Thomas Ockerse