THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF MARIA VAN LEEUWENHOEK, ANTONI'S DOCHTER by Heather Tosteson
NEW EBOOK: CITIZEN/SCHOLAR REPORT
THE 2018 IMMIGRATION DEBATE: TRUMP FACES PUBLIC OPINION by Charles Brockett
NEW WEB ANTHOLOGY
LONGER THAN EXPECTED: Adulthood After Life-Threatening Childhood Illness
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
MY NAME IS YOUR NAME & OTHER STORIES, Kerry Langan
Kindle version now available
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS . . . Our 12th Wising Up Anthology . . .
New Kindle Editions Available . . . Love After 70. . . Siblings: Our First Macrocosm. . .
NEW PHOTO GALLERIES
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: The Lasting Weight of Felony - A Wising Up Listening Project
A WELCOMING PHILOSOPHY
The aim of Universal Table is to promote tolerance and social trust along many dimensions of life - or those are the words we have been using in our official mission statement. But each time we use them, we realize we are trying to describe something far broader - something that encompasses welcome, difference, surprise and inclusion, truthfulness and authenticity, and an equal place for each of us and what we hold most dear. These are the true goals of Universal Table: Finding the We in Them, the Us in You.
Our major activities are the books we create and publish through Wising Up Press, and the Universal Table workshops and research projects that both develop and support them. Our areas of particular interest are social justice & inclusion, immigration & belonging, pluralism in families, illness & meaning, social and psychological resiliency, creative aging, listening across faiths - and the many other complex challenges and lasting rewards of living up close and personal with pluralism in social, family, religious, and civic life.
What distinguishes our approach is an equal emphasis on the why and the how of living well with difference. Through our research projects, we are developing new interpretations of chronic areas of social discord, interpretations that make it safer for us to interact from a position of respect and appreciation with people who have very different world views and value systems.
We are equally interested in specific techniques, especially the use of story and other art forms, to help us change our patterns of direct personal interaction, so that we can live out our best intentions. What ways of thinking, imagining, listening, speaking and being with one another truly expand our worlds? For real, sustainable change takes place at the day by day, person by person, word by word, gesture by gesture level - and it isn't easy and it isn't simple. But fascinating, rewarding, energizing, inspiring, and worth all the effort - without a doubt.
NEW PUBLICATION - NOVEL
This engaging and extensively illustrated novel with its daunting but self-explanatory title tells a complex, moving and often funny story. Set in seventeenth century Holland, its heroine, Maria, explores the perennially fascinating (and often squirmy) issues of sexual generation that engaged her father and everyone in their household following his discovery of sperm—particularly, who makes scientific theories, why, and how these theories affect the lives of the people around them, especially women.
HEATHER TOSTESON
THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS of Maria van Leeuwenhoek, Antoni’s Dochter (1668-1696) Including accounts of novel discoveries made in Delft that bear upon the oft vexing mysteries of sexual generation, particularly as they apply to the fate and purpose of women
THE LASTING WEIGHT OF FELONY A Wising Up Listening Project
To explore the lasting social consequences of felony convictions, we are creating a book that combines first person accounts of people with felony convictions—both when serving their sentences and afterwards, including those who have successfully reintegrated and those who have not—along with the stories of the many other people involved in these cases.READ MORE
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
MY NAME IS YOUR NAME & OTHER STORIES Kerry Langan
Kerry Langan's warm and generous third short story collection, My Name Is Your Name, includes stories of women at all ages—from little girls to old women whose long lives are now only fleeting memories. READ MORE
Our 12th Wising Up Anthology. . . THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS A Wising Up Anthology
In this Wising Up Anthology, forty-eight contemporary authors explore through stories, memoir, and poetry how the kindness of strangers has informed and transformed their lives. They describe how we are often surprised into kindness; discover unexpected abilities and compatibilities through it; retreat from it; act on it at times grudgingly; are saved by it in times of illness; and through its practice find our best selves. READ MORE . . .
SIBLINGS: Our First Macrocosm A Wising Up Anthology
Our families, especially our siblings, provide our first macrocosm. How much of that experience do we carry out into the world as part of our deepest, inchoate expectations of the world or of ourselves? What happens to us as adults when we return to these first numinous macrocosms trying to understand how they still shape our ways of being? Read more. . .
Stephanie Hart: Contributing author and discussion leader
The Kindness of Strangers NYC Discussion Group
WOULD YOU LIKE TO USE AN ANTHOLOGY TO START A CONVERSATION?
We see our books, especially our Wising Up Anthologies, as catalysts for community, a way of deepening the conversations that develop through the shared experience of reading, especially around areas of sticky, or strident, social concern . . . Read More
