About
The Gathering
The Gathering is about your life and God’s plan for your life'; it’s about our lives together; it’s about finding what matters to us, what makes a life well lived, and using those things to build lives that matter with people that we care about and who care about us, people we can rely on.
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It’s about discovering the ways we can impact our communities and recreate our nation.
We’ll be exploring these issues together. For some of these questions, the answers will be uniquely our own and for others, we’ll discover common answers, the kind that bring us together and give our lives meaning and purpose. But for all of us, it will be a journey an adventure, one that you won’t have to travel alone, and one that will really matter.
Your Moderator
Leonardo Radomile
Leonardo was educated at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. He has been a lecturer at Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership and has taught courses in the co curricular program at the Harvard Kennedy School on effective social engagement.
He is the co author of the Harvard Guide on Social Entrepreneurship and has won three teaching awards including the prestigious Harvard Club award for teaching and civic engagement.
He has worked with grassroots community organizations, political organizations, church groups, and corporations, large and small. The focus of his work is on personal development through values education and community engagement
We live in troubling times.
The explosion of technology in the last quarter century has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. The immediate access to knowledge and information has provided limitless resources for learning. At the same time, social media and the substitution of technology driven interactions for personal interactions has depersonalized our lives, reducing too many interactions to irresponsible snipping.
Worst of all has been the secularization of society and the deterioration of those Judeo/Christian values that create meaningful lives. Where once universities and churches taught these values, universities and even many churches have been overtaken by woke ideology. Emotional reactions have replaced meaningful discussions of life’s most important issues.
Compounding these problems has been the breakdown of the family and communal life, robbing both children and adults of the supports necessary for successful lives and creating an epidemic of loneliness.
The results have been catastrophic. Incidents of depression, suicidal ideation, and actual suicides have skyrocketed particularly among teenagers who as a group have had the most extensive exposure to social media and have suffered the most from the breakdown of the family and those positive values. Today, 30% of teenage girls suffer from major depression, a 145% increase since 2004 and hospital admissions for self-harm in the same group has risen 188% since 2010. Teenage boys have suffered a 161% increase in major depression with a 48% increase in self-harm. Even among millennials, those aged 26 to 34, there has been a 62% increase in serious cases of anxiety. We are becoming a sicker and more toxic society.
There is a solution
But there is a solution. During the same quarter century, breakthroughs in psychology, neuroscience, and sociology have rediscovered the principles that make for meaningful lives and flourishing societies. These principles reflect the inheritance of our Judeo/Christian Tradition, particularly in those principles found in the Bible and Great Literature.
At The Gathering we will be exploring these principles in depth. More importantly, we will be creating the resources for implementing these principles in our daily lives and in community with others.
Our mission and all that we do is focused on significantly improving the lives of our participants.
We do this by providing the values education and support systems that provide the foundation for building meaningful lives in community.
How can we accomplish this?
Providing free courses and podcasts on the principles of building a meaningful life and flourishing communities.
Providing intensive courses where small groups of participants come together in person to implement these principles and support each other in building meaningful lives.
Providing these small groups the ability to interact in person with other small groups in their geographic area to build strong communities of support and civic engagement.
Though we are a faith-based educational enterprise, we are totally entrepreneurial in spirit. We will take risks and fail from time to time, learning from our mistakes and adjusting accordingly. Though we have the goals stated above, we have one overriding mission: To significantly improve the quality of life of our participants. Our success as an organization can only be measured by yours.
Join us as we build meaningful lives together.
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