On Natalie Houghtby-Haddon’s Dissertation (twitter post 6/30/09)

Natalies is a colleague at GW and took one of my courses during her doctoral program. This is second doctorate. The first was in divinity; this one is in religion/public policy. Her secular mission is “healthy and sustainable communities” and her spiritual journey, as I perceive it, is to make the lessons of Christ a relevant moral compass in our secular pursuits (my words, not her words). In her dissertation, she talks about the value of “imaginative discourse” as a way to engage communities in conceiving of and actually making better communities. At her reception I asked her to answer, within the constraints of Twitter, her own question: ‘How do we build health and sustainable communities?” Thus her answer: “Imagine them into being.”