Charles M Johnston

Intelligence's Creative Multiplicity addresses one of our time's most essential insights if we are to think with the sophistication our future demands. Intelligence has multiple aspects each of which is critical to understanding ourselves and to addressing the important questions before us as a species. From the book's back cover: "We take appropriate pride in our rationality, but other aspects of our cognitive complexity-the imaginal, the emotional, the intelligence of the body-play equally important roles in our unique toolmaking, meaning-making natures. Creative Systems Theory brings particular attention to the role of intelligence's multiplicity in what makes us human. And it argues that a greater appreciation for intelligence's multiple aspects will become more and more critical in times ahead. The theory describes how a more conscious and encompassing relationship to the whole of intelligence is key to the more nuanced and mature-we could say simply wise-kind of decision-making that will be increasingly necessary in all parts of our lives. Intelligence's Creative Multiplicity offers a deep-dive look into this rich and dynamic new picture of cognition's workings."

Perspective and Guidance for a Time of Deep Discord confronts the very real dangers that come with today's extreme social and political polarization. And it examines what will be needed to effectively address what we see. From the book's back cover: "Social and political polarization has become so extreme that conversation about the simplest of issues is today often close to impossible. And polarized thinking-from both the Right and the Left-is not just putting civil conversation in jeopardy, it is getting in the way of addressing essential questions that our future well-being will depend on. "In Perspective and Guidance for a Time of Deep Discord, one of our times most innovative social thinkers argues that what we see is a product not just of what we think but how what we think. He describes what the greater maturity of understanding needed to get beyond warring ideological purities requires of us. And he looks closely at what such understanding looks like when applied to critical concerns where divisiveness too often prevails: war and peace, climate change, health care, immigration, abortion, bigotry, the relationship of science and faith, and conflicting views on the nature of progress."

This book is the place to go for a deep dive into the forward-thinking, multi-faceted ideas of Creative Systems Theory. From the book's back cover: "Creative Systems Theory brings big-picture, long-term perspective to understanding who we are and why we think and act in the ways that we do. It is pertinent equally to appreciating the past, teasing apart current cultural challenges, and making sense of what a vital human future will require of us. This is the definitive work on Creative Systems Theory and its implications."At a practical level, Creative Systems Theory provides powerful tools for making effective choices in both our personal and our collective lives. More conceptually, it makes a major contribution to the history of ideas. It clarifies how, while modern age institutions, values, and ways of thinking have served us well, they cannot be sufficient for the tasks ahead. And it offers a comprehensive approach to understanding that reflects the more mature and encompassing kind of thinking that will become more and more essential in times ahead. "This volume brings together fifty years of committed inquiry and practical application. It is part guidebook, part memoir, part compilation, and part an effort to extend Creative Systems Theory's thinking just as far into the future as is possible."

The Creative Imperative confronts the most critical question of our time: how we must think to have a vital future. It first introduced the thinking of Creative Systems Theory over thirty years ago and remains one of the most important resources for understanding the theory and its contribution. It is also a valued reference for people interested in a deep understanding of creative process.Creative Systems Theory is a comprehensive framework for understanding purpose, change, and interrelationship in human systems. It helps us better understand the past, tease apart current cultural dilemmas, and make sense of what a vital human future will require of us. The theory offers a overarching approach to understanding that reflects the more mature and encompassing kind of thinking that will become more and more essential in times ahead.The Creative Imperative is significant not just for the insights it brings from Creative Systems Theory's beginnings, but also for the particular attention it brings to many of the theory's foundational concepts. In addition, it richly documents ideas with photographs of art and architecture through history. Much in Creative Systems Theory has not been expressed more richly or fully since.

Hope and the Future is a critically important book by one of our times' most respected and original social thinkers. This second edition includes a new preface and additional examples that more specifically address unsettling events of the last four years.From the book's back cover: "Hope and the Future addresses what legitimate hope for the future necessarily depends on. It describes how we face a growing number of challenges that require that we think, act, and relate in new ways--often fundamentally new ways. And it explores how effectively addressing those challenges will require not just fresh ideas, but a critical "growing up" as a species."This essential book also looks at ways needed changes are already happening, and how when we are ready for them, they can seem surprisingly straightforward, indeed, like common sense. Hope and the Future is an exploration of the "new common sense" on which our future depends."Of all Dr Johnston's books, Hope and Future is written most specifically for a general audience. It is the place to start if you are not familiar with his work.

The Toronto Years is the first of three volumes relating the history of McMaster University. It is not simply an institutional chronicle, which lists names for the record; it is a dramatic and colourful story that shows how the university grew out of earlier Baptist educational endeavours and describes its eventful first forty years, spent on the Bloor Street Campus in Toronto. McMaster University was established in 1887 as a trust of the Baptist constituency, which helped to ensure vital and ongoing financial support, but which also embroiled the school in the often bitter theological debates sweeping through the churches. In the 1920s, the struggle between modernism and fundamentalism threatened the university's very existence. Fluctuating enrolment, wartime stresses, and education continually forced confrontations over the question of federation with the provincial university in Toronto. Charles Johnston describes the achievements of a small group of courageous and skilful administrators amid the conflicting currents of educational and religious development in Canada during a period when universities were the targets of traditional criticisms of urban values. This volume will be of interest to anyone concerned with the cultural and intellectual growth of the nation.

McMaster University was established in 1887 as a trust to the Baptist constituency of central Canada. This second volume of the university's history chronicles its transformation from a modest university college into an important university. It is the story of survival through the Depression and the Second World War to eventual emergence as a recognized scientific research centre and of how this role, never envisaged at the time when arts and theology were McMaster's chief concerns, dictated the university's divorce from its original Baptist sponsors. McMaster's move to Hamilton in 1930 coincided with the Depression, a catastrophe that haunted the university throughout the decade, thwarting new programs, forcing economies, and shattering the hopes entertained for the institution during the 1920s. This chastening interlude was followed by war, which further curbed development and created serious financial and enrolment problems, but the war also spurred scientific research, particularly in nuclear physics. Funds for science were sought outside the Baptist constituency, but to be eligible for them a new and separate institution had to be formed, so in 1948 Hamilton College was incorporated and affiliated with McMaster. Members of the arts faculty were disturbed by the growing stress on science, and the university's attempts to strengthen arts and theology in the 1950s so threatened to overtax its resources that McMaster was forced to seek state aid for its entire operation. In 1957, McMaster was reorganized as a private non-denominational institution, eligible for public funding. Its days as a Baptist university came to an end. Charles Johnston pays tribute to those dedicated and resourceful administrators who, through depression, war, and ideological conflicts, provided the expertise essential to the survival and growth of McMaster. This volume, like its predecessor and successor, will be of interest to anyone concerned with the cultural and intellectual growth of the nation.

Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Futureis the most detailed of three new future-related works by the author. It looks deeply at how the most important challenges ahead for the species will require not just better ideas, but new human capacities; in the end, an essential "growing up" as a species-a new Cultural Maturity. It is written for those inter- ested in acquiring the newly sophisticated leadership abilities that we will more and more need in all parts of our lives in times ahead.The concept of Cultural Maturity makes understandable how institutional structures and beliefs that in modern times have served us well can't be the ideals and end points that we have assumed them to be. It goes on to articulate a new guiding story for our time, one able to take us equally beyond denial, cynicism, and na ve wishful thinking. This book looks deeply at the changes the concept of Cultural Maturity describes-both how they make needed new capacities possible, and how we see their beginnings in many parts of our personal and collective lives.The concept of Cultural Maturity is based on the ideas of Creative Systems Theory, a comprehensive framework for understanding change, purpose, and interrelationship in human systems. Creative Systems Theory describes how Cultural Maturity's changes are as, or more, significant than those that brought us modern democratic governance 250 years ago. It also argues that if the concept of Cultural Maturity is not basically correct, it is hard to imagine a healthy and vital human future.In addition to introducing the concept of Cultural Maturity, Cultural Maturity: A Guidebook for the Future presents important related ideas from Creative Systems Theory. Creative Systems Theory represents an example of culturally mature conception and offers a rich array of conceptual tools able to guide us in making the future's increasingly complex choices.

Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questions addresses how the new kind of understanding we need today, besides helping us confront modern-day challenges, also brings a new creativity of perspective to more ultimate questions. It describes how many such ultimate questions have baffled us not because they are inherently difficult, but becase they require a maturity of understanding of which we are only now becoming capable. This short book uses the thinking of Creative Systems Theory to take on some of the most important and timely of such quesions. Some examples: -How do we best understand the times in which we live? -How do we best understand the human story as a whole?-Why, at different times in history, has human understanding taken the forms that it has?-How do we best understand the experience of free will? -Are the beliefs of science and religion just different or, instead, parts of a larger picture? -What is our place in the larger scheme of things? These questions share a common bond: they are systemic, and systemic in a particular sense we are only beginning to fully grasp. Quick and Dirty Answersdescribes how the needed answers to these questions are in fact straightforward, indeed rather common sense. What is new and different is that this is a sort of common sense that we are only beginning to be able to get our minds around. Quick and Dirty Answers to the Biggest of Questionsis intended for people who find particular fascination with overarching, "theory of everything" reflection.

Necessary Wisdom presents an invitation by one of today's most far-reaching thinkers to explore the new creativity and maturity that future challenges will increasingly demand. The profound challenges that define our time--changes in love and family, the gifts and curses of a global world, inescapable threats to the environment--require not just fresh policies, but whole new ways of understanding. Necessary Wisdom draws on one of the simplest ways to get at what makes such new understanding new: such thinking successfully "bridges" polarities. It draws an encompassing circle around the either/ors of conventional thought-political left and political right, might and body, masculine and feminine, alley and enemy, or matter and energy. Besides applying the concept of bridging to issues such as those above, it draws on Creative Systems Theory to help tease apart how our thinking can stop short of the needed conceptual maturity. Creative Systems Theory identifies three kinds of polar traps, what it calls Unity Fallacies, Separation Fallacies, and Compromise Fallacies. Each issue-focused chapters ends with a listing of ways we can fall for each of these kinds of fallacies in attempting to address those particular concerns.

The authors examine the interaction of missionary organizations with local political powers and with their home government, arguing that in trying to decide which course of action to pursue, missionaries became knowledgeable students of imperial politics and the shifting state of international affairs. They show that leadership of British missionary societies was split between those who wanted to be treated without favouritism by the British government and those who had more aggressive expectations. In doing so they explore the pressures that contributed to the formation of imperial policy and perspective during a significant period of the evolution of the British empire.

In a fiercely fought provincial election in 1919, a new political movement came to power in Ontario. The victorious party was the United Farmers of Ontario. Its leader, Ernest Charles Drury (1878-1968), became the province's eighth premier. Idealistic agrarian reformer, staunch temperance man, free-trade advocate, Simcoe County 'yeoman,' and progressive populist, Drury was a man of the people and of the land, inevitably tagged the Farmer Premier. In this biography, Charles M. Johnston follows the career of Drury through agrarian activism and partisan politics, and explores the personal and ideological forces that directed him. Drury began his career in the farm movement as leader of the Dominion Grange and Farmers' Alliance. He went on to act as the driving force behind the Canadian Council of Agriculture, and then co-founded the UFO in 1913. Activist though he was, Drury as a premier sought no dramatic departures from established political procedures. When others of his party did, notably J.J. Morrison and W.C. Good, Drury disavowed their class-consciousness and their formula of group government. Instead he advocated the creation of a people's party, based on what he called Broadening Out – an appeal to all citizens, regardless of class, occupation, or political stripe, who were seen to share the farmer's desire for a more humane, moral, and progressive society in the wake of the First World War. The question of Broadening Out was a controversial one within agrarian ranks, and it led to dissension among the leaders. This weakening of the party combined with the shrewd tactics of Howard Ferguson's Tories to bring about the Drury government's downfall in 1923. During its four years in power it had enacted some solid social welfare legislation, but its defeat was resounding. With it came the effective end of Drury's political career. Johnston offers a revealing study of a brief chapter in Ontario history and of the man whose principles and ideals shaped it.