Black Friday Invitation: Eva Saulitis,

The Death of Darwinism: Christopher Preston,

Gears / Pieces: Annette Basalyga,

Prophet at Yandeistakye: Two Excerpts: Daniel Henry,

“In June, 2009, the Island Institute will host its 25th Sitka Symposium, quite a feat for a small organization like ours. But in the face of the challenges facing our country and the world today, events like these are small occasions, special to the relative few who will attend.

Yes, this is so, yet the legacy of ideas the Sitka Symposium has generated in its twenty-five years is no small one. And many of them are ideas the world needs just now–questions we must face squarely, concepts we must examine closely, notions we may need to leave behind, others we may need to imagine into being: How is it that we can best live together in community? How can we best honor and respect the places, the environment we inhabit? How might our stories help us understand essential truths about our human nature, about our relationships to all of nature?

FrameWork: Shaping an Enduring Human Culture–the 2009 Sitka Symposium theme–poses essential questions about the characteristics of a sustainable culture. To work on that culture’s frame is to consider its parameters and what it holds–the full meaning of our human lives and the power given to that meaning by a sense of appropriate limits. If we cultivate an awareness of both meaningfulness and limitation, how might that affect our choices and actions in daily living and in the distances that constitute our lifetimes?

The essays and poems in this issue of Connotations are about some of those choices and actions…”