Like it or not, our world refuses to stand still. Between today’s ever accelerating rate of technological innovation, the increasingly transforming presence of globalization, and needed shifts in how we relate and how we understand, change has become increasingly inescapable. Certainly we must learn to be more comfortable in change’s presence. But the task is more than just that. If we are to make good choices, we need to better understand the particular changes that define our time. We also need to better understand change more generally, how it works—in ourselves, in relationships, in larger social systems and in non-human systems as well. And we need institutions and social structures able to help us ride the rapids of change and to support the changes that will be necessary to a world we would want to live in. The concept of Culture Maturity offers both help and hope with each of these needed changes in our relationship with change. It assists us in understanding current changes and why our times might be so permeated by change—and often change of a fundamental sort. It makes possible more sophisticated understandings of change’s mechanisms and a deeper appreciation for change’s role in our human natures. It helps us rethink institutions not just so they can better support positive change, but so they themselves can continue to change to needed ways. More generally, it describes the future possibility of greater grace in the face of change.The topic of change has particular pertinence to the challenge of culturally mature conception. Culturally mature understanding not only better acknowledges change, it makes change part of the substance of understanding.
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