by Lillian Koizumi
Special to the Tribune
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning, and Dialogue hosted its 5th Global Citizens Seminar on June 21, 2025, to explore interdisciplinary approaches to fostering hope, resilience and value creation in the face of interlocking social and political crises.
This year, 14 doctoral students joined co-facilitators Tim McCarthy, Ph.D., of Harvard University, and Jason Goulah, Ph.D., of DePaul University for the seminar. All of the students in this year’s cohort, representing 10 countries of origin, were new to Daisaku Ikeda’s philosophy and ideas.
McCarthy and Goulah chose Daisaku Ikeda’s 2014 peace proposal “Value Creation for Global Change: Building Resilient and Sustainable Societies” and his essay “The Most Important Decision” as the grounding texts. Recognizing both the difficulty and significance of this current moment, the two co-facilitators were inspired by Daisaku Ikeda’s emphasis on hope and the notion that “hope is a decision.”
As they delved into the proposal and essay throughout the one-day seminar, the doctoral students were invited to reflect on the following questions: What passages in the readings are making you think differently about your work? Are there passages that connect with your original motivations/reasons for pursuing your Ph.D. work? Based on the readings, how are you thinking about hope in this current moment?
One Iranian student resonated with Daisaku Ikeda’s perspective that “hope that has not been tested is nothing more than a fragile dream.”[1] After she opened up about the difficulty of maintaining hope amid the realities of current events in Iran, the group reflected on whether hope and realism are mutually exclusive.
Another student, from Nigeria, expressed that the concept of human revolution, or inner-motivated change, which Daisaku Ikeda highlighted in his peace proposal, is especially powerful at a time when “people are feeling so much rage and emptiness.” In his view, Daisaku Ikeda wants us to realize that if hope seems absent, we have to create hope ourselves.
At the conclusion of the seminar, McCarthy shared that spaces like this seminar have revitalized and strengthened his hope during these challenging times. “We have a choice about who we want to be and who, more importantly, we want to become,” he said. “And that to me is why I’m drawn to Mr. Ikeda. … and to so many of the people that were named [in the peace proposal].”
August 1, 2025 World Tribune, p. 4
References
- Hope is a Decision, p. 6. ↩︎
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