Bowling alone these days? The Dalai Lama Centre has an idea for you.

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Back in 2004 I was privileged to do some PR work for the Dalai Lama - it involved talking to all the big news and talk shows on American network TV. Peter Jennings (he was still alive then), Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers - I talked to them or their senior producers. Some were impossible to contact (like Oprah).

One of the people this work brought me into contact with is Victor Chan - a remarkable academic from the University of British Columbia who has been a buddy with the Dalai Lama since the early '70's. You can read about this remarkable relationship in his book, The Wisdom of Forgiveness, and read about their adventures at remote Tibetan bowling alleys.

No, sorry; I'm wrong. They've done a lot together, but not bowling. The bowling was done with Robert Putnam, the celebrated American sociologist who first came to my attention with a remarkable essay called Bowling Alone, published in 1995 in The Journal of Democracy.

Putnam had noticed that participation in league bowling - as opposed to purely recreational bowling - was in steep decline. This lead him to the  discovery that all sorts of group activities, from membership in social clubs, to volunteer activities, were in free-fall all across America. Hence the title, Bowling Alone.

The connection? Victor Chan is now heading up The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education in Vancouver, Canada and has invited Putnam to give an address at 8:00 pm on Saturday April 14, 2007, at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, the University of British Columbia.

You can read about it here or below.

Civic Engagement in a Changing World



When
Saturday, April 14, 2007
8:00 PM

Where
Chan Shun Concert Hall,
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts:

6265 Crescent Road, UBC
Vancouver, British Columbia

Description

The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education will be hosting a lecture by Robert Putnam at 8:00 pm on Saturday April 14, 2007, at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, the University of British Columbia.

Robert Putnam has been described as the most influential academic in the world today. His book Bowling Alone (2000), a modern classic, seems to have struck a chord with many concerned with the state of public life. He has made some influential friends in recent years. He has been the focus of seminars hosted by Bill Clinton at Camp David, Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street, George W. Bush at the White House, and Muammar Qaddafi at his tent in the desert.

The decline of civil engagement in the USA over the last 30 years or so, which he charted in Bowling Alone, has worried a number of politicians and commentators. Robert Putnam's marshalling of evidence with regard to this shift; his identification of the causes; and his argument that within the new circumstances new institutions of civic engagement can arise has made him the centre of attention.

According to William Julius Wilson of Harvard,

"Bowling Alone is a tour de force. Robert Putnam has amassed an impressive array of evidence for his original and powerful thesis on the decline of social capital and civic engagement in the past several decades. This thought-provoking book will stimulate huge academic and national public policy debates on the crisis of American community."

With surprisingly conclusive results, Putnam shows the deterioration of America's social framework. This process also leads to a growing distance from neighbours, friends and even family members. Since well-connected people are reportedly living longer, happier lives, the list of side effects of the Bowling Alone phenomenon is long and alarming.

Curtis Gans of Washington Monthly calls Bowling Alone "a formidable book.... There is no place, in my knowledge, where so much about the current disconnectedness of American Society has been uncovered, assembled, and presented as in the text, charts, and notes within [Bowling Alone]."
Civic Engagement in a Changing World

Saturday April 14, 2007
8:00 pm
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts

www.chancentre.com: Tickets On Sale Via Ticketmaster Beginning March 10

Tickets ($22; $17 students and seniors) will be on sale Saturday March 10 at 12:00 noon at all Ticketmaster Ticket Centres, through www.ticketmaster.ca: or 604.280.3311, and in person at the Chan Centre ticket office daily except Sundays from 12:00 noon - 5:00 pm.

The event is hosted by the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education and sponsored by the Vancouver Board of Trade and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Professor John Helliwell of UBC, a long-time friend and collaborator, will introduce.
About Robert Putnam

Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government.

In 2006, Putnam received the Skytte Prize, one of the world's highest accolades for a political scientist.

He is currently working on three major empirical projects: (1) the changing role of religion in contemporary America, (2) the effects of workplace practices on family and community life, and (3) practical strategies for civic renewal in the United States in the context of immigration and social and ethnic diversity.