Letter from the Editor

Humans have a tendency to complicate things, despite the fact that we’ve probably all enjoyed the sensation of sudden, profound enlightenment made possible through simple yet powerful words, images, or experiences. As an unrepentant lover of complexities and the mountains of words that often accompany them, I personally struggle against this tendency almost every day, in both my professional and my personal life. When I know I’ve got something important to say but can feel it getting lost in a literary fog, I try to remember to yank on the reins and employ the advice of a good friend who once admonished me to K.I.S.S. (If you’re unsure about that acronym, go look it up. It’s probably very telling that I had to do the same!)

For a few years now, we’ve been talking about what it means to Do More at Centenary and beyond. But we’ve recently been able to crystalize and narrate our liberal arts mission in a way that, for me, achieves a synthesis of the simple and the profound. In other words, it says something that is easy to understand and visualize that is also rich with personal meaning and collective possibility. When we tell our current and prospective students, our graduates, and our community friends that Centenary empowers you to Do More – for yourself, for others, and for the world – we are putting into words a concrete roadmap for the ways that Centenary prepares its graduates to meet the complex challenges of the 21st century through academics, service, leadership development, and intercultural interaction.

We’re also signaling something important about the process that enlightenment and discovery takes at Centenary, a process that we hope becomes a lifelong habit for our graduates. As you’ll find in many of the stories in this issue of Encircle, the path toward the big (the world) often starts with the small (yourself). The first step is often simple, though the journey is complex, and it is meaningful because of the connections with others that we make along the way.

Kate Pedrotty
Director of Strategic Communication

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