Dear Reader,
Citizen Scholar has a simple mission: to bring together a community of readers who value the study & discussion of important ideas. More precisely, we’re interested in ideas that can enrich and improve our daily and civic lives.
Before we left the financial services industry to pursue Citizen Scholar, we read during our leisure time and for our own personal growth and satisfaction. Each of us had different preferences and perspectives. Recurring genres included history, technology, classic fiction, economics, and many others. We loved reading and discussing what we’d learned with fellow readers & thinkers. However, we kept running into recurring issues.
Not everyone in your social or geographic circles wants to talk about how bittersweetly beautiful the most recent story you’ve [re-]read is. You also may not get invited back to the next party if, after consuming a few beverages, you hijack a conversation to get to the bottom of whether the heroes of your favorite historical period were actually bigger, better, faster and stronger than those of us inhabiting Earth today. Perhaps you’re fortunate enough to have a handful of friends and acquaintances who are interested, but these conversations tend to happen by accident and not frequently enough.
This is the fundamental problem we set out to solve with Citizen Scholar. We know there are people all over the world who love to read and to learn, even if it’s just in their personal time. There ought to be an online, purpose-built community that can connect these folks across distant geographies and different walks of life.
The Citizen Scholar team plans to make this dream a reality by following a simple formula. Each week, we’ll dive in to and post about a book or other stand-alone, substantial text or work. Our focus will be on reading material that can help us live better informed, and potentially, more satisfying lives through the accumulation of greater knowledge [facts + context], wisdom [sound judgement + frameworks] and appreciation for beauty [good-ole fashioned enjoyment of great art & literature]. To this end, the books we write about will tend to satisfy one or more of the below criteria:
§ Does this book shed light on the past? (i.e. history, classics, biography)
§ Does this book help explain present conditions or phenomena? (i.e. economics & finance, general studies)
§ Does this book offer any [humble] glimpse into the future? (i.e. cutting edge technology, theory, futurism)
§ Is there practical value to daily life or long-term achievement in reading this work? (i.e. mental health / fortitude, business)
§ Is this a beautiful work of art that’s worth reading for its own sake? (i.e. fiction, well written non-fiction, poetry)
These posts will briefly introduce the book’s contents, present our own thoughts and analysis, and invite readers to discuss. As the community grows, new methods and forms of content will emerge - the framework we’ve developed will benefit from your feedback and from other potential improvements we observe along the way. We’re not professional journalists or academics. We’re simply looking for fellow lay scholars, or rather Citizen Scholars, to join us on a journey of reading and learning.
Check out our site and, if you enjoy our work, please sign up, share the link with your friends and come along for the ride!
