 Announcing a New Project:
The Scriptorium
Continuing the Conversation
A Gesture of Our Gratitude
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Dear Friends,
Necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case the engine of programmatic innovation. The economic downturn has made the traveling and speaking schedule I maintained for several years infeasible. So this fall I will be turning to a writing project I have long postponed.
One of the reasons for the postponements is that much of the financial support we have received
in recent years has been directly or indirectly related to the traveling and
lecturing. By turning to the writing project, therefore, we risk compounding the financial difficulties related to the economic slowdown.
We realize that our donors,
too, are experiencing the ill effects of the sluggish economy, and so we want to do
all that we can to remain worthy of our current donors' generosity and, if possible, to be deemed worthy of support by those who have not yet contributed financially to our work.
In response to this challenging situation, we are launching a new project we are calling The Scriptorium. I urge you to read or listen to the full introduction to the project (links below), but here, briefly, is how it will work:
The Forum's executive director, Randy Coleman-Riese, has created a website to which our donors will have exclusive access, and to which we will periodically post excerpts from the manuscript-in-progress -- in both a text and a streaming audio format. We will alert our donors by email newsletter whenever a new excerpt is posted. Our donors will be given an email address
and a toll-free telephone number to use to share any comments or questions they
might have about the posted excerpt. Randy will gather and synthesize the comments, and once or twice a month we will post a split-screen video conversation about the posted excerpts and the responses to them -- Randy from the Cornerstone Forum office in Sonoma and me from my home-office in San Diego.
In order to let all our friends know what the donors can expect in the months ahead, the new
website will be open to everyone through Thanksgiving. Thereafter we
will use it to extend a few courtesies exclusively to our donors in gratitude for
their financial support.
The entry level donation for access to this website will be only $5 a month or $60 a year. As Randy explains in our preliminary video conversation (the link is below), those who contribute at higher rates will receive additional tokens of our gratitude. We hope our donors will find
this new website valuable enough to justify their continued generosity. We
likewise hope that those who are unable to contribute financially will
understand our
desire to express our appreciation to our donors, and that they will continue to visit our main website and weblog regularly, for these sites will remain the primary source of our outreach and internet presence.
I urge you to follow the links below and read the full text of the introduction to The Scriptorium project or listen to the recorded version of it.
As always, we thank you most sincerely for your friendship, your prayers and your generosity.
Affectionately,
Gil Bailie
The link below takes you to the new website, where you will find:
1. The introduction to The Scriptorium (Printable Text Format) 2. The introduction to The Scriptorium (Streaming & Downloadable Audio Format) 3. Gil & Randy in a Split-Screen Video preview to visit our new site To login, please use: USERNAME: cf_friend PASSWORD: cf
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The Cornerstone Forum
"Healing the Schizophrenic Division Between Worldliness and Piety"
The Cornerstone Forum is a 501(C)3 non-profit organization.
Donations to the Forum are tax-deductible and most gratefully appreciated.
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