What is SEMPERGEIST?
SEMPERGEIST is a community of practice for civic renewal, equipping leaders, educators, and changemakers with practical tools, shared wisdom, and community support to rebuild trust, bridge divides, and tackle our era’s most urgent democratic challenges.
SEMPERGEIST is more than a platform; it’s a movement dedicated to renewing democracy, rebuilding civic trust, and equipping leaders, educators, and changemakers with the tools, insights, and community support needed to address the urgent challenges facing public life today.
Founded by Dennis Stevens, Ed.D., SEMPERGEIST was born out of the recognition that our civic life today is fractured, marked by polarization, misinformation, civic apathy, and the breakdown of meaningful dialogue; at its heart lies a crisis of the American moral imagination.
As David Bromwich defines it, moral imagination is the capacity to recognize and respond to the needs of others, including strangers or those unlike ourselves, by imaginatively identifying with their situations.
America cannot bridge its divides or create new shared meaning without cultivating both the emotional intelligence to engage across differences and the moral imagination to envision what’s possible together.
This faculty extends beyond self-interest or simple empathy, enabling individuals to distinguish right from wrong apart from personal benefit and to envision the potential consequences of their actions for people outside their immediate circle. For Bromwich, moral imagination is an innate strength that allows us to grant full reality and moral consideration to those who are not close to us.
It seems that traditional approaches to civic engagement, journalism, and technology governance haven’t kept pace with the complexity and speed of change in American society. Our political ways of knowing have diverged, our shared understanding has been eroded, and our moral imagination now fractured.
SEMPERGEIST means “always the spirit”; a commitment to sustaining the ideals, practices, and renewing the American moral imagination, as necessary, for vibrant democracy and community renewal, despite the challenges of the moment.
Join us as we grow SEMPERGEIST into an emergent and innovative creative engine for civic trust, ethical leadership, and collective action. Together, we can reimagine what democracy means and make it real for everyone, even the people we disagree with politically.