The magic bowl

“Trust is good, control is better.” You’re sure to have heard of this saying, it’s a piece of advice that many of us do trust in and follow – whether in our business lives, our personal relationships or in bringing up our children. Yet hardly anybody knows where this saying comes from.

Cool! For some years now, this word like no other has re-emerged to become our common currency for describing what we find good or great, for describing what moves us. Yet most of the time we ourselves are anything else but cool. We’re living in a touchy-feely time, a time of emotional extremes as Wolf Lotter puts it in a recent issue of brand eins, and I would certainly agree with his diagnosis. Yet how does coolness shape up with emotional extremes? For many people authenticity is the magic word that makes all contradictions vanish. Yet does its magic really work?

Anima Mundi – The Soul of the World is the name of the newly designed Ethnological Museum in the Vatican Museums in Rome that Pope Francis recently inaugurated with its first exhibition on the Amazonas region.