Our Philosophy of Intellectual Property
As a Christian organization, The Colossian Forum is invested both in creating innovative ways of loving God and neighbor as well as in recovering the existing resources of our Christian tradition. We see ourselves as part of the broad stream of Christian thought, practice, and witness—adding our minds, hearts, and voices to the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us and will come after us.
To that end, we seek to articulate a clear and compelling Christian vision, and operationalize Christian action through practices that produce deeper love of God and neighbor, made manifest by increased fruit of the Spirit and decreased acts of the flesh. We define intellectual property (IP) as the unique ways that we articulate and operationalize this mission. This includes any and all resources that we create and deploy to offer our vision and practices to our beneficiaries.
How can our IP be used?
We want our beneficiaries and our collaborative peer organizations to find our IP to be helpful, and for them to feel the freedom to iterate on it, deploying it in their context, recontextualizing it as needed, and inventing good and beautiful ways of being in the world that echo the ways of Jesus Christ. We think of our beneficiaries as collaborators in this way. Together, we are trying to chart a new way of being in the world that models the way of Jesus.
However, use of our IP is restricted from individuals and organizations who:
- Seek to make financial gain by deploying, distributing, or deriving from our IP, outside of a licensure agreement with us.
- Seek to deploy only the “moves” or practices within our IP without attention to the theological vision of Christian transformation (growing in virtue) that is core to our work.
- Seek to deploy the vision and practices within our IP in an effort to manipulate, control, or pacify others rather than collaborate with them.
- Threaten our place in the market by distributing our IP, or derivatives of it, freely to individuals or organizations that might otherwise compensate us for it.
For more information, please download our full IP Use Guidelines using the link below.