Common Good Collective

Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Leaving Egypt and Pharaoh, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

A Foreigner’s Home

As many of us return home to celebrate family and gratitude according to our cultural traditions, Toni Morrison’s essay “A Foreigner’s Home” poses a fascinating question. “To what do we pay greatest allegiance?,” she asks. “Family, language group, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely?”

Toni Morrison (Photo by Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images)

The Foreigner’s Home
by Toni Morrison

EXCLUDING THE HEIGHT of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, the mass movement of peoples in the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is greater now than it has ever been. It is a movement of workers, intellectuals, refugees, armies crossing oceans, continents, immigrants through custom offices and hidden routes, speaking multiple languages of trade, of political intervention, of persecution, exile, violence, and poverty. There is little doubt that the redistribution (voluntary or involuntary) of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state, the boardrooms, the neighbourhoods, the street. Political maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring the dispossessed. While much of this exodus can be described as the journey of the colonised to the seat of the colonisers (slaves, as it were, abandoning the plantation for the planters’ home), and while more of it is the flight of war refugees, the relocation and transplantation of the management and diplomatic class to globalisation’s outposts, as well as the deployment of fresh military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts to control the constant flow of people.

“On Coming Out”

Home is a series of concentric circles, with our bodies at the center. In many places, and for many people, their bodies do not feel like home. Not simply because their gender does not match their anatomy, but because our societies makes existing so violent for them. But, as poet Lee Mokobe says, “I treat my body like a house/and when your house is falling apart/you do not evacuate./you make it comfortable enough for all your insides.”

On Coming Out
by Lee Mokobe

Healing: Where Racial Reconciliation Starts

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes speak at the Confronting Whiteness summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. Dr. Walker Barnes is a womanist theologian with a background in psychology. She emphasizes the importance of the beloved community to the Christians, and emphasizes how a rich combination of Scripture and liturature shows us the way towards this reality.

Common Good Podcast: A Conversation on Freedom and Friendship

David Cayley is a friend of the Common Good Collective, scholar, and an accomplished author. He sat down with Peter Block and John McKnight to talk about his latest book, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. A theological misfit and a disturber of the status quo, Illich and his influential insights on the power of community were truly inspiring.

The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. For this episode, we’ll hear the Abundant Community Conversation between David Cayley, Peter Block and John McKnight. Every couple of months the Common Good Collective helps to produce these interactive conversations on Zoom and they always contain music or poetry, small groups and an exploration of a particular theme with a community practitioner. In this Abundant Community Conversation, John and Peter speak with David Cayley about Ivan Illich and his understanding of freedom and friendship.

David Cayley is a Canadian writer and broadcaster. He has produced and presented hundreds of radio documentaries, including two five-hour series with Ivan Illich, and published seven books, among them The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich & Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey.

Courtney Napier sings a rendition of Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” She is a freelance journalist and writer from Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the founder of Black Oak Society —a community of Black writers and artists in the greater Raleigh area—and the editor of BOS Zine. Her work can be found in INDY Week and Scalawag Magazine, as well as on her blog, Courtney Has Words. Courtney chose to write because she wanted the untold stories of marginalized residents to be shared and preserved for generations to come. Her spouse and two children are a daily source of love and inspiration. She is also in charge of the Common Good Reader.

Be on the lookout for upcoming Abundant Community Conversations. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective at commongood.cc. This episode has been guest hosted and produced by me, Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman.

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Sabbath: Time for the Unexpected Permalink

“Veterans of the Seventies”

Veterans Day is tomorrow, November 11th, and this year has been especially hard for those who have served in the US military. Poet Marvin Bell wrote often about war and how it impacts relationships within community. Here he reflects on the all too common fate of many veterans – homelessness.

Veterans of the Seventies
By Marvin Bell

His army jacket bore the white rectangle
of one who has torn off his name. He sat mute
at the round table where the trip-wire veterans
ate breakfast. They were foxhole buddies
who went stateside without leaving the war.
They had the look of men who held their breath
and now their tongues. What is to say
beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower
and lower as the war went on, spines curving
toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged
with ammo belts enough to make fine lace
of enemy flesh and blood. Now these who survived,
who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front,
lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires
strung through tin cans. Better an alarm
than the constant nightmare of something moving
on its belly to make your skin crawl
with the sensory memory of foxhole living.

Poem copyright © 2007 by Marvin Bell, and reprinted from Mars Being Red, Copper Canyon Press, 2007, by permission of the author and publisher. The poem first appeared in Gettysburg Review, Summer, 2007.

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