Common Good Collective

O Land, Land, Land (Jeremiah 22:29)

Community is big. It is human and animal, soil and water, wind and sky. We are all interconnected and when we inflict pain or show love to one, it ripples throughout the commons. Walter’s poem reflects on this intertwined reality, expanding our imagination through the personification of the Earth.

O Land, Land, Land (Jeremiah 22:29)
by Walter Brueggemann

The land, when it is honored and respected,
weeps.
It weeps long sadness
because it knows such durable abuse.
It weeps the pollution that fouls the soil
and stenches the sea.
It weeps for fossil heat that melts its ice.
It weeps for agribusiness that disregards natural yield.
It weeps the violence of armies to and fro in rapacious violence.
It saddens for the anthropocene that imagines mastery rather than partnership;
It cries all night and sheds day-time tears for the terror that begins again at sunrise.
It dares to make such lamenting noises,
because it knows that its voice is proper and
legitimate and
God-given
and merits being heard and heeded.
This groaning land does not know how late it is,
nor do we.

The ‘New Redlining’

Theologian Willie Jennings says that people of faith belong in zoning board meetings just as they belong in sanctuaries and mosques and temples. How we organize our society in relation to land and our occupation of land is a theological decision that indicates what we believe, and what we be able to believe. It is the zoning board that makes decisions about who gets to live where, and thus how we will interact with one another, and whose good our social relations will serve. Want better neighborhoods? You can start on the inside, in your own neighborhood, but your work will eventually take you into the minutia of zoning.

The ‘New Redlining’ Is Deciding Who Lives in Your Neighborhood
By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Housing segregation by race and class is a fountainhead of inequality in America, yet for generations, politicians have been terrified to address the issue. That is why it is so significant that President Biden has proposed, as part of his American Jobs Act, a $5 billion race-to-the-top competitive grants program to spur jurisdictions to “eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies.”

Mr. Biden would reward localities that voluntarily agree to jettison “minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements and prohibitions on multifamily housing.” The Biden administration is off to an important start, but over the course of his term, Mr. Biden should add sticks to the carrots he has already proposed.

Spaces Are Not Static

Life in North America is lived in contested space. The places we occupy are all filled with meaning and with hidden clues that can help us to understand the ways that our individual stories are tied together in systems and structures. These spaces are not static. The decisions that got us to the present day need not be replicated, at least not uncritically. We can still write new stories, and sing new songs.

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Significance Of Place, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

“Build A House”

Rhiannon Giddens offers here a musical meditation on land, home, and the social relations in North America that make finding home so difficult for so many. Each time we talk about home, a long and complex history is on the table. The stories that constitute home for each person can cover the full range of emotions.

And in the systems that comprise our societies, home remains contested – who gets one? How? Who really owns all the spaces we occupy? Why?

Like any muse, Giddens won’t let us sit with easy, sentimental thoughts about home.

Gratitude for Today, Anticipation for Tomorrow: Revisited

We’re still mulling over this conversation with Walter Brueggemann. In particular, we are listening again for how we might keep learning to hear the stories of individuals and the history of systems, and to listen for how those histories collide various ways, sometimes generative, sometimes destructive.

Common Good In Conversation with Walter Brueggemann about his article, “Not Numbed Inside“

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