Common Good Collective

Invitation, Reader, Structure Of Belonging, The Abundant Community Permalink

Building Back Better Through Relationships

Common Good Collective contributor Al Etmanski reminds us that even the largest system begins with caring relationships. “The experience of giving and receiving care is humanity’s classroom.” To practice community care is not to learn a new skill, though – it is to remember who we have always been.

With apologies to the gospel in the beginning wasn’t the word, it was a caring relationship.

In 2001 the 530,000 year old partial skeleton of a 12 year old girl was discovered in Spain. The shape of her skull indicated to scientists that she had a disability that limited her mobility. The extent of her disability doesn’t matter. What matters is that she survived because her family and her hunter-gatherer community took care. Her bones speak of love, tenderness, compassion and belonging. A story that runs counter to the assertion that we are selfish creatures and that only the fittest survive.

The Neighborhood as a Sacred Place

In this recent talk, John McKnight draws on both Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann and comedian Dave Chappelle to talk about the neighborhood as a sacred space. Sacred spaces do not eliminate suffering. They provide a venue for sharing suffering, and for working together to heal. With his characteristic gentleness and insight, McKnight helps to create such a space in the virtual realm.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Power is a fact of life, neither positive nor negative. But it’s accumulation into too few hands, even into the best of hands, can leave communities and neighborhoods reliant upon power brokers rather than upon one another. Around the country, people are re-discovering mutual aid as a practice of cultivating the power of their own communities, and as an antidote for when the unexpected happens.

This weekend, our increasingly troubled country lost part of its soul. For many, hope died alongside Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice, feminist icon, and American patriot. If a handful of conscientious Senate Republicans fail to join Democrats in a 2016-like delay on the confirmation of President Trump’s eventual nominee, we’re looking at a 6-3 conservative Court majority, possibly for decades to come. Holding the darkness back from the Republic is a lot to ask of any octogenarian cancer patient, and while Ginsburg threw herself into that breach for as long as she could, it’s now our job to help ourselves and each other. Vote, of course, but understand that voting is the least we can do, the most minimal obligation of a citizen in a country facing the caliber of challenges we face. When we can’t rely on the government for help, mutual aid is the answer.

Examining Cultures of Care

Culture leads the way to change, whether in a house, a neighborhood, or a society. American society now feels to be groaning under the weight of the rotten culture of racialized consumer capitalism. But small communities within American Empire often embody vastly different cultures of care. This week, we offer to you some compelling stories about building cultures of artistic, spiritual, and material care.

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Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Invitation, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

The Art of Protest

Culture leads the way in change. Sometimes a single image will make all the difference in pushing a nascent movement into a mainstream cause. At other times, the weight of collected images and songs and poems both represent a community’s embodied resilience and its dream for a future, as CGC co-founder Peter Block says, “distinct from the past.” Art and artists lead the way.

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