Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

Where Does It Hurt? Ruby Sales with Krista Tippett

Image by Nikki Kahn/Getty Images

The civil rights icon Ruby Sales names “a spiritual crisis of white America” as a calling of this time. During the days of the movement, she learned to ask the question, “Where does it hurt?” It’s a question we scarcely know how to ask in public life now, but it gets at human dynamics that we are living and reckoning with. A probing conversation recorded at a convening of 20 theologians seeking to reimagine the public good of theology for this century.

Listen now on YouTube or download the episode.

Ruby Sales is the founder and director of The Spirit House Project in Atlanta. She is included in an oral history of the Civil Rights Movement at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

(Original Air: On Being)

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Poetry for Building Community Permalink

Poetry for Building Community by Naomi Shihab Nye

Famous

Naomi Shihab Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit.

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

For Reflection: Communities are built on knowing and being known. In a culture that claims to love influence and publicly curating a particular style, the actual intimacy of knowing is rare. The public nature of our media has led us astray in seeking fame through retweets and likes, rather than directing us to do well in building the common good in the places where we naturally belong.

Nye’s meditation in “Famous” is a reminder that our imaginations have been compromised by the pervasive desire for fame and notoriety. Each person or object has its own way of being known and loved when it does the thing it was designed to do, or the thing that connects it to its place and time.

Consider what might stand in the way of you letting yourself be known. How does the desire to be famous keep you from connecting deeply with the people and places right in front of you?

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Reader, Significance Of Place Permalink

How A Local Bookstores Can Be A Hub Of A Community

Photo by Norbert Tóth on Unsplash

An independent bookstore is a repository of local information. The staff know local authors and information. Readers stop through for recommendations. Regional history, cooking, arts, and guides are always in stock. A bookstore becomes a hub of a community – loved for its placemaking, its focus on local economy, and its way of connecting readers and authors and books and thinkers.

Below are some favorite independent bookstores from our team. When we are travelling, or in our own hometowns, we make a point of visiting these places, even if just to browse the people there.

Enough Structure for the Next Step by Peter Block & John McKnight

Our discussions on community point out how it is messy, chaotic, and frequently less structured than a system approach that determines roles and outcomes in advance.

This is not an argument against structure and order, just about how they are produced. What we are talking about, in taking the path to community competence, is changing our relationship to order. Community has a unique relationship to order. It creates the minimum that is needed. In systems, the first thing we do is create more order. What helps us to find common ground between system and community life is that we create order without predictability. This is what chaos theory and emergent design are about. You can always create the structure that takes you another step, and then you look around and see what you have. This is emergent order. Read more

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Eliminating economic isolation, Reader Permalink

Fr. Richard Rohr on Departing the Consumer Culture

Economic systems based on competition, scarcity, and acquisitiveness have become more than a question of economics; they have become the kingdom within which we dwell. That way of thinking invades our social order, our ways of being together, and what we value. It replicates the kingdom of ancient Egypt, Pharaoh’s kingdom. It produces a consumer culture that centralizes wealth and power and leaves the rest wanting what the beneficiaries of the system have.

We invite you to a journey of departure from this consumer culture. We ask you to imagine an alternative set of economic beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a culture where poverty, violence, and shrinking well-being are not inevitable—a culture in which the social order produces enough for all. . . . This departure into another kingdom might be closer to the reality of our nature and what works best for our humanity. . . .

Luckily, the exodus from a consumer, globalized culture into a neighborly, localized communal and cooperative culture has begun. We join the chorus of other agents of the alternative economy: food hubs, cooperative and social enterprises, the climate change activists, health activists, [etc.]. . . .
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