Common Good Collective

Eliminating economic isolation, Reader Permalink

Books For Imagining A New Economy

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

An economy is built on personal interactions. A neighbor stepping into a shop, say, or a gardener buying seeds in spring and giving away produce in fall, form the building blocks of even the most complex economies. But complex economies obscure those connections, and they often obscure the ability of neighbors to imagine themselves in different, more human economies built around people rather than money.

The work of describing a new economy is a feat of imagination. The gift of words to describe interactions and systems as complex as a city block or a rural farm takes immensely detailed imagination. It invites readers to return to a human scale of connection with soil and soul.

The works listed here have encouraged our team to reimagine a new economy, especially one built on human connections and care for neighbors of every sort. We’ve included some selective annotations.

Walk Out, Walk On: A Learning Journey Into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now – Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley.

Sex, Economy, Freedom, Community by Wendell Berry

It All Turns on Affection. Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture is a remarkable reflection on human economy and belonging in place.

Sabbath as Resistance. Walter Brueggemann’s clarion call for Sabbath practice as resistance to the economy of totalism.

Solidarity Ethics. Rebecca Todd Peters builds an ethic around solidarity with the world’s poor and marginalized.

Sabbath Economics. Ched Myers and Elaine Enns construct a vision for economy built on abundance. A variety of resources available by following the link.

An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture. Common Good Collective gurus Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight lay out a vision for leaving Pharaoh’s economy for the wilderness of the neighborhood.

Bonus podcast: “Faith and Capital” seeks to understand the capitalist economy as it is, and to help to create a clearer vision of what it could be.

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader Permalink

Shoulders by Naomi Shihab Nye

”Shoulders” by Naomi Shihab Nye[1]

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

In a world where might makes right, Nye offers a compelling image as an alternative: a man caring intensely for a child while performing a normal, everyday action. “We’re not going to be able/ to make it in this world/ if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing/ with one another,” she says.

The importance of the kind of daily, mundane, fine-grained care this man offers is a compelling alternative to the ways of the world. His work cannot be scaled. It must be done one child at a time, one street crossing at a time. And the meaning of the work is found in the doing of it, as the boy’s dream echoes inside him.

For Reflection: Consider those places in your neighborhood where the slow, gentle work of “crossing a street” together is needed. How can you embody the patient care that will help us all to live in this world?

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Bad Decisions

Last summer, I challenged myself. I vowed that every day that I was out with friends I would make one “bad” decision. Decisions that in retrospect would seem horrible. So that summer I climbed roofs, and I jumped off those roofs. I went to the top of trees, and I jumped off those trees. I got my ear pierced, and I skated in the street. That was the best summer of my life.

Before that summer, all I would do was stay inside. I wouldn’t go out because, well, I didn’t have any friends. All I would do was play video games and sleep. Time seemed to mush together. The minutes turned into hours, the hours into days, and the days into blurs. I can’t remember anything worthwhile from those years. I was lost in a limbo state of living but not fully. I had nothing interesting happening to me. No friends to make memories with. No life to enjoy. But slowly, I got friends. I started going out and having fun. I started getting memories and stories. But most importantly I started making bad decisions.

Making bad decisions was ironically the best decision that I’ve ever made. Making bad decisions meant stepping out of my comfort zone and actually facing the world. I made long term decisions without much thought. The biggest of which was trying for the school mascot.

The school needed more participants to run for the school mascot. So, my friend and I decided to run for fun. We wrote the script at 10:30 at night and made jokes about how bad we would be. How irresponsible we were. How we had almost no experience with sports. We presented said script to the whole school, embarrassing both of us. Then we won.

We were now hit with this sudden responsibility of getting into a costume and having to dance for audience pleasure. Something that seems like a nightmare. And I love doing it. It’s the best use of my time I could think of. But I would’ve never thought of it if I didn’t decide to make a very important decision in the span of 3 seconds.

But jumping out of a tree may be the type of a bad idea to avoid. And telling kids to jump out of trees in the first place is probably a bad idea. But bad ideas led me out of the house. Bad decisions let me remember my life. And bad decisions let me become who I am.

With a Perspective, I’m D’Angelo Romero.

D’Angelo Romero is in the eighth grade at Kent Middle School in Kentfield.

Originally published on KQED Perspectives

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader Permalink

Poetry for Building Community

Building community in a diverse, fragmented society is like the work of poetry. A poet makes connections among words. A poem joins unlike things, and in the joining creates new ways of seeing. One skill needed for building community is the ability to see how two unlike things, when joined together, could create something unique in the world. The task is to always remember, even in moments of confusion and despair, that, as Maggie Smith writes, “you could make this place beautiful.”

Reading poetry is a practice for building community. It requires patience. The gifts of a good poem reveal themselves slowly, over the course of several readings. Often, new insights are gleaned best with another person or community with whom to read and poem. And a multiplicity of meanings comes forward in poems, just as it does on any block in any neighborhood.

Slowing down, paying attention to details and empty spaces, expecting an abundance of meaning and gifts: all the things that make poetry important also make for good community building work. The meaning and gifts of our blocks, and the sorts of work we need to do together, become apparent when we slow down and listen to our neighbors. The abundance of gifts packed into every line of poetry and every block of a city or town offer themselves as gifts when we pause to listen and to receive.

Below are poems to enlighten, inspire, and encourage those who would do the hard work of digging into their places and seeking to build for the common good there.

“Good Bones” by Maggie Smith[1]
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

For Reflection: Maggie Smith offers this meditation on seeing the abundance of the world. Sure, things may look tough, she suggests, but can you imagine what could be? In a few moments of quiet reflection, imagine one of the “terrible” thins or places you know. What, through a lens of abundance, could it be? What is the gift already there, waiting to be discovered?

Read another poem by Wendell Berry

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Consumerism and Jubilee

By Adam Clark

But there are other things that black people need to be free from besides racial bondage. And one of them is consumerism. The consumerism, I’m talking about not just an economic system, but an inward disposition, a belief in scarcity, and a desire for more. One of the things I was arguing is that the dominant religion in our world is not Christianity or Islam, the dominant religion of our world is consumerism. And consumerism is not just a dominant religion, it’s the most successful religion because the religion of consumerism is winning more converts, has more loyal disciples, has the capacity to promote its values and belief system quicker than any other religion of all time. It has its own grand meaning to the narrative of history. It talks about why things went right, why things went wrong, has narrative of the fall and redemption, and it has its own deity as the market, the market deity. That’s enshrouded in mystery and reverence.

And it’s not that other society didn’t have markets, but they had other centers of value and meaning that competed with markets. And now, the market has reached a certain type of supremacy. So it’s almost like in the kind of Greek narratives where you had Zeus as part of the pantheon of deities and then in later Greek times, you have Zeus who goes up to Mount Olympus and becomes so supreme that he stands out above all the other deities. And that’s how the market is. The market stands out and it’s above and beyond any other type of center of meaning and value. So the god of the market has all the kind of attributes and characteristics of a god of a monotheistic faith. It has omnipotence, it has omnipresence. It’s omnipotent in a sense that it’s all powerful, it can define what’s real and what’s not real. It has the power to make something out of nothing. You know, everything can be bought, everything has a price. Air, water, land, bodies, souls, mind, they could all be bought for a price. It’s omnipresent. Where older religions had a sense of place, sacred lands, the new religion, all places are interchangeable. The religion of the market can convert land into something holy like real estate, which is the holy currency of the market religion.

So even its concept of the human being. It changes what it means to be human. In traditional religious culture, being human was something seen as being kind of a oneness with God. But here, the dominant script of our society transforms self-interested individuals whose purpose is not just to cooperate with others, but to compete with others, to accumulate possessions and maximize pleasure. So that the goal of our lives is no longer in union with God, but the goal of our lives is personal happiness and pleasure. The ownership of things. The very act of spending money as a primary means to happiness, that’s our goal in life. It’s an entire life orientation and meaning system.

Originally written for For Economics of Compassion Initiative of Greater Cincinnati.

Adam Clark, Associate Professor of Theology at Xavier University, is committed to the idea that theological education in the twenty first century must function as a counter-story. One that equips students to read against the grain of the dominant culture and inspires them to live into the Ignatian dictum of going forth “to set the world on fire.” To this end, Dr. Clark is intentional about pedagogical practices that raise critical consciousness by going beneath surface meanings, unmasking conventional wisdoms and reimagining the good. During his tenure at Xavier, Dr. Clark has received several distinctions in teaching including Teacher of the Year Nomination by the Alpha Sigma Nu International Honor Society and The Faculty Support Award by the Black Student Association. His courses on Black Theology, Jesus and Power, Faith and Justice and Religion and Hip Hop contribute to the Jesuit practice of educating students in the service of faith and the promotion of justice. He currently serves as co-chair of Black Theology Group at the American Academy of Religion, actively publishes in the area of black theology and black religion and participates in social justice groups at Xavier and in the Cincinnati area.

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