“Seeding the Imagination…
Guerrilla style”

A Review of
Guerrilla Gardening.
by
Richard Reynolds.

By Brent Aldrich.

Guerrilla Gardening:
A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries.
Richard Reynolds.
Hardcover: Bloomsbury, 2008.

Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $22 ] [ Amazon ]

This past summer, on and empty and overgrown lot in my neighborhood, I mowed several trails through the vegetation, and planted nearly 100 sunflower seeds or starts with a friend, attempting to claim this abandoned space as a nature preserve, or park. The lot, unfortunately, was mowed over on occasion by the owner, so the flowers didn’t make it, but such was my first attempt at guerrilla gardening. At the time, I was aware of the original ‘Green Guerrillas,’ and vague stories of appearing by cover of dark for a night of horticulture on a public space. Richard Reynolds’s new book On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries outlines this movement further, and serves as a handy guide for anyone interested in cultivating a bit of land not your own.

            The simple definition of guerrilla gardening is “the illicit cultivation of someone else’s land,” although to flesh that out, Reynolds says, “I, and thousands of people like me, step out from home to garden land we do not own. We see opportunities all around us. Vacant lots flourish as urban oases, roadside verges dazzle with flowers and crops are harvested from land that was supposed to be fruitless” (15-16). As described from his own gardens and dozens of others, Reynolds outlines both a survey and manual for guerrilla gardening. He remains conversational and supportive to other gardeners throughout, narrating stories of many gardeners gathered online at guerrillagardening.org.

            As seen in this book, the motivations for guerrilla gardening, as well as the locations and methods, are as diverse as nature itself. From abandoned lots to road medians to unused lawns, one common thread is just the neglect of land in urban places. Living in London, Reynolds also describes ‘scarcity’ as another foe to be conquered, though I must say that I believe we live in an abundance, but the questions arise as to how the land is divided or shared (one could build a political manifesto of guerrilla gardening). Taking responsibility for neglected land, these gardeners are represented in stories and photographs planting medians, empty flowerbeds, and tree pits in bright flowers. An incredible photograph of a 15,000 square foot guerrilla garden in New York (demolished by the city in the 1980’s) is perhaps the largest scale in the book; most are more modest, but still remarkable for their incongruity to their surroundings. “Where there has never been colour, a guerrilla gardener finds a way to bring it into the environment, seeing potential where others saw blank, barren boredom” (30).

  (more…)

You can listen to Part 2 of “The Wasteland” here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21602/mp3/21602-03.mp3

This MP3 is public domain; do listen and share!

THE WASTE LAND

by T.S. Eliot

III. THE FIRE SERMON

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.

Line 161 ALRIGHT. This spelling occurs also in
the Hogarth Press edition – Editor.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.

“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

“Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”

“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised ‘a new start’.
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
“On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

A Recent Interview with Wendell Berry
From THE SUN magazine

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/391/digging_in

Jeff Fearnside: Stopping by a local eatery on the way here, I asked people what they might want to ask you. Henry County is small, they noted, and farming isn’t very profitable anymore. So, why did you stay when you could have left for, as one waitress put it, “glitz and glamour” elsewhere?

Berry: I just happen to have no appetite for glitz and glamour. I like it here. This place has furnished its quota of people who’ve helped each other, cared for each other, and tried to be fair. I have known some of them, living and dead, whom I’ve loved deeply, and being here reminds me of them. This has given my days a quality that they wouldn’t have had if I’d moved away.

There have been some good farmers here. The way of farming that I grew up with was conservative in the best sense. I learned a lot from people in Henry County. Probably all my most influential teachers lived here, when you get right down to it. I owe big debts to teachers in universities, to literary influences, and so on. But it’s the people you listened to as a child whose influence is immeasurable — especially your grandparents, your parents, your older friends. I’ve paid a lot of attention to older people. Of course, not a lot of people here are older than I am anymore, but some are, and I still love to listen to them, to my immense improvement and pleasure.

Fearnside: What are some of the things that they say?

Berry: They tell stories. They talk about relationships. They talk about events that have stuck in their minds. The most important thing is not what they say, but the way they talk. We had a local pattern of speech at one time. Now we’re running out of people who speak it. But there were once people here whose speech was uninfluenced by the media, and it had an immediacy, a loveliness when it was intelligently used, and a great capacity for humor.

Fearnside: A good friend of mine told me that she knows people from Kentucky who have trained themselves not to speak like Kentuckians.

Berry: That was the main goal of the school system: to stop you from talking like a “hick” and get you to speak standard American.

Fearnside: When you speak of what the elders here in Henry County discuss, it reminds me of a line from Barry Lopez’s short-story collection Winter Count: “That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

Berry: I don’t think we’re just stories — we’re living souls, too — but we’d be nothing without stories. Of course, stories that belong to a landscape are different from stories that don’t. In Arctic Dreams Lopez talks about how the Eskimos, the native Alaskan people, have a cultural landscape — the landscape as they know it — that is always a little different from the actual landscape, which nobody ever will fully know.

In a functioning culture the landscape is full of stories. Stories adhere to it. And they’re most interesting when they’re told within the landscape. If, say, an oral-history project records somebody’s story and puts it in the university archives, then it’s a different story. It’s become isolated, misplaced, displaced.

Fearnside: You’re a well-known advocate for local economies, yet you write for a much-wider-than-local audience, which means you must rely on the machinery of the corporate world to get your message out. Is there a contradiction in this, or is it simply an inescapable paradox that you must be pragmatic about?

Berry: There are contradictions in it, no doubt about that. There’s an absolutely lethal contradiction in my driving and flying around to talk about conservation and local economies. But you have to live in the world the way it is. You can’t declare yourself too good for it and move away. You have to carry the effort wherever you can take it. You’ve got to have allies. The thought of the Committees of Correspondence in the American Revolution is never very far from my mind. People have to stay in touch somehow. They have to meet and talk. They have to support each other. But that’s a network, not a community.

Read the full review:
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/391/digging_in

WENDELL BERRY: LIFE AND WORK.
Jason Peters, ed.
Hardcover: UP of KY, 2007.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $28 ] [ Amazon ]

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/janfeb/8.12.html

I have a dream … .” This simple collocation of four words has become one of the most instantly recognized quotations of all time. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s trademark refrain is frequently borrowed the world over by journalists, preachers, politicians, screenwriters, and other communicators seeking to convey to their readers and listeners certain visions to be actualized. It marked the high point of a grand and powerful speech delivered in the heart of his country’s capital, at a time of wrenching national soul-searching.

The public image of what is known today as the civil rights movement has come to be symbolized by the 1963 March on Washington. There, from a stage erected in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King addressed some 250,000 supporters rallying for protections that would take form within the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The capstone of the historic assembly was his “I Have a Dream” speech, an oration televised around the world. Coming near the midpoint of King’s public ministry, the speech encapsulated the essence of a saga begun with the local bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955–56 and ended by his death from an assassin’s bullet in Memphis in 1968. So comprehensive has been the subsequent journalistic and academic treatment of the movement that that the meaning behind the famous words that now identify it is simply assumed.

Such unexamined assumptions can prove problematic, according to UCLA professor Eric J. Sundquist, who is author or editor of eight books on American literature and culture. In his latest offering, King’s Dream, the distinguished scholar grapples with the question of what King’s dream actually was. Taking the “I have a dream” speech as his unit of analysis and recorded history as his data set, Sundquist synthesizes, contextualizes, and answers the question in a number of ways.

Sundquist first reviews the history of American debates about racial justice, spanning three centuries. He then demonstrates how King’s speech pristinely embodies the story of African American freedom. Next, he surveys the extent to which the meaning of the speech “has been obscured by its appropriation for every conceivable cause.” He finally asserts its continuing relevance for contemporary arguments about equality. Covering some of the same territory explored in Drew Hansen’s 2003 book The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech That Inspired a Nation, but from a fresh perspective, Sundquist sets King’s speech within the cultural and rhetorical traditions on which the civil rights leader drew in crafting his oratory.

Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/janfeb/8.12.html

KING’S DREAM
Eric Sundquist.
Hardcover: Yale UP, 2009.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $22 ] [ Amazon ]

An economic maelstrom has struck the world. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 35 percent between last New Year’s Eve and the start of this year’s somewhat bleaker holiday season, making this the worst year for stocks since 1931. The crisis has already been responsible for massive political change, carrying in not only a new president but also a new appetite for large-scale government action. Who would have thought, a year ago, that America would be seriously considering a semi-nationalization of the automobile industry?

This crisis, which has buffeted every bourse and rocked every government, had humble origins. It began with ordinary homes in Las Vegas and Miami and Cleveland. The arcane magic of mortgagebacked securities meant that few observers realized just how sensitive the entire world had become to fluctuations in the American housing market, but that is exactly what happened. The troubles began, as is well known, in the subprime market, where a bout of extreme optimism led investors to think that the dross of no-down-payment loans to high-risk borrowers could be transformed into the gold of triple-A securities.

As mortgages began to default, the owners of mortgage-backed securities became de facto homeowners, acutely sensitive to the price of housing. Rising defaults, not coincidentally, were accompanied by falling prices. Between January 2000 and July 2006, the Case-Shiller home price index rose by 126 percent, the biggest nationwide boom in the history of housing. Between July 2006 and September 2008, housing prices dropped by 23 percent. Falling prices encouraged more defaults, since many homeowners owed far more than their homes were worth. Lenders’ liens became worth less and less.

Waves of policy proposals followed the path of financial disaster. First, there was a hue and cry to reduce the suffering inherent in millions of foreclosures. Then the banking crisis, created by the collapse in the mortgage market, led to billions of dollars of “emergency injections” to shore up the banking system. Now, the next administration is discussing a trillion-dollar fiscal stimulus to limit the damage of a full-fledged recession.

If housing policies are to be wiser in the future than they have been in the past — and they had better be — then they must be based on a better understanding of housing and housing markets. Robert Ellickson’s new book is a good place to start. In 1975, Ellickson wrote a seminal analysis of zoning law that described the beginning of a great change in American property rights. In the 1960s, he showed, the ability to build in much of America was relatively unlimited; but over the last forty years, increasingly stringent land-use controls have enabled neighbors to veto more and more projects, which has reduced construction and increased prices in America’s most desirable areas. In 1991, he wrote the classic Order without Law, which jump-started a legal literature on extra-legal arrangements that settle disputes and establish rights. Now The Household brings together his long-standing interest in housing with his interest in informal contracts.

http://www.powells.com/review/2009_01_22.html?utm_source=review-a-day&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_rad&utm_content=The%20Household%3A%20Informal%20Order%20Around%20the%20Hearth&PID=18

THE HOUSEHOLD: INFORMAL ORDER AROUND THE HEARTH
Robert Ellickson.
Hardcover: Princeton UP, 2008.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Indy’s First Urban Farming Forum

All Indianapolis fans of backyard gardening for food and growers of goodies should take note of Punxsutawney Phil’s next big day of Monday Februrary 2nd, 2009. This will be the date upon which more will arrive to Indy than news from some groundhog harbinger of more foul winter weather. Instead, at 1029 Fletcher Avenue – (see: http://www.kibi.org/building/index.htm) from 5:30PM to 7:00PM the new Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, Inc. (KIBI) headquarters site will host Indy’s FIRST “Urban Farming Forum.”

Chris Harrell, brownfield/urban redevelopment specialist (and local produce fan); Sarah Wiehe, IUPUI medical researcher and pediatrician (and ardent urban gardner); Matthew Jose, urban agriculture specialist; Laura Henderson, Founder of Indy’s new Winter Farmer’s Market will join together to host all attendees at this FREE event.

The Urban Farming Forum expects to bring together the many disparate groups, individuals, churches, non profits, and more to discuss multiple topics of interest. Main topics will include: health and safety issues sometimes confronted when farming urban sites, how to mend soil if health concerns are discovered in the soil, what crops are best suited for Indianapolis and environs and related garden growing hints, and lastly how to share the bounty from urban gardens with the your neighbors or the public at large by market or through non profit assistance (churches, community gardens, poverty relief, or supplying urban schools with fresh and healthy produce, etc.).

More info:   http://www.agreenerindiana.com/events/indys-first-urban-farming

“Striking at the Heart of Empire”

A Review of
Jesus Wants to Save Christians:
A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.
by
Rob Bell and Don Golden.

By Chris Smith.

Jesus Wants to Save Christians:
A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.
Rob Bell and Don Golden.
Paperback: Zondervan, 2008.
Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $16 ] [ Amazon ]

Jesus Wants to Save Christians came  as a pleasant surprise for me.  For several years now, Rob Bell’s books have been creating quite a buzz among the younger generations in our churches ( This book was even named the 2008 book of the year by Relevant Magazine ), but I honestly haven’t been impressed with Bell’s previous books.  His writing style maintained through all of his books to date, consists of a stream of rapid-fire bursts of words, often in the form of mini-paragraphs of a sentence (or less).  This style has proven controversial, drawing criticism that it panders to the shorter attention spans of younger generations, but I suspect that Bell is more of a preacher than a writer and that his styles plays better in an audiobook format than on the printed page.

Certainly, the rhetoric of Jesus Wants to Save Christians is that of a sermon.  Bell and his co-author Don Golden trace the arc of biblical history, and they do so through the lens of the oppression of empire and of God’s hearing the cry of the oppressed people.  Certainly, this theme is not a new one, and indeed is one that – since the peak of the liberation theology movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s – has been drawing increasing attention in seminaries and some churches.  What is striking about this book however, is its audience, comprised mostly of young middle class Americans, growing up in the heart of the empire and not exactly what we would consider an “oppressed people.”

(more…)

You can listen to Part 2 of “The Wasteland” here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21602/mp3/21602-02.mp3

This MP3 is public domain, do listen and share!

THE WASTE LAND

by T.S. Eliot

 II. A GAME OF CHESS

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid – troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carved dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”

I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag -
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said -
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot -
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

Ultra-Brief Reviews.

By Chris Smith

Heretics for Armchair Theologians (WJK 2008) turns what for many people would be a dry topic  from the dusty pages of historical theology into a lively stroll through the heresies of the Early Christian era.  Justo and Catherine Gonzalez, both eminent church historians, are our guides on this whirlwind tour and Ron Hill’s cartoon illustrations add to the levity of the book.  The text is book-ended nicely by the first chapter, which defines what is meant by “heresy,” and the last chapter that examines the significance of remembering these heresies as we pursue theological inquiry today.  This book is a wonderful resource that could be used in high school/college classes on church history – or for anyone in thye Church who desires to know more about the stories of the heretics and why they are still relevant to God’s people today.

Christian Community Now: Ecclesiological Investigations (T&T Clark 2008) is a wonderful collection of papers that survey the present state of ecclesiology in the theological academy.  However, it is intended for academic audiences and thus is not for the faint of mind.  One particular highlight here is Paul Collins’s paper “Ecclesiology: Context and Community” which explores “how the methods of contextual theology and pastoral theology may influence and change the way in which systematic theologians approach the task of reflecting upon what the church is and what it is for” (135).  I pray that the fine research that undergirds this book would filter down to our church congregations and challenge us as we daily seek to be the people of God.

In Transition Handbook (Chelsea Green 2008), Rob Hopkins uses the ecological concepts of resilience and permaculture to argue for the emergence of local cultures in a world after peak oil.  Hopkins is founder of the “Transition” Movement, which seeks to move communities in the direction of greater resilience.  The latter chapters of the book tell the stories of “Transition towns” in the UK that have committed to moving in this direction.  This book demands the attention of any church that would seek to share life together in ways that nurture creation in the places where they are.  It provides language for helping us to understand where we need to go ecologically and furthermore offers us practical advice for moving in that direction.

Heretics for Armchair Theologians.
Justo and Catherine Gonzalez.
Paperback: WJK, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $14 ] [ Amazon ]

Christian Community Now:
Ecclesiological Investigations.
P. Collins, G. Mannion, G. Powell, K. Wilson, eds.
Hardcover: T&T Clark, 2008.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Transition Handbook.
Rob Hopkins.
Paperback: Chelsea Green, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

The Other Journal interviews Vinoth Ramachandra
Author of SUBVERTING GLOBAL MYTHS

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=566

The Other Journal (TOJ): Dr. Ramachandra, it is an honor to talk with you about your recent book Subverting Global Myths and about how your work might help us understand faithfulness in the current biopolitical landscape.

I want to start off with a basic question: Given your travels across the world and your experiences in both cultures of the West and the developing world, or majority world, would you please talk a bit about the myopia that you feel U.S. Christians suffer as it relates to the myths you discuss in your book? In other words, what myths or “collective deceptions” do you find particularly salient within the subculture of evangelical and mainline Protestant U.S. Christianity?

Vinoth Ramachandra (VR): The myths that I explore do not have to do primarily with Christian churches; they deal with what one reviewer called “liberal pieties.” However, many Christians, of all theological persuasions, do tend to share in the predominant myths of their societies. I know that U.S. Christianity, even in its evangelical expressions, is extremely diverse, so I am wary of making facile generalizations (as in the liberal media).

Myths often contain some grains of truth, but these truths are greatly exaggerated and countertruths are suppressed. For instance, think of the way that many American Christians have been brought up to think of the United States of America’s wealth as having been founded on the Protestant work ethic and free trade. Many American Christians are not only brought up on one-sided readings of their own history but are largely ignorant of the histories of other peoples. This was reflected in the sheer incomprehension that attended the 9/11 atrocities, and it is reflected today in the sudden disillusionment with the global financial system. Anyone who has followed U.S. foreign policy over the past fifty years or looked at the way global financial institutions operate from the perspective of the global poor would not have been surprised by recent events.

…

Read the full interview:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=566

SUBVERTING GLOBAL MYTHS:
THEOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC ISSUES SHAPING OUR WORLD
Vinoth Ramachandra.
Hardcover: IVP BOOKS, 2008
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $18 ] [ Amazon ]

Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” said Miss Katherine Scott, Flannery O’Connor’s freshman-composition teacher, speaking to a reporter many years later about her most famous student—“warped, but a genius all the same.” The teacher no doubt focused on the warped part when the seventeen-year-old Catholic girl with the spectacles and the searing wit took her writing class at Milledgeville’s Georgia State College for Women in the summer of 1942; and it was the warped part she noticed some ten years later, when she read O’Connor’s first book, Wise Blood, and flung it across the room. “I thought to myself that character who dies in the last chapter could have done the world a great favor by dying in the first chapter instead,” she told the same reporter.

This was the sort of understanding and encouragement that surrounded Mary Flannery O’Connor from her earliest years in Savannah to her death at the age of thirty-nine in the Milledgeville area. But we should not be entirely sorry about that. Familial and social disapproval evidently spurred this writer on, enabling her to form a pearl around each painful speck of grit. That O’Connor’s pearls are among the most luminous and valuable we have in all of American literature does not detract in any way from their strangeness and hardness. Indeed, their value lies precisely in that hardness, that strangeness. However many times you read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Good Country People,” you will not be able to figure out the source of their enormous power; in fact, they will become increasingly mysterious to you as the years go by.

O’Connor’s fictional world is a severe, hilarious, violent place. People behave with senseless intolerance—not just racial intolerance, which we might expect of the South in the middle of the twentieth century, but also a deep-seated prejudice against anything or anyone from elsewhere, and particularly from Europe, the source of “unreformed” religion, gibberishlike speech, and other undesirable forms of behavior.

…
Read the full Review:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/015_05/3248

FLANNERY: A LIFE OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR.
Brad Gooch.
Hardcover: Little, Brown and Company, Feb. 2009.
Pre-order now: [ Amazon ]

Before the next chapter of American political history unfolds further, it is worth thinking back a little on the one that is coming to a close.  An unusually good elucidation of some crucial developments of the past thirty years appears this month as So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, by Robert G. Kaiser.

Ostensibly, the book tells the story of a highly successful but little-known entrepreneur named Gerald S.J. Cassidy — the man who, for all practical purposes, in 1975 invented a new kind of business, Congressional “earmarking,” and turned it into a vast – and troubling – new industry.

More broadly,  So Damn Much Money relates how money got the upper hand in politics, becoming the basis of  “the one big arrangement that came to define modern Washington: the mutually dependent relationship that evolved in the years after 1975 between members of Congress and the ever-growing tribe of Washington lobbyists.”

Read the full review:
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2009.01.11/380.html

So Damn Much Money.
Robert G. Kaiser.
Hardcover: Knopf, Jan. 2009.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $22 ] [ Amazon ]

Green Congregations Workshop

 Saturday, January 31, 2009

12:30—1:00 p.m. Registration & Information Fair
1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Workshop

Presented by a group of congregational green teams from different faiths.

• View exhibits and learn about local resources
• Learn how to start a green ministry
• Share experiences with others
• Obtain information on energy efficiency
• Get inspiration and ideas for your faith community

Second Presbyterian Church
7700 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis

This event is free and open to people of all faiths
To register, contact Brady Hansel
at bhansel@hecweb.org or 317-686-4790
Deadline for Registrations: January 24

http://www.hecweb.org/File/Green_Congregations_Workshop_Flyer.pdf

Indy’s First Urban Farming Forum

All Indianapolis fans of backyard gardening for food and growers of goodies should take note of Punxsutawney Phil’s next big day of Monday Februrary 2nd, 2009. This will be the date upon which more will arrive to Indy than news from some groundhog harbinger of more foul winter weather. Instead, at 1029 Fletcher Avenue – (see: http://www.kibi.org/building/index.htm) from 5:30PM to 7:00PM the new Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, Inc. (KIBI) headquarters site will host Indy’s FIRST “Urban Farming Forum.”

Chris Harrell, brownfield/urban redevelopment specialist (and local produce fan); Sarah Wiehe, IUPUI medical researcher and pediatrician (and ardent urban gardner); Matthew Jose, urban agriculture specialist; Laura Henderson, Founder of Indy’s new Winter Farmer’s Market will join together to host all attendees at this FREE event.

The Urban Farming Forum expects to bring together the many disparate groups, individuals, churches, non profits, and more to discuss multiple topics of interest. Main topics will include: health and safety issues sometimes confronted when farming urban sites, how to mend soil if health concerns are discovered in the soil, what crops are best suited for Indianapolis and environs and related garden growing hints, and lastly how to share the bounty from urban gardens with the your neighbors or the public at large by market or through non profit assistance (churches, community gardens, poverty relief, or supplying urban schools with fresh and healthy produce, etc.).

More info:   http://www.agreenerindiana.com/events/indys-first-urban-farming

“The Flourishing of
Placed and Peopled Churches
Within Local Cultures”

A Review of
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life.
by
Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens.

By Brent Aldrich.

Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life:
A Reader’s Guide.
Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens.
Paperback: Brazos Press, 2008.
Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $17 ] [ Amazon ]

Wendell Berry’s writings have been deeply formative for me, as they have for many people I know; his vision of the wholeness (and holiness) of Creation, and the good work, peaceableness and economy of love, and commitment to life together in a particular place consistently affirms the very presence of God’s reconciling work in the world. This vision spans literary disciplines, as well as a working farm and several decades. With the long reach of his writing, Berry has been taken up by many other writers; indeed, I hardly pick up a book about agriculture, place or technological criticism without first flipping to the index to see where Berry is cited. Considering this broad reach comes Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens’ Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader’s Guide. This book offers the suggestion that “if we were asked to name one person to whom contemporary Christians need to listen, it would be this unlikely source [Berry], a man with no important connections to ecclesial or political or corporate power” (17). Throughout the course of this book, then, Bonzo and Stevens offer a framework guide to Berry’s writing, drawing out some of the most common threads of his vision, and addressing them explicitly to the church.

            At its broadest, Berry’s vision is cast as a “dogged search for health in the midst of disease. His notion of health is undergirded by a set of ideas that includes finitude, humility, localness, boundedness, propriety of scale, particularity” (25). This health seems most observed in nature, in the creation, and in community, with two scriptural precedents that Berry initiates and Bonzo and Stevens elaborate on: Genesis 1 and 2, and 1 Corinthians 12.

            I’d like to turn to Berry’s poem “Healing” to begin to describe the contours of this book:

            “The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.

            In healing the scattered members come together.

            In health, the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.”

     (more…)