“The companies insisted on their right to use facial-recognition systems to identify a stranger on the street without first obtaining the individual’s consent. As one lobbyist in the talks told the press, ‘Everyone has the right to take photographs in public… if someone wants to apply facial recognition, should they really need to get consent in advance?’”

And it's been a fun read. Genuine laugh-out-loud moments and captivating plot point moments. It's one of those series I find myself sneaking in reading almost every free moment I have. So, kudos to Matt Dinniman.

However, I have also found the world building and larger story very motivating. It's the story of resistance and pushing back against a machine and system that only wants to break you. There was one part in the second book that I found myself reflecting on.

“If it used to be okay, but it’s not okay anymore, then maybe you should do something about it. Don’t compare your circumstances with how they were yesterday. Look at how they were years ago. We’re supposed to be making the world… the universe… a better place for our children. If it’s not better, if you’re dealing with cruelty, with neglect, then you should do something about it.” (emphasis mine)

This is a tricky bit of work they're doing here; essentially trying to equate the eyes on the street notion of public life with the use of surveillance tech. But these are very different things, especially in the hands of a company like Google. Jacobs' eyes on the street is about establishing a shared sense of ownership for public space. When a place is used by people, it creates a sort of social safety net in which strangers are tied together by an unspoken common goal. They are the eyes of the collective stranger—the community—whose gaze is not salacious but watchful.

The use of surveillance tech in the public realm is something that has bothered me for a while. It's driven not by a shared responsibility of protecting the common good but the individual desire to protect private interests. One builds communal trust, the other tears it down.

Google's attempt to claim access to the public realm is similarly compelled by their private interests. These eyes on the street are not watchful, nor are they communal. They are the exploitative gaze of a company who harvests our behaviours for their own benefit, indifferent to what makes a shared space good.

"Care for the needy requires the expenditure of wealth: when all share alike, disbursing their possessions among themselves, they each receive a small portion for their individual needs. Thus, those who love their neighbour as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbour...

For the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love."

— St Basil, reflecting on Mat 19

“In contrast, Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users… Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behaviour by any means available in the competition for market advantage. In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends.” (Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism)

Zuboff spends a lot of time in the first few chapters of the book looking at Google as the pioneers of surveillance capitalism. One of the more interesting parts is the way the founders of Google initially rejected advertising. They were focused on building the best search technology. The behavioural data was only used to make their Search better, an exchange that users were willing to make. However, the dot-com financial crisis put a lot of pressure on them from their investors to figure out how to become profitable—and fast—so they pivoted and discovered how valuable that behavioural data was when being used in ways not for the benefit of the users. In four years they went from making no profit to $3.2 billion. By 2017 they were one of the top two companies in he world.

Again, Zuboff's point here is that the use of the technology in this way was not inevitable. It was result of deliberate choices made by specific people at specific times.

Surveillance capitalism is essentially the way companies mine our data in order to predict, guide, and exploit our behaviours for profit. As Zuboff notes, it is practice that is so commonplace now we barely even think about it. It's also a practice that has increasingly become normalized in our offline spaces as well (the way we track our health and exercise data as an example).

Zuboff's early argument—and one I agree with—is that we effectively have no choice in this. It is everywhere and a part of everything. Its design is to feel both normal and invisible, so as not to draw our attention. And we willingly surrender to it in exchange for various conveniences and securities. As Zuboff puts it, "its normalization leaves us singing in our chains."

One key point that Zuboff makes that I want to highlight here is that much of these exploitative practices hide behind the argument of inevitability. The creators and enablers of them want us to believe that they are the inevitable outcome of the technology, this is just the price we pay for modern society. However, these practices are far from inevitable, and are instead "meticulously calculated and lavishly funded."

Resisting them begins with resisting the claim of inevitability. And understanding that we have the power to design a better way.

"Surveillance capitalism runs contrary to the early digital dream... Instead, it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being ‘connected’ is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge. Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labour, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labour, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.” (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)

"Perhaps the church is not so much the crumbling edifice we see but more a tent for the wandering people of God." (Soelle, Against the Wind)

I was reading a chapter this morning on Soelle's understanding of the church; and why she still feels apart of it. She references a conversation she had with Daniel Berrigan, who called the church a fairly inefficient umbrella. Despite getting a bit wet sometimes, 'it's there and I wouldn't want to do without it.'

She describes the necessary tension of holding the tendencies of the historical church towards both oppression and liberation, describing this as the tension between the church from above and the church from below. What's striking is despite the outright hate and dismissiveness that she personally received from the church throughout her career, she still sees a place within that tent:

“Now I feel much less alone in the church than I did some years ago… This momentum and its orientation carry me along, oriented toward reconciliation. My hope is for an end to the war between rich and poor that has shed and still sheds more blood than we can measure, and to the war between all of us and the earth who bears us. In this process I feel at home and borne by Christian tradition.”

As someone who has struggled to feel at home in the church for quite some time, I feel encouraged by this reminder that the church is not one thing and cannot be claimed by any one group. Yes, there can be hate and bigotry and selfishness but there is also love and kindness and self-sacrifice. The church holds both a history of oppression and liberation.

I am grateful for people like Soelle—and Berrigan—who spent their lives fighting for the latter even when the church itself turned against them.

My first personal listening device was a Sony Walkman. And it was perfect. I got my hands on the cassette of Amy Grant's ‘The Collection’ and had my first notable experience with a pop song. But getting tapes wasn't easy. Any allowance I had was spent on candy and RC Cola that I biked into town to buy so I was mostly limited to whatever tapes my parents had. Thankfully they both liked music so there was a fair amount to choose from at home; but I wanted to figure out what I liked.

So I learned how to make mixtapes. This involved waiting for songs on the radio and hitting the play/record buttons at the same time and just accepting that you would forever listen to this song with the missing first couple seconds or a DJ's comments overlaying the intro. Daily countdowns were a great way to grab a specific song you wanted (Mix 99.9's top 9 at 9). It often sounded like garbage but this was my music, self-selected and personal.

In junior high I got a Discman and this began a whole new journey in my music experience: collecting cds. For a while this involved jumping on my friend's Columbia House subscription and ordering cds. I was so envious of anyone with a Columbia House subscription. Imagine getting new cds just mailed to your house every month. This enabled me to buy the album of some of the bands I was listening to on the radio. I started discovering new rock (as distinct from my parents' old rock). Bands like Everclear, Eve 6, and of course, Green Day were early purchases and filled my headphones. This also very much represented me listening to music that I didn't want my parents to know I was listening to so I remember hiding cd sleeves where they couldn't find them.

The first cd I ever purchased from an actual, physical music store was MxPx - Life in General. I was with my family at a mall and I left them to go into the store myself and came back with it. It was also a declaration: this is what I'm into and I'm okay if you don't like it (they didn't). From here there was no stopping, I began collecting cds with a new intensity. Saving up money however I could and going and picking out cds from HMV. My collection grew and evolved as I grew and evolved. I'd buy cds sometimes because they looked cool; it was a gamble and it cost me money and sometimes it didn't pay off. But sometimes it did. I also started picking up music magazines to try and discover new bands. My tastes were all over the place. In my late teens I even got into that old rock my parents were into because we listened to Q107 at work.

At some point in my teenage years two pieces of technology changed everything: the iPod and Napster. My hunting for music shifted from magazines and stores to the computer. Music blogs became my source for recommendations and then I would track those songs down and fill my iPod with them. There was nothing between me and the endless consumption of new music (other than copyright laws and the shutting down of piracy sites). But there was very little friction. I could hear about a band, download that band, and listen to that band. Then move on to the next band. And there was no shortage of new music to discover. During this time, new bands were popping up constantly and it honestly got hard keeping up with them all. You'd have a current obsession but easily forget what you listened to last week. This wasn't inherently a bad thing, but it fundamentally changed how we would experience music.

I want to note two things here: 1) my relationship with music began to change at the same time society's relationship to media began to change; and 2) I was well past childhood or adolescent development when these shifts took place. I think this matters.

I'd also like to acknowledge that I think the iPod was a really great example of technology moving us in the right direction. It solved a legitimate problem: how to carry around a larger collection of music. But with that move came new problems. When the metric become convenience, we started to embrace other conveniences as well. Like, what if it could do more than just play music? [As an aside, the other issue I have with the iPod was the way it walked us into the normalization of walled gardens in how we experience media. I wrote about that a bit here.]

In my late 20s I started collecting vinyl. It was a return to how I used to experience music. Something less instant and more tangible. I think that's what the vinyl resurgence was all about. We can argue that there's something purer about vinyl or it sounding better or whatever; but really it was mostly people like me remembering what they loved about listening to music before the internet took it from us. I still collect vinyl for this reason. The friction is part of the experience. As the meme goes, "the two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience."

All of this leads me to what I said yesterday about buying my kids dedicated music players and getting them off of Apple Music. I'm trying to find a way to give them the ingredients necessary to nurture a relationship with music during their formative years. It involves creating the right amount of friction to slow them down just enough to appreciate the music they're choosing to listen to right now.

I know our kids live in a different world than we grew up in. It would be ridiculous to insist that they experience everything the exact same way that we did. But I want to believe there's a healthy middle ground. One that doesn't just give in and hand our kids a smartphone because it's the easiest option. I believe friction is a good thing; and just maybe it’s better for kids to not instantly have access to whatever they want without a little bit of work and patience.

This pursuit has primarily been inspired by parenting kids who are at the age where they both want (and in some cases need) technology. The almost daily request of can I have a phone and everyone else in my class has one has put me in a position of needing to come up with a good answer for why I don't plan on giving them one anytime soon—if ever. It's also left me wondering if maybe giving them my old phone (stripped of most of its functions) was a step in the wrong direction.

Let me try and unpack my thinking:

I had repurposed my old iPhone in order to give my kids a way to a) listen to music/podcasts and b) take pictures. For the last couple years this has worked just fine. But over the last few months I began to notice a couple things that had me second guessing this.

1) They were scrolling. Despite having no access to anything to really scroll through, they were still just lying there, looking at the phone and flipping through pictures they had taken. They weren't doing anything creative with those images, just looking at them. And they had the same slumped over posture and vacant expression that we all do when sucked into a mindless feed.

2) They had been conditioned to streaming. Here's a question: do we think it's a good idea to give kids access to anything they want whenever they want it? I feel like if we were to apply that generally to most things the answer would be no. Yet, when it comes to entertainment this is now the new normal. And I guess from a childhood-development perspective I'm wondering what that will do to how they interact with the world. Also, what is this doing to their relationship with the things they enjoy? More on this in a future post I think.

Anyways, in response to this I've started a difficult backtracking in our home, putting some new boundaries on things as well as taking away what had previously been given. I took back the old phone and have sort of-mostly-not quite-but almost cut them off from Apple Music. Not an easy thing, but as Katherine Martinko says, "you can say no."

However, I also believe in saying yes at the same time. So I did some research and bought both kids a DAP (digital audio player). Like the iPods or mp3 players we used to have, it's designed to do one thing and one thing only: play music. They weren't initially happy with this switch. It's less convenient (we have to put music on it). It's not as intuitive (physical buttons rather than a touchscreen). And it doesn't do anything else. But, I notice it's now the first thing they grab when we're going somewhere in the car.

Small win? Sure, why not.

"We need to remind ourselves that there was once a time when genetic technology did not determine the beginning—and nuclear technology the end—of life. People had a different relationship with pain and with themselves. They had fashioned a language which shared and made sense of pain." (Soelle, Against the Wind)

What do we lose if we lose our pain? This is a question that Soelle reflects on and positions it specifically in the history of the pains of birth. She reflects on the way that the technical world views pain as "an avoidable hazard," something that can be overcome or denied. For Soelle, this is a betrayal of what makes us human.

"We are neither machines nor beings domesticated to run the treadmill of consumerism. We are capable of suffering because we are capable of love. Activities like loving, suffering, giving birth, and dying are already a form of resistance against the imperatives of the economy under which we live." (Soelle)

What do we lose if we lose our pain? Our capacity to love, to hope, to fight for a better world? Perhaps.

This morning I was reading Soelle's reflection on her feminism and really enjoyed this part:

"Perhaps my image of a happy life is less individualistic than that of many young women. I think that we need a certain kind of dependence in order to live, but not total emotional and economic dependence, the inability to organize our lives ourselves. There is a dependence that grows inside freedom: I could live by myself, but I want to life with you, enter into mutuality. The concept of dependence is often devalued in the woman’s movement; in whatever case, it is seen as deadly, as destructive of human beings. I find this wrong; I believe that mutual dependence is part of being human. Concretely, it means that I am sexually, spiritually, and emotionally dependent on others. I need conversation, challenge, critique, affection, understanding, and help in managing everyday life. I want to share my experiences with someone; I wish to give and to receive comfort."

One of the values of our age is the supremacy of the individual. This is a path we have been on for a long while now and you can feel its consequences in every area of society. Something I am particularly interested in is the way technology† has propelled this value to new extremes. Each new era brings with it technical advancements that further prioritizes the autonomy of the individual and weakens our communal bonds.

Today, the digital has ripped apart the previous era's clean separation of both the private and public realms. Each has crossed into the other in ways that we have yet to fully grapple with. The private has become commodified and made public for mass consumption while the public realm has become a space primarily dedicated to the protection of private interest.

I think what I like about what Soelle is writing here is that it represents a value that cuts against this entire trajectory that we have all just accepted. It feels somewhat jarring to advocate for mutual dependence in a time when all those things she mentions—one's sexual, spiritual, and emotional life—have been wholly defined by individual desire. The radical statement, to suggest that human beings need one another, is the antithesis of the technological pursuit.

But it is a pursuit that seeks to make us less human and more machine.

† I mean technology here in a broad sort of sense as we think about the trajectory of human 'progress.' It is an application of thinking that prioritizes efficiency or innovation over all else. We can apply this to things like automobiles, the replacement of porches with backyards, and of course the digital sphere.

“Theological reflection without political consequences was tantamount to blasphemy… Every theological statement has to be at the same time a political one.” (Soelle, Against the Wind)

All theology is, by its very nature, contextual. By that I mean it emerges out of a particular time and place by real people responding to the challenges and questions that matter to them and their communities. This is what makes it political. It's theology that matters.

Soelle is working in a very particular time, the aftermath of WWII in Germany. She develops much of her theological awareness during a period when the church seemed at its weakest, having aligned itself with fascism—and all its brutality. If theological reflection at its core might be considered our attempts to 'follow the tracks' of whatever we might think of God at work in our world, Soelle joined the Liberation theologians in identifying God as on the side of the poor and oppressed. What makes this a political statement is that it has tangible implications for the rest of us. As Soelle reflected,

"What I suffer from, and what I need and seek forgiveness for, are all the disastrous things that we, as a society, inflict today on the poorest of the poor and on our mother, the earth."

Good theology—real theology—changes us. Not just how we think, or what we believe, but in how we live in the world and what we do in it. If it doesn't, Soelle would say it doesn't matter, and that's what makes it blasphemous. What good is a theology that has no consequences?

"Demythologizing is often a means of telling the truth about the bosses of this world."

In her memoir, Soelle talks about how Rudolf Bultmann's theology more or less saved her faith, being an example of someone who was both deeply religious and intellectually curious. Bultmann's theology was one that sought to rescue Christianity from myth; not eliminating it, but interpreting it.

I like this line of hers, sharing the way a theology like this can help us make sense of the world—specifically when thinking about power.

Something that jumped out in the early parts of the book was her talking about a teacher she had, saying, "her thinking takes sides."

She goes on to note that a good teacher needs more than knowledge, they must stand for something. Interestingly, Kingsnorth had similar things to say around the value of having a stance if we wish to be able to resist the Machine.

I think this is really important and something that is missing for a lot of people, having something to stand for. So much of who we are tends to be defined by what we're not or what we're against, but not enough of us are doing the hard work of asking ourselves, but what are we for?

“The point, I think, is to be found beneath the surface layer of politics, and beneath the lower layers of nationhood, ethnicity, and culture too. The point, as ever, is spiritual. If our nations seem hollowed-out, if our countries seem to be prey for the Machine, surely it is because they have no soul. If people, place, prayer, and the past are the group upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these. Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easiest option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?” (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

For most of my life, a garbage truck had two workers on it. Someone who drove and someone who would jump off and empty the bins into the truck. My town, like many others, has adopted the trucks with the big mechanical claw on the side of it that lifts the garbage can from the curb and dumps its contents into the truck. It now only takes one worker to both drive and operate the claw.

It reminds me of grocery stores. When I was a kid, every cash register had two workers: a cashier and someone to bag the groceries. I remember when they got rid of the bagger job, all of a sudden you were expected to bag your own (or the cashier might do it for you). Today, in many grocery stores, a single worker can oversee a dozen different self-checkouts.

My grandfather worked his whole life in a GM plant. The threat of automation to jobs is nothing new. I think what is important to keep in mind is that it's not often an abrupt replacement. It's usually many small, different changes—often presented as opportunity for efficiency or skill learning—each one making human work slightly more redundant. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

In 1958, Hannah Arendt pondered what happens to a society of labourers that becomes "liberated" from the bonds of labour when labour is all this society knows. Of that, she wrote, "surely nothing could be worse."

“As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.” (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

I can still smell my grandmother's house. She's been gone now for going on ten years but the memory of her cooking is still there. It's a more visceral memory than almost anything I have from any of the houses I grew up in. It taps into something deeper, a tradition of cooking that was brought with her out of Poland and re-rooted itself in her home in Oshawa. Some of her kids have carried it on in small ways, but I think a lot of it has been forgotten.

Our disconnect from a sense of rootedness, or home, is hard to notice. It's not one thing, nor is it immediate. It happens slowly, subtly over time and through many different things. It's the loss of the traditional way of doing things in exchange for faster and easier. It's the unfamiliarity many of us feel towards the natural world, even that which is directly around us. It's the forgetting of stories, of songs, of cultural artifacts that hold deep significance to where we came from. It's the creeping dominance of a digital world and culture that is swallowing everything else.

The last few Christmas Eve's I have attempted to make a Polish dish for my family meal. It's a small nod to that sense of home I feel when I think of my grandmother's house. This year we attempted a Sernik, a Polish cheesecake. All four of us were involved in this tricky process of making something we'd never made before. It was fun—and delicious.

"But a value system which glorifies wealth and accumulation, which builds itself on a platform of want, which inflames and creates more of it daily through a marketing machine that colonizes the human mind—this is what every spiritual tradition in history has warned against, and with good reason." (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

Just tagging off yesterday's post here with a followup quote from the book that I think hits what I was getting at a bit better. The point here isn't to say that a religious society is better or more just—far from it. Nor should we equate modern religious identity with its pre-modern versions. Capitalism has consumed religion just as much as anything else. But, there is wisdom to be found in these traditions if we are willing to listen.

One of the myths that capitalism relies on is the way excess (prosperity) is presented as the grand goal for all. Rather than put limitations around wealth, we talk about it as something that anyone can attain with just a little hard work or the right timing of the market. This myth operates at both a local and a global level, driving the idea that the world will be a better place when everyone lives like the richest nations. But not only is this not possible, it begs the moral question of if this is even something we should aspire towards. A question that Kingsnorth notes was being asked by the British economist, E.F. Schumacher in the 1970s:

"The foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man."

The thing that makes ethics so tricky in our age is that we are trying to work out individual moral choices against the backdrop of a capitalist system that has made virtues of what was once considered vice. Lifestyles of excess are presented as normal and the pursuit of more is seen as the sign of a good life. What I think Kingsnorth is so rightly pointing out is that this has not always been the case; and we may need to be more critical in asking what this has cost us.

Favourite album/s: New Threat From the Soul (Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band), Getting Killed (Geese), Bleeds (Wednesday), Wasteland (Jim Ghedi), Headlights (Alex G), Holo Boy (This is Lorelei).

Favourite Movie/s: Sinners, One Battle After Another, Weapons, Friendship (so weird and tense and bizarrely funny), Final Destination: Bloodlines (absolute blast).

"The notion that the Machine is inevitable and natural, and that there is no 'realistic' alternative to its reign, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is also a fiction...

The reality is that Machine capitalism did not 'evolve' from small-scale artisan of peasant societies: they had to be deliberately destroyed in order that it might replace them." (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

Capitalism does not feed the local economy; it feeds on it. It preys on our sentiment and tells us a story to make us feel as though we are supporting local businesses but instead it is devouring any semblance of that. A good example of this has been the 'Buy Canadian' response to US tariffs over the last year. Many massive corporations exploited this idea in order to increase their profit margins while their existence hurts actual local, independent retailers. Not to mention that the little of the profit of those larger corporations stays within the community.

“Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer could." (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

The sort of central point—at least in the early parts of this book—is that we have all become uprooted by The Machine, a sort of loose term for the global crisis that has severed us from tradition, culture, nature, community, ourselves, etc... It is driven by the global economy and although it was created by the West we can see it being furthered by States all around the world.

We have all been uprooted.

"Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in a metastasizing machine which is closing in around you, polluting your skies and your woods and your past and your imagination... Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the change of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines."

Picked up 'Against the Machine' by Paul Kingsnorth at the library the other day. This part in the introduction leaped out at me.

Most of the things you like are fading away.

“Many modern Christians have unfortunately understood injustice in simply materialistic terms and have not recognized the need to ‘convert’ people from the spirituality that binds them to a particular material expression of power. It is not enough merely to change social structures. People are not simply determined by the material forces that impinge on them. They are also the victims of the very spirituality that the material means of production and socialization have fostered, even as these material means are themselves the spin-off of a particular spirituality.” (Wink, Naming the Powers)

I remember a mentor of mine who had spent a good part of his life working among people afflicted by poverty telling me that the poor are inherently spiritual. This was, according him, a failure in understanding by many of the attempts of philanthropy from 'secular' organizations who saw poverty as only a material problem—solved easily with money.

Wink's point here is that the Christian tradition has a vocabulary to help. A way of talking about evil in both structural and spiritual ways. It's not about explaining things, it's about that awareness that power has both an inner and an outer reality and we need a way to confront both.

Dorothee Sölle wrote about how the Church can learn to recognize the powers. It begins with listening and seeing and feeling. We look at a given context and ask ourselves a couple questions. First, who is being victimized? And then, to understand the cause, we ask who profits? It is in learning to see this dynamic at work that the Church can learn to see where their work is needed.

Anyway, as a part of this Advent and Christmas season, I have decided to go back to some of that and draw out some reflections on what it means for the Kingdom to be breaking in as it relates to the idea of power in our world. Wink's core argument is that modern readers have failed to understand the mythic descriptions of the Powers on their own terms.

“The goal is not ‘demythologizing’ if by that is meant removal of the mythic dimension, but rather juxtaposing the ancient myth with the emerging postmodern (mythic) worldview and asking how they might mutually illuminate each other.”

So expect a few notes here for the next couple weeks on this topic as I work out a bit of what is on my mind this season.

What then should we do while we wait?

I really think that this is the perfect question for Advent. If Christmas is about the arrival of the Kingdom, Advent is about taking a beat and getting ready. I've heard it described as active waiting. Rather than jumping straight into celebration, there's this season of preparation. It's like having guests over for a big holiday party; there's so many things you need to do before they arrive. Advent is the church's season of house cleaning and meal prep.

But back to the main question: what are we supposed to do to get ready? John's answer—and, quite frankly, I love this—is socio-economic.

In reply he said to them, "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." He said to [the tax collectors], "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you." He said [to the soldiers], "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages."

What I appreciate here is that there really is no way to 'spiritualize' this away from its very real economic implications. It's also a vision for a society that would have radically upended the Roman Empire. If you have extra, share it with someone in need. If you are part of the machine itself that extracts wealth from its citizens, do so in a way that is fair, nonviolent, and non exploitative. Imagine such a thing.

Christmas has, in so many ways, become a celebration of indulgence and excess. [cue a Charlie Brown Christmas] I'm not trying to be all curmudgeonly here, I enjoy giving gifts and having elaborate meals during this time as much as anyone; but I think the value of Advent is that it calls us back to this idea that there is still much work to be done in order to get ready. And that work is not accomplished by going to more church services, having the biggest nativity scene on your lawn, or fighting about corporations saying happy holidays. It's found in a vision of upending an unjust and oppressive socio-economic system that dehumanizes its labourers and worships capital. It's in recognizing that the extra that we have we are not entitled to, but that it should be shared with those who have far less. It's in gratitude and generosity and solidarity with the poor.

Advent is ultimately a reminder that the world isn't as it should be and we shouldn't be okay with how it is.

• I'm currently powering through the final stretch of the Wheel of Time books (in the last half of the last one). For those that don't know, this is a 14 volume fantasy series. I've attempted it twice before and lost momentum. I started the series from the beginning again in April and have been pushing to accomplish it by the end of the year.

• I've also been spending more time in the mornings doing some reflective work on my life. I'm working on building out a 5-10 year vision and it's got a lot of my headspace. So less time for reading.

• Also, I turned 40 today.

“Small things were important. Seconds were small things, and if you heaped enough of those on top of one another, they became a man’s life.” (from Towers of Midnight, book 13 in the Wheel of Time)

"I do believe in the possibility of creating a new social model. The only thing is that we now have to begin afresh. The unions, the labour halls, decentralization, the federative system—are all gone. The perverse use that has been made of them has destroyed them. The matter is all the more urgent because all our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state."

From Anarchy and Christianity, Jacques Ellul.

Like obligation.

This is the first "weapon of influence" that Cialdini explores (he refers to it as 'reciprocation'). Obligation is the social web of indebtedness, giving and expecting an equal measure of return in some way. He notes that human society is somewhat built on this assurance. It is designed (and exploited) to shame people into keeping the balance in socially acceptable ways.

Take, for example, the mutually binding experience of helping someone move. There is an unspoken agreement that helping someone move locks you into a form of social debt, only escapable by returning the favour. Until the debt is repaid, the relationship is imbalanced—even if only subtly. The obliged might feel compelled to try and repay their gratitude in other ways: dinner, beer, a thank you gift; but the scale is only truly made right again with a favour of equal size.

These sorts of social transactions are common, even if we don't like to think of them that way. Watering a friend's plants while they're out of town, donating to a coworker's charity run, taking the cheque at a family dinner. It can even exist in things like potlucks or gift exchanges. When we give of our time or resources, there is an underlying assumption that the recipient should be willing to 'repay' if and when the opportunity presents itself.

Now, what interests me the most here is what this might say about human selflessness. This is something I like to spend my time thinking about: how and when someone acts against their self-interest for the sake of someone or something else. If we take this concept of obligation seriously, we might consider that nobody ever truly acts in a selfless way. We all give with some sort of expectation that the recipient, the community, or even the universe will pay us back in equal measure at some point in the future. Even if we want to be charitable and say that these future returns are merely an incentive to give, I still find it an interesting thought experiment to consider how people would act without them. Would wealthy people be as philanthropic without tax benefits? Would religious people engage in charity without a promise of eternal reward? Would you be willing to help a friend move if you knew that when it was your time to move, your friend would be out of town?

Maybe for some the answer would still be yes, and I like to hope that that is true. But I can't help but feel that if we lost the web of obligation, a lot of "selfless" behaviour would stop. And I wonder what the cumulative impact of that would be. Cialdini notes,

"The obligation to reciprocate a concession encourages the creation of socially desirable arrangements by ensuring that anyone seeking to start such an arrangement will not be exploited. After all, if there were no social obligation to reciprocate a concession, who would want to make the first sacrifice? To do so would be to risk giving up something and getting nothing back."

My observation is that society is becoming increasingly more self-centred. I believe this is because empathy is in decline (for a number of reasons that I'm not going to explore here) but as I read this section of Cialdini's book, I am wondering whether obligation isn't also disappearing. Or at least evolving into something else. This isn't to say that the intricate balance of equal repayment for services given is gone, but I think what has happened is that many of the things we once did for one another as community favours are increasingly becoming normalized as paid services. Dog walking, moving help, tool rental, snow shovelling, even providing for the elderly—all of these can now be purchased. An easy and instant transaction with no promise of future repayment.

This feels like a loss.

I guess what I'm concerned about is that we are falling out of habit of asking for and giving favours, of helping those around us with our extra time and skills. We're setting a new standard where asking for something that can be paid for is considered a bit of a faux pas, an inconvenience upon those who are asked. That's to say nothing of simply stepping up and helping out without being asked, just because you are able. Just because you see a need. As Cialdini put it, who wants to risk giving something up and getting nothing back in return?

The problem is that human society was built upon this sort of mutual exchange. If not selflessness, at least a fundamental trust in the community around us. If I help you, you'll be there to help me when I need it. Obligation is not a bad thing. It's not a debt to be rid of. It's a sense of moral duty and concern for the world we live in. It's a contract that binds us into living together, as a diverse group of people sharing space and resources. It's a necessary foundation for cooperation.

Something I personally think we could use a lot more of these days.

"Contemplative lingering, dwelling on things, which is a recipe for happiness, will be completely replaced by the hunt for information." (Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive)

We have entered a new sort of hunter-gatherer stage, one in which information and data are the objects of our hunt. We save information, take photos, screenshots, article clippings, etc.—with little discrimination, hoarding it all in our increasingly consumptive digital storehouses. But as Han writes here, this sort of mindless collecting is devoid of the thrill and joy that comes with skillfully hunting down your intended prey. Our constant and immediate access to information leaves us unchanged. As comedian, Pete Holmes deftly put it, "the time between knowing and not knowing is so brief that knowing feels exactly like not knowing. So life is meaningless."

There is, as I have suggested before, a value in knowing how to learn things. Our brains benefit from simply having time to reflect on a problem or challenge. It's why going for a walk to think things through or even having uninterrupted time in the shower can be so beneficial. When we reduce that lingering time, we deprive our brains of something essential to what makes us human. I also think losing that reflective space is also, in part, what is driving this mass mental health crisis.

Want a small way you can fight back against all of this? Go for a walk—and leave your phone at home.

"This new form of rule does not force us to be silent. Rather, it constantly asks us to communicate, to participate, to express our opinions, desires, wishes and preferences—even to narrate our lives."

(Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive)

Han makes note of a census attempt in Western Germany in the 1980s that was met with loud pushback, even protest. People felt the questions were too personal and boycotted it. This resulted in a pause and then revised census.

Today, however, people give over all sorts of personal information with barely a second thought. We are, in Han's view, building our own prison—a form of digital totalitarianism—one that is increasingly exploiting every area of our lives.

"There is no cooperative, networked multitude that could serve as a global protest movement and revolutionary body. Rather, the current form of production is based on the solitary, isolated, disconnect entrepreneur of the self. It used to be the case that, although enterprises competed with each other, there was solitary within each enterprise. Today, everyone is in competition with everyone else, even within a single enterprise. This universal competition may lead to an enormous increase in productivity, but it destroys solidarity and the sense of community. You cannot form a revolutionary mass our of depressive, disconnected individuals."

(Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive)

This touches on one of my favourite problems, how do we build around cooperation rather than competition and it's one I don't have a good answer for. Han addresses the way cooperation under capitalism has been commodified as well. The rise of the sharing economy, in which access rather than ownership became the model, is still based on competition. Look to the rise of all the different food delivery apps as an example. Each of them employs clever (and costly) advertising to win the consumer. Han notes that it also puts this "sharing" behind a paywall. You still need money in order to borrow from these services. Those who lack are left out.

"Out of the oppressed worker, neoliberalism creates the free entrepreneur, the entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in his own enterprise. Everyone is both master and slave. The class struggle has been transformed into an internal struggle against oneself. Those who fail blame themselves and feel ashamed. People see themselves, rather than society, as the problem.”

(Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive)

I've long felt that one of the central myths of capitalism is this idea that anyone can make it. Sort of like living in a hockey town in Canada, everyone knows someone who did, just to make it feel almost accessible. The system is propped up and defended even by those it exploits because they buy into this myth.

I like what Han is saying here: that the neoliberal system has also solidified itself against resistance by making it a struggle against the self. Those who don't 'make it' under capitalism blame something about themselves. They're not working hard enough, they made a bad investment choice, their career just hasn't taken off yet. This is why I think capitalism thrives off our guilt.

That said, as we watch whatever late-stage capitalism is becoming, we can certainly see the way anger is being weaponized against others. This could be the result of rage being commodified and a primary driver in the attention economy. Docility somewhat goes out the window when anger sells so well.

"Every political revolution must be preceded by a revolution of consciousness, one that gives death back to life. The revolution must create an awareness of the fact that life is only truly alive when there is an exchange with death."

From 'Capitalism and the Death Drive', Byung-Chul Han

"Violence is closely connected to the awareness of death, which is exclusively human. The economy of violence is ruled by a logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulated killing power produces a feeling of growth, force, power - of invulnerability and immortality. The narcissistic enjoyment human beings take in sadistic violence is based on just this increase in power. Killing protects against death.”

From 'Capitalism and the Death Drive', Byung-Chul Han

"The Christian’s action must be specifically Christian. Christians must never identify themselves with this our that political or economic movement. Rather, they must bring to social movements what they alone can provide." (Ellul, Violence)

Something I've thought about quite a fair amount since shifting to working outside of the church is the question of what role the church might still play in today's social movements. It's something I explored in more detail in this essay looking at how the church can and should support worker's rights. There I suggest that the church needs to first adopt a posture of hospitality (both giving and receiving it) in relation to the rest of society.

We are facing a handful of immense—and interconnected—existential threats. Any hope we have in solving or surviving them requires us working together. They will also call many of us to self-sacrifice on behalf of others and to rely on community. Capitalism will not get us there. It cannot. But within many of our religions, there are truths here we can reclaim. This includes Christianity.

But not a Christianity that is nearly indistinguishable from capitalism. Of that, the church needs to repent.

"In the eyes of many people, love of the poor seems better expressed and incarnated by socialists than by Christians.” (Ellul, Violence)

There was a moment, quite a number of years ago, that signalled a fairly significant change in my life. It was a decision that marked the end of over a decade of working within the structural church. During my time there, I had committed to cultivating a love for others that inspired action—in both myself and those I worked with. Yet I kept bumping up against a tension that I didn't quite know what to do with. It seemed clear that Christianity was well positioned to provide care for individuals suffering from injustice or oppression; but in the face of the economic and social systems that caused that injustice, it felt painfully inadequate.

Now, this is a weighty topic that I'm not about to solve. What I wanted to offer here was a personal reflection around this tension that signalled a change in my life. One that led me from the church into other spaces. It was not a decision that I came to lazily or out of some crisis of faith. If anything, it was driven by idealism. It's also something I am still wrestling with. I claim no definitive answer to these questions.

My goal in reading through Ellul (along with some other authors right now) is to spend some time reflecting on the 21st century (North American) church in light of current events and what seems like a massive betrayal of the faith they claim to hold.

"What troubles me is not that the opinions of Christians change, nor that their opinions are shaped by the problems of the times; on the contrary, that is good. What troubles me is that Christians conform to the trend of the moment without introducing into it anything specifically Christian. Their convictions are determined by their social milieu, not by faith in the revelation; they lack the uniqueness which ought to be the expression of that faith. Thus theologies become mechanical exercises that justify the positions adopted, and justify them on grounds that are absolutely not Christian."

Violence, Jacques Ellul

"The major challenge to neighbourhood, as a demographic-physical construct as well as a viable social network, comes from organizations and institutions (firms and bureaucracies) whose routine functioning reorganizes urban space. The stranger to fear may not be the man of different ethnicity on the street corner, but a bank president or property management executive far from view.”

From Logan and Molotch.

My prof used to say something similar around how the person to fear is not the individual suffering from mental health illness on the corner but the executives in their big shiny buildings. This is why it's always important to be able to read the power dynamics of a community through the lens of who suffers and who benefits.

"When social media users do encounter misinformation, they largely follow accounts with whom they are likely to agree and consume outlets that reflect their perspectives. As a result, digital misinformation generally preaches to the choir, potentially making attitudes or behaviors more extreme but not acting as vectors of mass influence or persuasion. If anything, the causal arrows may face in the opposite directions: beliefs may explain digital misinformation consumption more than the other way around." (Source)

Connected to yesterday's post on one-sided conversations. This is an interesting article exploring the overall failure in how we've handled misinformation. Basically we understand what misinformation is, how it spreads, and who is most susceptible; but attempts to fact check it have been futile. The article suggests that this is due to a failure to fully and properly understand the role of this sort of communication. Rather than thinking of this as a problem between true and false, we need to be understanding how communication more broadly impacts identity, trust, and polarization.

It's a good article that touches on several things I've been thinking about lately, including what the role of helpful communication needs to be moving forward. Check it out.

"Progressives really got to figure out how to deal with this buzzkill problem." (Marc Maron, 2025)

It's a hard thing, I think, to figure out how to balance the deep anxiety and uncertainty many of us feel towards the state of the world with finding joy and appreciation in the present moment. The desperation and despair of it all often finds us turning the simplest conversations with friends and family into soap-box like diatribes, screaming about the injustices and dangers perpetuated by one's choice of hand soap. As Maron continues in his latest special, "no one can ruin a bbq quicker than a liberal."

He's not wrong.

A few years ago, I wrote a thing for an environmental coalition on how not to ruin parties by taking a more hopeful posture in these conversations rather than a doom-centric one. I might go further if I were to rewrite that today. I think the thing that Maron is addressing in this new special is that talk isn't actually making any difference. If anything, it might be making things worse. This seems to be—at least in part—why he is ending his long running podcast this year. But if talking is no longer helpful, what does that mean and what can be done?

I wonder if part of the problem is that we're all just having one-sided conversations. Now, this isn't me saying that I think we need to get better at listening—though I do. It's also not me saying that I think we need break down our silos and learn to build community across differences—though I also do. Rather, what I'm getting at here is the way we have all become pseudo-experts at sharing ourselves and our ideas as content. We've spent years now honing our ability to take a thought, craft it to compete in the attention economy, and make it connect with people based on likes and reshares. Curated personalities and opinions. It's not conversation, it's marketing.

I'm not sure if Maron would say that's what he's been doing, but he does make some pointed comments about his fans and the specific type of people who would be at one of his shows. The audience laughs. He knows who he's talking to. Which is exactly the point. Good marketing is about reaching the right audience. The ones who already want what you're selling. What it rarely does is make any meaningful change.

So much of everything right now feels like this. As though it's been made just for content. Even conversations with people can come across as either a testing ground for content or a repeating of content, like if this hasn't already been posted, it will be. But content is not designed for real conversation. It's meant to be consumed.

And the attention economy has an unyielding appetite.

I'm struggling to define what I think is needed as an alternative or resistance to this. It's not to say that no conversation can ever be helpful. But I think part of it is that we need to embrace embodiment. To inhabit our values and ideals in such a way that they are evident in how we live our lives. To practice them instead of preaching them. There's an old wisdom here that I think we have forgotten because of how disembodied our culture has become. I believe we need to reclaim the truth of it. That actions do speak louder than words.

Another part of embodiment to me is simply being more present in the world. It's about turning off and tuning out the unending deluge of content that competes for our attention and reconnecting with the natural world. Again, an ancient wisdom that is getting forgotten. Our minds and bodies need the slowness that comes with being unplugged and just experiencing the world as it is around us.

Now, will any of this make progressives more fun to be around? Probably not, but it might help us deal with some of our own anxieties about everything and move us closer to a healthier place.

I've been working through Logan and Molotch's 'Urban Fortunes: the Political Economy of Place' over the last couple weeks. It's been a bit slow (partially because I'm also reading through the Wheel of Time in my third attempt to get through the massive 13 book series); but I'm making progress.

One argument that they are making in the book is that how we define a place, how it comes to be, is a social construction largely based upon a tension between use and exchange values. Use values are all the ways the place you live in impacts your daily life, while exchange values is what that place is worth as a commodity. These values come about through all sorts of human efforts and activities, but the main point is that what makes a place a place is a constantly evolving thing driven by social action. It is through this social action that inequalities in class are both created and maintained.

"High status within the social hierarchy can bring access to the most desirable places (for residence or investment) and a guarantee of a rewarding future for whatever place one controls. At the same time a high status for one's geographical place means the availability of resources (rents, urban services, prestige) that enhance life chances generally."

You can really get a sense of how this all works out when you look at things through the lens of raising kids in a particular locale. Home values end up being directly tied to the quality of other aspects of society (better and more available green space, school sizes and quality, daycare, proximity to pollution, etc). Your income defines your ability to afford the place you raise your kids which has an impact on the resources available to your kids to help them lead healthier, happier, and more possible lives.

While none of this is a new idea, I think what matters here is to keep Logan and Molotch's argument in front of us: this is all made through social action. And as such, can be unmade.

The other day, I was reading a recent interview with one of my favourite vocalists, Julian Casablancas (The Strokes, the Voidz), in which he commented that keeping the Strokes together made sense only for financial reasons, but it was leaving him unfulfilled creatively.

“There’s a beautiful Miles Davis quote: ‘The real risk is not changing.’ That’s why I always want to feel like I’m searching for something unexplored. If I make money, that’s fine, but I don’t want to stay still. I’m not looking for security or the status quo. If someone wants to keep creating, they have to be ready for change. Even if it means the death of something they held dear.”

As I've already admitted, I'm a big fan of his and have been since Last Night easily became one of the most recognizable songs of the early 00s. And, while I don't love everything he's ever done, I have a certain fondness for his impulsive, self-indulgent eccentricities, despite how messy they can become. But I think that's part of what I like. He's honest in his art, even when it sucks.

Which brings me back to my own messy career. I went from running programs for youth to marketing and comms. From nonprofit to for-profit and back to nonprofit again. I went from coordinator to director to manager. And I have a decade of experience in the church + a Mdiv in church leadership and theology to now working entirely outside of that space. It adds up to a pretty bizarre resume.

This is where I find a certain resonance with Casablancas. From a coherent, linear career progression, my path doesn't always make a lot of sense. If anything, it can come across like a series of missteps or start-overs. But underneath all of these shifts and turns was a never-ending battle between playing-it-safe and staying true to my ideals. The roles I've chosen have had less to do with building a career and more to do with feeling like I can make a meaningful difference in some way. And I've left them when it began to feel like I was unable to be true to myself. I know what it is to take a role and reinvent it several times over, pushing it to the boundaries of what's possible. And I know what it is to find that the people you work with aren't always ready to take that journey with you.

Maybe a resume doesn't have to be seen only as a progression. Maybe there's a way to think of it like a playlist on shuffle. Each contribution is its own unique piece of growth and learning that plays with what comes before and after. And it's our willingness to keep exploring and keep evolving that allows us to add the next unique piece. Sometimes that's found within pushing the boundaries of our current project, and sometimes that means stepping out and trying something entirely new.

"In real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn—if they learn at all—the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public responsibility for you."

Granted, I don't live in a large city, but it seems to me that the notion of public responsibility has so eroded that I'm not sure there's much left to be assimilated into. Something I write about often here is the dynamic between public and private life and the sort of collapsing of the two into each other. A big fan of Hannah Arendt, I like her idea that the public realm has become primarily about protecting private interests. This gives me a helpful way of understanding the loss of public responsibility for one another.

A while back I noted this idea of collective, or shared, responsibility in keeping kids safe; but it's interesting to also think about this as Jacobs did on the shared responsibility of helping kids learn public responsibility. Specifically, how this can't really be taught. It needs to be seen and experienced. But how can kids learn something that they can no longer see?

“The ideal of universal small property held those without property in collective check while it lured them on as individuals. They would fight alongside those who already had it, joining with them in destroying holdovers from the previous epoch which hampered the way up for the small owner.”

I started reading White Collar by C. Wright Mills this weekend, a book I picked up a few years ago and never got to. It's a bit of a social history on the American middle class and the rise of white collar work. I'm only just into it, but there's already some great nuggets in here. This piece (above) is notable to me, as it helps illustrate the myths that have propped up capitalism over here.

There was this emerging narrative in the 19th century that American was the land of small fortunes rather than 'great wealth' and that anyone could achieve this. This note here around the way the seeming accessibility of property ownership put those without property in solidarity with property owners do is a fascinating look at a myth that we are now seeing crumble. As the ideal of property ownership becomes less available to each successive generation and the division of wealth becomes more stark, I wonder if that solidarity will fully collapse.

“The last thing we need is blind optimism about technology. History is rife with innovations that failed to being shared prosperity… Nothing says that tech progress will automatically benefit everyone... That depends on the choices we make as a society, and those choices have moral aspects we can’t sidestep.”

Bregman talks about the need for a cyclical relationship between tech/science and activism. He notes that science has saved more lives than all the most famous activists combined. Yet, activism is still needed to give tech a moral centre.

AI is a perfect example of this.

Are there real, life saving opportunities with AI? Of course. Everything from medical scans to climate change mitigation can be possible with well deployed AI. But we also cannot ignore the ethical arguments against AI. The energy and water use, the loss of jobs, and the cognitive decline associated with it are all legitimate concerns that need to be taken seriously. And, let's be honest, not every company investing in AI is making the world a better place. Most are seeing it as a way to increase profits.

So yes, advancement in technology is necessary; but without moral guidance we can do more harm than good.

"You don’t do good things because you’re a good person. You become a good person by doing good things."

Started Rutger Bregman's new book, Moral Ambition, this weekend. I really enjoyed one of his previous books so I've been looking forward to this one.

I really like this sentiment, that morality is something that is forged over time rather than a starting place. It also places action as the core thing that truly matters. Good intentions are not enough to make you good. It's not a belief system or a sense of identity, morality is something you do.

It reminds me of a short film in the anthology, Paris, je'taime, in which a man is getting ready to leave his wife for a mistress when his wife tells him that she has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Instead of leaving, he chooses to stay and care for her until she dies. This brings about a change in him and his understanding of happiness. The vignette ends with the line, "by acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again."

I find myself coming back to this story over and over again as a picture of how selflessness changes us from the outside in. While there are certainly issues with this portrayal of a marriage (the betrayal and deception as a starter), I think this underlying idea rings true to what Bregman is saying: we learn how to be good people by doing good things. It's the ethical version of 'fake it 'till you make it.'

"At its worst, 'corporate multiculturalism' is an attitude that patronizes imported diversity while ignoring its own backyard.”

Mike Davis talking about how a city (LA) can invest major capital into becoming a cultural epicentre while also defunding arts programming that might benefit people who actually live there.

I don't mean a favourite type of tree, but an actual individual tree. Maybe this is a strange question to ask, sort of like asking if you have a favourite wall or street sign. Trees are just kind of there, not something that often comes to the foreground of our thoughts unless there’s a problem (a tree branch falls on your car or something).

When I was a kid, I had a favourite tree. It was an extra tall one in the forest near a family farm where we spent summers. In the mornings I’d throw some snacks, books and binoculars into a bag and run to it, climb and just spend time sitting there reading or imagining. Oddly, thinking about it gives me a wave of nostalgia, almost as though I’m remembering an old friend.

While that may seem unusual, consider the role that trees have played in the folklore and traditions of communities all around the world. Often associated with wisdom and the interconnection of life, trees have acted as the central gathering spot for both sacred and social rituals. In many Indigenous cultures, trees are deeply intertwined with memory and connection to ancestors. And in some traditions, trees can act as a link between the physical and spiritual realms, places where one might even have a chance encounter with a guiding spirit or trickster god.

It can be humbling to think about all the history and lives that trees bear witness to. Engagements, rites of passage, festivals, quiet moments of reflection, storytelling, memorials, and every other milestone and event that has taken place under or around them. And that’s to say nothing of all the other, non-human living things that enter their presence.

Regrettably, in the history of urbanization, trees are often seen as an obstacle or burden in the way of development — something to destroy, domesticate or relocate rather than work with and around. Maybe this is why so many of us rarely think of trees anymore except as a problem. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are lots of emerging models (drawing on ancient wisdom) in how our built environment can have a healthy relationship with nature.

Evergreen (where I work) began as a tree planting organization in a bid to bring nature back into our cities. For over 30 years, we've been inspired by the way trees work together with one another to create a canopy for life to thrive, offering everything from food, shade, rest to even a safe transportation network for non-human living things. That's why we now invest in the power of public spaces. Just like trees, they too are the vital layers that enable city life to flourish.

Note: this was a piece I wrote for our Evergreen Newsletter this month.

A few years back I read a book on the theology of the built environment by T.J. Gorringe. It's worth noting that my interest in urbanism in large part came from my mdiv where I was taught to see theology as a contextual project, not something that just exists outside of time and space. Not only that, but my professor (and the founder of the particular program I took, Donald Goertz, always said that the bible was primarily urban in nature. Anyways, as a part of one of my directed reading courses, I read this particular book and I thought it might be nice to just share a thought from it today that also builds off Mumford's work on the origin of cities.

Gorringe here is riffing off Mumford and considering how cities do or do not participate in the economy of redemption, that is, creating something that lasts for the betterment of the world.

"If Mumford is right, the Hellenistic city effectively built to celebrate its own achievements, as did Imperial Rome. This ought to be a warning to us, for today we wander about in their ruins. For what gave a new lease of life to Rome was Christianity without which, at several points in the past two millennia, it would probably not have survived. Cities necessarily have markets; they are centres of the arts and of innovation. But without a creative spirituality, a sense of transcendent purpose, they die."

I've always kind of liked the idea that cities have a soul, so to speak, and like people, that soul can be nurtured or starved. I think this puts it in an interesting framing, calling it a transcendent purpose. Going back a few days to what I was reflecting on with Mumford in the way that cities began as spaces for ritual and memory, I think it's interesting to consider what gives a city that spark. We sort of intuitively know when we visit a city that has it. It feels alive and exciting. It might also be why suburban sprawl can feel so soulless, they lack a transcendent purpose.

Of course, the trajectory that he has already laid out around the power myth at the core of the development of the city leads to only one answer. But for me this gets at the very myth we need to break as a species. We have continuously chosen conquest to the detriment of our planet. It has brought about ecological ruin and left billions in poverty and exploitation. The power myth of conquest (or competition under capitalism's narrative) has failed us.

What I find interesting is the way he describes the collective ambition of the city as being one of cooperation, people coming together for greater safety and wellbeing. We have just become too dependant on a model that turns to strongmen in order to preserve it. Perhaps the real tension at play is cooperation vs anxiety. Our increased security and comforts feed that anxiety—and so we accept the promises of protection to our own detriment. Maybe the way forward into cooperation requires first dealing with our collective anxieties.

I found it particularly interesting the way he roots the origins of this war in the role of human sacrifice. The leader, who had taken the responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of the community, had to have ways to appease the forces of nature they were at the mercy of. Human sacrifice was one way they would do this.

“Beneath all war’s technical improvements lay an irrational belief, still deeply embedded in the collective consciousness: only by wholesale human sacrifice can the community be saved.” (Mumford, 45)

What may have began as small raids to seek out victims, grew to become sizeable numbers in some areas, perhaps representative of the growing collective anxiety the city produced. Mumford's point was that over time, the power of the king became the point: the power to control, subdue, or destroy. Organized war was their invention, used to eliminate threats to their power—real or imagined.

It is the same way of life that compels art and performance and other forms of meaning-making ritual in our cities today. From the street artist to the ornate sacred space, these things invite us into a communal life that goes beyond meeting our physical needs to touching on something more transcendent.

"Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility." — Jenny Odell

Walking is one of the best ways to build a relationship with where you live; but it requires paying attention. The more you walk through your community with a sense of attentive awareness, the more you begin to notice. This is an important step for feeling a sense of responsibility towards it. By slowing down and noticing, you begin to see your city from a different angle. And this can make you a better neighbour.

Rather than getting caught up in internet debates or social media's shallow form of social justice, attune yourself to what's going on in your own neighbourhood. Who is it designed for? Who is being excluded? Where are resources going and why? Who benefits from the way things are designed, and who is paying the price for it?

Did you know that our brains miss about 50% of what's happening in our peripheral vision when we're moving in a vehicle? Cars are a terrible way to really get a sense of how a community is designed. To truly get to know where you live, you gotta take a walk.

"If you want storehouses, you have them in the stomachs of the poor."

St Basil on saving your money.

On the one hand, my community ranks near the bottom of Ontario cities walkability scores (13/100). On the other, I've always been okay walking further than what most people would consider convenient. I think anything under 3km is a completely reasonable distance to walk to something. That said, I'm relatively healthy and able bodied. I'm not pushing a stroller and my kids are old enough to ride their own bikes. So my version of walkable is certainly not applicable to everyone.

This is where I find something like Jeff Speck's theory of walkability helpful. Rather than focus on distance, he points to four key conditions: a walk should be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting. Importantly, these conditions should be able to be felt by everyone, regardless of age, need, or ability. Imagine if cities began with this sort of mandate for planning. Instead of walking being an afterthought or given the bare minimum of attention, let's make it the starting point for how we think about movement in our cities.

After all, it's not only good for our health and wellbeing, it's also directly related to increased property values and attracting and retaining young families.

"Urban ugliness is often a by-product of municipal structures and utilities that were built with function, not people, in mind."

— Janette Sadik-Khan, Street Fight.

It's wild to me how radicalized I have become around the concept of what a street can be.

For a long time, this was not something I ever thought about. I just assumed the way streets were designed was the only way the could be. I barely questioned it because it served my primary purpose, getting me around efficiently in my car. At some point in my late twenties, something changed. I think I just got tired of driving everywhere. I found being behind the wheel of a car stressful and so I decided to try other ways of getting around. The more I walked and tried out the different transit options, the more attuned I became to how poorly designed it all was for anyone who wasn't in a car.

I believe if you want to understand where you live, you have to walk it. You have to experience what movement through your community is like when you're not in a car. Pay attention to how safe or unsafe you feel in certain areas. How easy is it to get from one place to another?

Something I'm now beginning to pay more attention to is how space is allocated and recognizing that it doesn't have to be this way.

“There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance — poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death — ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.”

Read it a few times.

Arendt describes real, lasting happiness as being rooted in this cyclical aspect of labour; a pattern she refers to as painful exhaustion and then pleasurable regeneration. At first read, I had a hard time with that. How does exhaustion have anything to do with happiness? The pleasurable part of it made sense to me, but not pain. However, the more I (re)read and reflected, I think I started to get it. She’s talking about a fundamental balance in human behaviour. Look at how she describes the things that throw that cycle off: poverty and misery on one side and great riches and effortlessness on the other. Arendt suggests we need the balance of both to feel truly alive.

I had a prof who used to say ‘you can’t understand what it means to feast unless you understand what it means to fast.’

What’s fascinating to me is the relationship between happiness and sustainability. As capitalism has promised us a better life through the endless pursuit of more, our planet has struggled to keep up with our consumption rates. What’s even worse is that current studies suggest that beyond the meeting of essential needs there is no actual correlation between increased income and a country’s wellbeing rising together. The point is, current research is confirming what the wisest amongst us have been saying throughout human history: that the satisfaction of our desires is not the way to lasting happiness.

The world itself is dependant on that same cycle of exhaustion and regeneration. Resources are not infinite and need time to replenish. Capitalism’s insistence that there is always more to be taken has stripped the earth of what it has left to give, breaking the balance of the cycle, and threatening our very survival.

Are we happy yet?

There is a way forward for us. Arendt’s definition of happiness echoes the very patterns needed for a sustainable future. It’s a cycle that invites us to resist the myth of endless growth and embrace the wisdom of limitations and moderation, patterns that are found all over the natural world. It’s a path connected to the core experience of simply being alive on this planet: painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration.

I believe in the possibility of change rippling out as people show others a different way. As I once heard in a podcast, “everything large is made up of small parts.” We can affect the big picture by creating new patterns in the smaller areas within our reach. Maybe by changing the way we think about and pursue happiness in our own lives, our families, our friend groups and neighbours, our workplaces, schools, and communities, we might begin to challenge the hold that capitalism has on our culture.

Note, this is a piece I wrote for an environmental activism newsletter a couple years ago that I thought was a fitting reflection on Earth Day today.

In an essay titled, The Orthodoxy of Radical Involvement, he writes,

"There is no such thing as neutrality about any public issue... Every citizen and every institution is involved in one way or another, either by intention or default. Those who suppose they can withdraw only deceive themselves, because deliberate abstinence or asserted neutrality are themselves forms of involvement in politics."

The Church, as a part of society, has a responsibility to confront the social issues of its day. Attempts to stay out of them are still, as Stringfellow notes, a form of involvement. This why there is no such thing as being apolitical.

In another essay, Poverty, Property, and People, he writes,

“The beginning of conscience, in a Christian sense, is realizing that every action or omission, even those which seem routine and trivial, is consequentially related to the lives of all other human beings on the face of the earth.”

Politics gets at this interconnection of all things and what it means to try and form a shared life together. As an institution, the church is gathering people and forming them with values and purpose that will play a role in forging their relationship to the world around them. These things have political consequences—whether we recognize it or not.

It's been a while since I've attended a church service. Usually this isn't something that I think about but today it weighs a bit more heavily. My reasons for distancing myself from the structural church are complicated. They're also not special. I respect those who stay in it as much as I understand those who leave and I don't think either choice makes someone better or worse. My feelings about it are my own and I also don't claim any sort of finality to them.

What I can say is that my convictions and my faith have tended to lead me on the path of societal progressive change. I try to follow that, wherever it leads—and for the moment that has led me outside the church(†). Christianity has always rung most true for me as a socio-economic and political project working in solidarity with the poor and oppressed. And I guess this is the thing for me. The church is a political structure and it's naive to suggest it isn't. Attempts to try and frame it as a-political or somehow existing outside of that are lazy at best and disingenuous at worst, perpetuating the suffering we should be working against. What I see in the church (at least in much of the current North American expression of it) has been a commitment to a politic I simply do not find resonance with.

So today, as the Church gathers to remember and reflect upon the death of Jesus, I call to mind the writing of Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lanken priest and theologian who struggled deeply with the role of the church in relation to the suffering of people.

"The Eucharist is spiritual food insofar as it leads to greater love, self-unity, and communion among persons and groups. Today this requires love among persons and effective action for justice. The Eucharist must also lead us to a response to the suffering of the masses, often caused by people who take a prominent part in the Eucharist. Unless there is this twofold dimension of personal love and societal action, the Eucharist can be a sacrilege."

(from the Eucharist and Human Liberation)

† I am talking about being outside the structural or institutional church as opposed to the traditions and community.

“In the television age, political judgement is transformed from an intellectual assessment of propositions to an intuitive and emotional response to the totality of an image. In the television age, people do not so much as agree or disagree with politicians as like or dislike them.”

He then makes this suggestion that the democratic system was built around the idea that political judgement was something that was learned over time. This is why voting was restricted to a certain age. Political engagement also existed in the world of print—in newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Then tv came and flattened it and then everyone had access to the same political process and in doing so our judgement of political figures was reduced to image.

It's a bit of a cynical take, and perhaps a bit idealistic in its conception of the past, but I think it fits. I remember talking to a former MPP turned campaign manager on the political process and they more or less confirmed that voting comes down how likeable people feel the candidates are. And with tv, the likeability of politicians became the main point.

Of course, I'm always fascinated to consider how this trajectory has continued into the digital age.

The idea here is that up until this point, there was no government protection on kids. They were left to the responsibility of whatever adult they were in the care of. As capitalism and industrialization emerged, kids being raised in lower classes were basically just cheap labour. However, as the government began to step in, the rights of children began to matter. Postman writes,

"In the 18th C, the idea that the state had the right to act as a protector of children was both novel and radical. Nonetheless, gradually the total authority of parents was humanely modified so that all social classes were forced into partnership with government in taking responsibility for child nurturing."

Here's what I find interesting. Today there is a growing sentiment, particularly among more conservative families, that the government should be hands off when it comes to the raising of kids. And this is why a broader view of history matters. When kids were left to the sole protection of parents and caregivers, they were frequently exploited, abused, and generally seen as property for them to do with as they pleased.

It's just important to remember that the things we often think of as constant, the rights of children for example, are not as immutable as might think.

"More than any other device, the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local… print made a greater impression than actual events… To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy.

I find it interesting how when you compare this with today, obviously the digital world now dominates our focus. The immediate is what is happening online. It's become a new social existence that has pulled people's attention away from both deeper learning through written material and local things. We have become less engaged with what's going on right around us and the needs of our own community.

I assume the overall point of this book is going to be about establishing how the distinction between childhood and adulthood that was created with the advent of the printed word has disappeared as a result of new media (TV in this case). It's worth noting that childhood, in this understanding, would have been hyper-local. Kids were somewhat forced to be in place and interact with what was immediately happening around them. Now, the digital world has coopted that and we are seeing the negative effects playing out all over the world.

"As our understanding of the history of technology increases, it becomes clear that a new device merely opens a door; it does not compel one to enter. The acceptance or rejection of an invention, or the extent to which its implications are realized if it is accepted, depends quite as much upon the condition of a society, and upon the imagination of its leaders, as upon the nature of the technological item itself."

From Lynn White Jr's Medieval Technology and Social Change (1957-64)

To clarify, I have never gotten into the Grateful Dead and this is not a podcast I had ever listened to before. They are a complete blindspot in my musical tastes. I do, however, quite enjoy Klosterman's deep dives into various pop cultural niches. So I was excited to hear where this might go. As it turns out, Klosterman is also not much of a deadhead, something he admits to several times in the episode. He does spend some time making the case for why they are in his top five list of the greatest American bands. Where things do get interesting is when they shift into a conversation about whether you should be able to separate the art from the artist. It was a topic that they were sort of circling around throughout the whole thing, touching on the current way in which an artist's political views seem to matter so much to fans. Klosterman started to make the argument that it should be possible to be apolitical, suggesting that when he began doing music criticism, it was expected that you would be able to weigh the music on its own merit without letting who the artist is as a person influence your opinion.

Okay, I have some thoughts.

Nothing is ever truly neutral. We all act and create from a place that is deeply intertwined with our experiences and who we are as people. This includes our political or ideological beliefs.

Recently, I was reading a 2017 article on Death From Above 1979 that was responding to the (now old) controversy around their bass player, Jesse Keeler's, affiliation with Gavin McInnes, an alt-right figure. Fans (including myself) were frustrated and disappointed to learn about this. However, the author of this particular article notes that none of this should have been shocking and that this sort of men's rights politic has been a part of their brand since the beginning. Fans (especially male ones) had just been unwilling to notice it. But those political views becoming more public shines a backward light onto some of their more 'colourful' lyrical choices that may have just seemed silly at first listen ("where have all the virgins gone?") and even reframes the aggression within the music itself.

I guess my point is that context matters. You can't pretend like it's not there.

And this was always true. Critics have long loved to frame the way artists use their real-world trauma or suffering as a catalyst for their art. Regardless of whether that was the artist's intent. If a musician grew up in poverty or as a refugee or suffered abuse, we have no problem imprinting that onto their music. Maybe Klosterman is saying that pure criticism should avoid that, but I think it's naive to suggest that most criticism ever actually did or imply that this is a new problem as a result of some 21st century obsession with cancel culture or something (my words, not his).

Perhaps what is new is that the free pass that had been extended to primarily male and usually white (though not exclusively) artists has been somewhat revoked. And their art is being reevaluated retroactively in light of their beliefs, their affiliations, their actions, and yes, their politics. I'm not suggesting that we have this all figured out or that every criticism is entirely fair, but I do think it's reasonable to let criticism of the artist influence your criticism of the art.

The question that maybe we're asking here is, is it okay to stop listening to someone because I disagree with their politics or belief system? Or, can I continue to enjoy an artist even if it turns out they're a shitty person?

And I think that the answer to both of these is yes; but the choice is as subjective as the enjoyment of the art itself. While drawing some hard lines may seem more obvious than others, most of this falls into a murky grey area that might vary artist to artist. I can listen to the Smiths, even if it's become a lot harder to enjoy them after learning about Morrissey's anti-immigrant stance. Yet, I haven't picked up my Art Angels record ever since Grimes started dating Elon Musk. I do, however, still enjoy M.I.A., despite her increasingly polarizing opinions. Though admittedly I don't hold her quite as highly as I used to.

Complicated people can make great art. And sometimes the artists we admire turn out to be pretty terrible. Of course these things are going to colour our relationship to their work. I think what matters more than trying to hold to some unbiased judgment is an attempt to be fair. I think it's fair to consider who someone is when trying to interpret what they create. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

This is probably why they say don't meet your heroes.

"Eating beef without care for its effects on the environment in [North America] in 2025 is functionally climate denialism." (source)

I've long been fascinated with the tension that can exist between someone's belief or ideology and their actions. You could call it hypocrisy but I don't think that's exactly right. Hypocrisy is more explicit, saying you believe something that you actually don't. This is more subtle, closer to cognitive dissonance. Perhaps even bordering on ignorance. People can absolutely believe, whole-heartedly, in something and yet act in ways that entirely undermine those beliefs. Most often I think this is because individual actions are not seen as a part of a larger whole. They are framed in a self-contained vacuum and rarely given any deeper consideration.

For example, I could hold a belief that sharing what I have with someone who is in need is the right thing to do. Practically, if I ordered a whole pizza and ate that pizza in front of my kids who have had nothing to eat, that would be a clear contradiction and I think most people would choose to share. However, the systems have been setup so as to cut us off from seeing how our individual patterns of consumption are depriving others of having their fair share. Plus we ourselves are often geographically removed from those who have less than us so it's not as blatant. Add in all our notions of hard work and deservedness and that tension gap just keeps getting wider and more murky.

I guess my point is that there are a lot of different shades in this and each one is a different opportunity for learning and self-reflection. We all contain these tensions within us and the only way forward is to be open to learning more about how our own lives may contain functional denial of some the beliefs we hold and a willingness to change once we know.

If you've never heard it, check out I.GY. It's the kind of song I imagine myself playing as a DJ at some smokey, neon-saturated club.

Oh, I used to DJ. Just weddings and the odd work event, but it was fun nonetheless. I remember one time playing a Donna Summer song while a lone older woman danced unashamedly, arms out, cocktail in one hand. That's the sorta vibe this song gives me.

“Dad, how come you never drive us to school?” / “All our friends get driven.” / “Why do you always make us walk?” / “But it’s a blizzard/pouring rain/tornado/-35° out there!”

My answer is always the same:

“Walking is good for the planet and good for you.”

I know. I’m that parent.

But something interesting happened when my oldest kid started the conversation again last week; my youngest answered for me. She’s been learning about ways to care for the earth in her class and they were taking a tally on how many kids drive, roll, or walk to school. She was able to make a connection between a value we’re trying to live by and what her class was teaching.

She was also super excited to walk home in the pouring rain that week. It’s a small win but I’ll take it.

The whole thing got me thinking about what “sticks” when it comes to parenting and how we talk about things that really matter with our kids. It really is less about those one-off conversations that can feel really big and important; and instead is more about the regular and consistent conversations that add up over time. It’s also what we communicate through our actions and habits. What sticks is the aggregate.

The end of the world is a popular narrative archetype. Many movies, shows, books, and video games have capitalized on this. There’s a particular sub-genre though that seems to have a particular resonance; surviving an apocalyptic wasteland with a child in your care (see, The Last of Us). It’s easy to see why it connects with people; there’s an added layer of tension that comes with bringing a kid into a survival scenario. You care about their safety, but also their future. It’s not enough for them to make it through just one moment of danger, it’s about who they need to become to make it through them all. It’s about them picking up the skills and instincts necessary for them to survive. It’s about what sticks.

Parenting in the apocalypse is a rough gig.

This isn’t a thought piece on climate despair. As Rebecca Solnit says, “the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now.” (Not Too Late) I am not saying that we need to teach our kids how to survive a nightmarish wasteland. Probably I'm not...

The thing about putting a parenting dynamic into the centre of these stories of societal collapse is that even though it increases tension in the present, it also raises the possibility of building a better world in the future. It’s not enough to teach kids how to survive if you can’t also teach them how to love and be loved. As the brilliant novel (and show) Station Eleven put it, “Survival is insufficient.”

Parenting kids in the age of the climate crisis is about holding all these tensions together. We need to help our kids adopt more sustainable ways of living than we likely had growing up. We also need to protect them in the present and make sure that they feel safe. And we need to teach them how to love and be loved, to notice and care for all living things, to see beyond their self-interest and to help us build a better world. I hope it all sticks.

Walking with my kids has become one of the main ways I get to try and build that aggregate. We get 20 min together before and after school to talk about our days, notice things in our neighbourhood that we wouldn’t see if we drove by them, learn how to prepare for the weather, and stop and play at the park on the way home.

Amazingly, at the park they no longer care how extreme the weather is. I sometimes do though… 🥶

† Note, this is a piece I wrote for an environmental activism newsletter a couple years ago.

“Sex is the most common behaviour among humans after birth, breathing, sleeping, and death, and too often we still feel shame or bite our tongues when it comes up [in conversation].” (Brown, Pleasure Activism)

I grew up in a context where sex was primarily talked about in one way: wait until marriage. Outside of that, there was no real engagement with it. My parents certainly didn't know how to have the conversation with me; I often joke about how my first (and only) sex talk with my dad happened after I was married. Within the church, it was framed in this hyper-focused yet taboo way that left everyone thinking about it but with no real honesty. There was abstinence commitments, confession, shame, nervous jokes—and that's about it. It's been wild watching many adults I know (including myself) struggle to understand what a healthy conversation about sex really is in the aftermath of leaving or disentangling their upbringing in some way. Now many of us are parents ourselves and trying to figure out how to course correct but without really having done the work of healing our own shame and trauma around it.

Until we can figure out how to talk about honestly and healthily, it's hard to imagine any real change taking place. I'm grateful for challenging books like this that push me outside of my comfort zone and help me begin to do some self-reflection.

If you haven't read (or heard of) Tana French, she writes murder mysteries set in Ireland. At times they even flirt with horror. The mysteries are compelling, but her character writing is even better. She writes in the first person and is particularly skilled at writing an unreliable narrator. The book I saved for last, the Witch Elm, did this in a way I will be thinking about for a while. It was a takedown of white, male privilege that unfolds in a slow burn throughout the book. It had me questioning my own life at times in some real introspective ways.

The book confronts you with questions of whether or not you can trust your own memory on how certain events played out, especially when it comes to assumptions of how those events may have affected other people. My own adolescence is somewhat wrapped up in a haze of generalizations and a certain degree of distance or detachment. Like the narrator, at times a lot of my memories feel unmemorable. This book challenges the assumption that others, particularly people less inoculated by privilege, experienced things the same way.

"When my body feels good, my life feels good, and I want to keep going, and fight for my right to exist and love and grow and evolve." (Brown, Pleasure Activism)

This is something that I think about a fair bit. As someone who suffers with a degree of chronic pain/discomfort and anxiety, I find it to be a rare time that my body actually feels like it's in a good place. What I have found, however, is how to pursue those few times that it does. Walking, for instance makes me feel good. Being outside in the fresh air, moving at a brisk pace, puts both my body and mind at ease. Pain is reduced, my anxious thoughts are calmed, and life feels good. I'm more energized for relationships or creative things. Conversely, when I go for long periods of time without walking, my body and mood deteriorate. I become irritable and just want to lie down and be left alone. I'm a worse person all around when I'm not walking.

“Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves.

On a broad level, white people, and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough… or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them.” (Pleasure Activism)

Whew.

As someone who has benefitted from the system as it exists, I need to still understand (and disentangle) how my own relationship with pleasure has been broken as a result of this delusion. How have I bought into and perpetuated this system for my continued benefit? And how can I begin to seek a healthier approach to pleasure?

"We learn to love by loving."

A short line from an essay in a book I am revisiting (started a while back and got sidetracked). It's an idea that resonates deeply with me. Many years ago I remember seeing a collection of short films and one of them contained this idea of a man who reinvested his time to care for his dying wife; despite planning on leaving the marriage before finding out she was sick. The film ended with this line, "by choosing to be a man in love, he became a man in love once again."

Now, I don't want to oversimplify this; there are all sorts of considerations when dealing with relationships like this. But the thing I want to come back to is this idea that love is learned through practice. Specifically, I want to highlight the spirit that the author of the above quote is coming from. Love, not just in a romantic sense but as a revolutionary act, is something that needs to be practiced. Self-love, self-less love, self-giving love—these aren't things that you can feel your way into. You can only learn them by doing them.

There's the shelf in my bedroom that holds everything from fantasy series to Russian classics to short story anthologies to folklore. There's the pile on my subwoofer of deep dives into specific albums I like (including one on Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love). There's a bookshelf in my living room with bird and animal studies, oral histories, essay collections, and bordering on what might be considered too many books on mushrooms and foraging. My office (which is only about the size of a large closet) contains all my so-called higher interest books (read: boring), ranging from history, theology, sociology, tech-criticism, economics, urbanism, design, and more. There's even a small collection of various editions/translations of The Hobbit sitting above my record player.

My tastes in books are wide and eccentric, and they have arrived here in all manner of ways. I have haphazardly picked up books from places I have visited and deliberately tracked down certain books because they piqued my interest at a certain time. Friends and family members have gifted me books they thought seemed like something I'd like. Other books hold sentimental value in some way (like a couple I was given from a professor who made an impact on me).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think an algorithm can ever really capture this sort of collecting. While it can distill all of this into suggestions for me to buy something else, it can never replicate the various motivations behind the acquiring of those books. It can't replace human thoughtfulness.

"We need reform that reflects community expectations of privacy, that understands that privacy choices you make are not necessarily the choices about your privacy that are made, that others make them for you. This is a collective responsibility that needs to be regulated at a societal level, not something that we can offload to individuals. Unless we do that, companies and governments will continue to exploit this moment of sophisticated technology..." (Lizzie O'Shea, Founder & Chair of Digital Rights Watch)

It's just so important that we keep in mind that these big tech companies continue to spend significant amounts of money to lobby the government to stay out of their way. We should also maintain a healthy skepticism towards content amplified on their platforms that criticizes the governments that do challenge them. Oversight has been successfully rebranded as 'red tape' by the Libertarians and we need to be asking what we're giving up when we let Big Tech (and Big Business) have unimpeded access to our lives.

This morning I'm reading this article on some of the shifts taking place in social media, particularly the way the bigger, centralized platforms have been splintering into multiple decentralized, politically homogenous platforms. The general framing is that users are increasingly moving to platforms that align with their political beliefs rather than staying in spaces that attempt to adhere to a more neutral set of community standards.

“It was once novel features, like Facebook’s photo tagging or Twitter’s quote tweets, that drew users to social media sites. Now, it’s frequently ideological alignment that seduces users. People are decamping to platforms that they believe match their norms and values — and, in an increasingly polarized America, there is a chasm between the two sides.”

It's all very interesting, but it's also touching on something I've been thinking about a lot over the last few years: the relationship between diversity and working towards a common good. It's also a thought process that is still very unformed in my head. So as always, we'll see where this goes...

One of the markers of the post-modern turn was the deconstruction of a the (Western) idea that a singular experience/truth/viewpoint that was somehow more right or true than others. You might say we are now living in the post-post-modern turn. It's sort of like a tube of toothpaste that has been emptied; there are a lot of people invested in trying to put that toothpaste back, but it's kind of too late. It's all over the counter already.

This all ties back to my question around seeking a common good amidst an increasingly diverse society. The old, dominant narrative took us there via eliminating difference. It's sort of like that melting pot vision of America; one leaves behind where they came from in order to become something new—an American(†). But this is where the toothpaste comes in. That narrative has been cracked wide open and shown to be shallow, reductive, and (frankly) racist. There are lots of reasons to point to in order to understand the extreme polarization of everything right now, but I think this is a part of it. This relationship between diversity and finding a shared life together. It's playing out in more extreme ways online because the internet reduces us to our opinions/ideologies/alignments In a way, these homogenous online communities are a way for us to feel like the toothpaste is still in the tube.

As I said, I'm still working through this question but I think we need to explore other postures for how to form community if we have any hope of finding a way forward. Off the top of my head, I'm advocating for models built around cooperation and hospitality. I'm open to hearing about others though.

† Just want to be clear that this is not an American problem only. The American melting pot analogy is just a very clear picture of the problem.

But most Kindle users now sync their purchases over wifi, so what's the big deal? (you might say)

The issue is that this further muddies the already murky waters of ownership in the digital age. Or perhaps, from another angle, it makes things clearer. The question of do-you-really-own-it when it comes to purchased digital media has already been a tricky one, with the answer mostly being, "Well, not really." When you buy a digital product like a movie or a song or a book, you never really own it. You just own a license to access it. In reality, this is the way it has always been—even with physical media. When you picked up your limited edition HD DVD Director's Cut of Good Burger from the 2 for $22 bin at Blockbuster, you didn't own the rights to the 1997 masterpiece; you simply had a license to access it via that disc whenever you liked. You weren't allowed to make copies of it or host ticketed screenings in your parent's basement. We all understood this. And while some people did make the odd copy for their cousin Steve, the FBI wasn't coming for them because it wasn't a form of piracy on a scale that mattered much. Also, it was nearly impossible to track down. Even when Steve started selling bootleg copies behind his gym.

Digital changed this. It changed the scale and ability to crack down on piracy, it changed how and where we bought and consumed our media, and it changed our relationship to that license of access entirely. That dynamic that we all understood became cracked wide open, and a whole new slippery and strange entity crawled out. We no longer had something physical to take hold of and move around between the method and location of consumption. Again, I want to highlight that even physical media always represented just a form of access, but the form changed so starkly that everything became up for grabs. Out of this, two clear forms of access emerged that I think are worth highlighting: piracy and walled gardens. One used the slipperiness of the digital form to make the free copying and sharing of that access easier than ever before. The other found a way to use that very form to confine people to a closed (and pricey) system in order to continue to access their purchases. Apple was an early pioneer in this with the way they began introducing not just the media but the tools required to play that media on. This went on to include both software and hardware.

Okay, I wasn't really planning on a history lesson, but I can't avoid giving context to frame my thinking here as I reflect on these changes that Amazon has made. Kindle falls squarely into this messy space as one of the first major players in the digital book market. They sold both the e-books and the e-book readers required to consume them. And while there has always been a policy (and protections) to keep those e-books on Kindle, many savvy users have found ways around that, primarily through the ability to download your purchased files to your computer.

Alright, Amazon has a right to prevent people from exploiting their product. Again, what's the big deal? (You still might say)

The big deal, and this applies to all digital media, is the question of the ownership of that license to access. With physical media, it was easy to understand. As long as I have this physical thing—a tape, a VHS, a DVD, a book—I can access and enjoy this media that I have purchased. Even if the method of access breaks or needs to be replaced (think a Samsung DVD player), I can continue to use it on the replacement. On top of that, I am not forced to purchase another Samsung DVD player. If a Sony DVD player happens to be on sale, I can buy that, and my ability to watch my DVD remains unchanged. Digital media is increasingly locking your access into a closed system. You are forced to read that book on Kindle. You will always be forced to read that book on Kindle.

But let's take this to a few other possibilities. Let's say Amazon decides to change the text of a book because they feel that a certain line no longer fits with their values as a company. Or, what if they decide to ban certain books outright? They can just delete those sentences or books right off your Kindle, and there's nothing you can do about it. Or, and this is something I think is a very high possibility, what happens when Amazon decides that recurring and predictable revenue is better for their profits and moves Kindle to a subscription-only model. What is to prevent them from cutting off access to your purchased books and locking them behind a monthly paywall? And if you think they can't do that, you need to be paying more attention to the shift to the subscription model that has been taking place across the digital landscape over the last 5+ years. If you're a new user, that might not seem like such a bad deal. But let's remember that Amazon was a pioneer in e-books, releasing Kindle way back in 2007. If you've been faithfully purchasing books from them since they began, that becomes a much bigger thing.

This is why it's important for us to remember that our consumption habits are nothing more than an opportunity for profit. Corporations keep finding ways to turn those habits against us in order to maximize those profits. Why settle for selling a book to a customer once when you can force them to pay a recurring membership fee to keep reading within your walled garden? Perhaps the most absurd part of this whole thing is that libraries still exist. We already have FREE access to books whenever we want them, and services like Overdrive have made that access possible in a digital way as well.

I've heard it said that no one would be able to sell the idea of a library today, and I think that is true. It's also why they matter so much. Public goods and services are the few remaining strongholds of resistance to capitalism we have left. We need them as much as they need us. We should be supporting them while they're still around.

** Aside: I left Kindle years ago when I realized they were tracking my reading data and using it to make more profit.

"We need to value the consequences of our actions more than the cleverness of our ideas." (Ruined by Design)

While this statement is written for designers, I think this is something that can—and should—be applied more broadly. Our economy runs on ideas. Business ideas that are tidied up just enough to find venture backing, seen to be a path profit for those doing the investing. Advertising ideas crafted to chase awards and notoriety. Marketing ideas that are praised on their ability to stand out amidst a rising tide of excessive content. The better the idea, the faster we move with it. Monteiro's point is a call to slow down and consider the potential consequences of these ideas before we put them into action.

Unfortunately, slow and deliberate thinking is rarely rewarded in our economy.

"Where we put our labour is a choice; a choice that we should be willing and able to make with our eyes wide open, fully aware of its repercussions. Who we work for and how we do that work are the only things that matter right now." (Ruined by Design)

I've often felt that where I worked mattered more to me than things like how much I make or even what it is I am doing. Of course those things are important, but the balance for me has always tilted slightly in favour of wanting to work somewhere that I feel aligned. That's not always an easy thing to find and I'm grateful for the times in my life when I have had it.

At the end of my life, I want my kids to know that I did what I could to not screw the planet up too bad and to make things better for other people. Even if that maybe cost them a few luxuries that their friends had.

In the intro, Monteiro describes the goal of the book as wanting to "help you do the right thing in environments designed to make it easier to do the wrong thing." I think this is a perfect description of the tension of trying to work for a better world under capitalism. It's something that time and time again I have grown frustrated by how much the system, those environments he speaks of, are resistant to change. The question of whether or not capitalism is capable of producing a common good, one I have reflected on previously, seems to keep coming up as a no.

Capitalism relies on the myth that profit and the common good can coexist. It's what has fuelled Silicon Valley's techno-futuristic promises up to this point. Sure, you have to ignore all the missteps along the way. Selling people's data, massive efficiency layoffs, union-busting, those are all necessary evils on the road to a better tomorrow. But the truth is these aren't in the pursuit of good, these are done in the pursuit of profit. As Monteiro puts it,

“When the people at the top tell you they want to change the world, it’s generally because they’ve figured out how to profit even more from those below them.”

"While cognitive offloading can free up cognitive resources, there is concern that it may lead to a reduction in cognitive effort, fostering what some researchers refer to as ‘cognitive laziness’. This condition might diminish the inclination to engage in deep, reflective thinking. The use of AI tools for tasks like memory and decision-making could lead to a decline in individuals’ abilities to perform these tasks independently, potentially reducing cognitive resilience and flexibility over time."

Though I am sure that this is a nuanced topic and a need for some healthy debate around this remains, I am thankful that this is getting attention. Technology, like any tool can be beneficial in the ways it helps us achieve efficiency in tasks we do repeatedly. Yet, there is always a risk that if we become too reliant on that tool we might forget how to do the task without it. Skills can be diminished and lost entirely if not used.

My growing concern with AI has been a fear that it might erode our abilities to learn and think critically about things; and this study certainly lends itself to that theory. Yes, an AI tool might be able to summarize a book, an article, or meeting notes and save me the time of doing it myself; but efficiency should not be our only goal. Being able to critically evaluate something we read or hear and know how to pull out the useful or quality parts is crucial—especially as information online becomes less and less trustworthy.

• Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (Adam Greenfield)

• Faithful Place (Tana French)

• Great Small Towns of Ontario (Richard Peddie)

What I'm Listening To:

• Triple Seven (Wishy)

• Mahashmashana (Father John Misty)

• Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (Shabaka)

What I'm Watching:

• What We Do In The Shadows (TV)

• Red Rooms (movie)

“You skillfully sidestep God’s law in order to hold on to your own tradition… But you say it is all right for people to say to their parents, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. For I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you.’ In this way, you let them disregard their needy parents. And so you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition.” (Mark 7, NLT. Emphasis added)

It strikes me that I never heard this preached in all my time in the church. Instead, we were taught to give to the church before all other needs. I'm not going to flat out suggest that this passage was actively ignored, but it isn't lost on me that for all the sermons on tithing I sat through, this never once came up.

Something I like that Horsley makes explicit right from the outset is that the various texts of scripture are primarily concerned with concrete socio-economic realities. It is our post enlightenment assumptions that have largely stripped our readings of scripture of that important context. Specifically, he notes that the socio-economic realities of the societies from which scripture emerged were divided between a "vast majority of people who lived at subsistence level and a tiny minority of rulers who gained their wealth and power by expropriating a portion of the people's produce." Scripture's economic concern is rooted in that tension between the majority poor and the few wealthy who oppress them.

This is where things get sticky, I think, for many modern readers in our current, Western context. One of the ways that capitalism has tried to ease the conflict and division between the poor and the wealthy is through the concept of a middle class. Capitalism depends on this myth that anyone can move from poor to rich as long as they work hard enough. It keeps people's faith in upholding the economic system even when it's not fully serving them. The middle class falls into this strange not-quite-poor-but-also-not-considered rich grey area, which makes it tricky when reading the critiques of wealth or the solidarity with the poor in scripture.

The middle class (which is shrinking, I know) is, by comparison to the majority poor across the world, very wealthy. That wealth is also, perhaps indirectly, built off the exploitation of others. Yet, in comparison to the super wealthy, the middle class is closer to poverty. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, in a dependency that can feel like being poor. The middle class is trapped just like the poor, but are benefitting off the flow of wealth in a way that makes them beholden to the system that traps them.

So how then does scripture read our context today? Something I am hoping to dig into more as I work through Horsley.

• You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them - Richard A. Horsley

• The Likeness - Tana French

What I'm Listening To:

• The New Sound - Geordie Greep

What' I'm Playing:

• Slay the Spire the Boardgame

What I'm Watching:

• The Penguin

• Bad Sisters S2

• Silo S2

"We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started... And when behaviours become universal, they affect everybody."

I think this is a great point and I was particularly interested in how he took this idea and applied it to the behaviour of people using their phones to record concerts. I'm not sure if you've been to a concert lately, but this trend has become so big that it has become a normalized part of the experience. The author makes the observation that even if you don't want to participate in this shared behaviour, everyone else doing it can ruin the concert experience for you. He even notes that the people most affected are the performers themselves, who now have to perform for an online audience rather than just the people in attendance. It's no longer an option, it's an obligation.

"When one person does something, it’s an option. It’s something that somebody does. When these things become more widespread, they morph from being alternative options to being social norms, conventions from which you have no escape."

This is something I find myself reflecting on often as it relates to the public realm. Public space lives in this strange middle ground of belonging to no one and everyone simultaneously. As such, it is always vulnerable to the shifting norms and expectations of society. A lack of intentional reflection on those behaviours can result in our public spaces being hijacked by them in a way that actively destroys the value that public space should bring.

Perhaps one of the greatest sins of this modern era is the way we have let technology into our lives without intention or consideration of what we are giving up.

My reflection this morning is on a section where Haidt talks about the way our society has increasingly lost any meaningful age milestones for kids as they mature. Where many cultures around the world have historically had rites of passage that would mark a child's transition into adulthood, our modern secularized society has eschewed such practices. He then goes on to say how this has become even more pronounced in the internet age.

"On the internet, everyone is the same age, which is no particular age. This is a major reason why a phone-based adolescence is badly mismatched with the needs of adolescence."

Kids will always try and seek out experiences that are older than they are. Rites of passage and milestones helped keep that in check by providing something to work towards. Online, kids can essentially be any age they choose. They are given access to information and experiences that are beyond their maturity levels. Basic parental controls are not enough to mitigate this problem.

Haidt's suggestion is to reintroduce some form of rites of passage to help kids move at an appropriate pace towards more responsibility, freedom, and maturity. All of this should precede giving them access to online spaces; which he recommends being age 16 (at the earliest).

Other than that, I've been spending a bunch of time with the kids.

Oh, I also wrote this.

She was talking about the social contract in Holland in which people were willing to forego larger personal spaces in exchange for higher quality and more accessible public spaces. People have less need for larger backyards when they have lots of parks and multi-use paths around them. She also contrasted this with the way in which larger private space is seen as a status symbol here in Canada; a larger home is indicative of moving up the social ladder. Yet she recalls family members in Holland living their whole lives in modest row houses, something here we would likely call a starter home.

The key piece here is that achieving this sort of standard of living requires a value or mindset shift from all of us. We need to see a thriving public realm as a worthy trade off; but it also requires investment. It's not enough to just carve off some land and then leave it. Vibrant public spaces need resourcing and creativity in order for them to bring the sort of joy that makes them worth it.

"In Denmark, there’s a belief that there should be a healthy balance between private spending and public good. In other words, an acknowledgment that life is played out in the public spaces of cities as well as in private homes, and the things that give us joy should be in both realms... Without questions, their taxes are high, but the people I spoke to felt they got satisfaction from this form of allocation of their Joy budget. They saw joy as part of their habitat."

This feels like a direct contrast to the values that I see here in my area of Canada. Here, the protection of the private realm is prioritized above all else, even at the cost of the public good. We can see this in the way that public resources are underfunded in favour of private alternatives (healthcare, education, leisure services). It is also revealed in the way our private experiences of shared spaces have become cultural battlegrounds.

Perhaps the major difference is the way in which people in Denmark still see themselves as sharing in the benefits of the public realm. Here in Canada, it increasingly feels like the public-private divide is becoming a class war and those with the means to fund public services are taking their ball and going home, so-to-speak. Advocates for public goods need to make sure that they are drawing their lines of division in ways that include the most amount of people possible.

Cal Newport suggests several practices that can be used to train concentration, including getting our brains comfortable with boredom (time away from devices) and slowly building up increased focus time on a topic (interval training). In The Craftsman, Sennett similarly discusses concentration as physical skill that needs to be honed. Specifically, he talks about how the repetitive nature of skill building becomes more enjoyable as you hone that ability to concentrate on it. This is something I say to my kids all the time, the only way to get good at something is to practice.

But practice feels boring and boredom is a symptom that our present cultural moment has attempted to liberate us from. However, as I reflect on what we have given up in exchange for endless, immediate gratification, I find myself longing for boredom again.

It's hard not to read it with the normalization of AI in the background; which is, admittedly, part of my own interest in reading it at all.

In a chapter on material consciousness, he discusses the tension between natural and artificial materials and the way in which we attach virtue to these concepts. His point was that we endow a certain 'honesty' when natural materials and processes are used to create something. Machines, however, have challenged our ability to know the difference by replicating the look of handmade things. While a creator might know the difference, the average person does not. AI has brought this replication into the realm of language, expression, and thought; mass producing ideas in a way that is getting harder for the average person to discern. This, in turn, puts pressure on all knowledge workers to embrace AI just to keep up.

The question that I am wondering increasingly is what happens when we replace our human ability to think through problems and solutions? Just as we have 'forgotten' the skills and processes of other crafts that embrace the convenience of machines, will our reliance on prompts cause us to lose the capacity to move a thought from inception to conclusion?

"We should not compete against the machine. A machine, like any model, ought to propose rather than command, and humankind should certainly walk away from command to imitate perfection. Against the claim of perfection we can assert our own claim of individuality, which gives distinctive character to the work we do.”

Continuing in my read of The Craftsman (Sennett), I found this to be a really salient point in light of current conversations around machines. Machines set standards of perfection that humans simply cannot compete against; and so we shouldn't. Rather, than perfection we should strive for originality in our craft. Embrace the quirks and flaws that make our work our own.

These are the marks of our humanity imprinted on the objects we make.

It's an interesting thing to consider how the very knowledge of how to do a thing changes over time due to our innovations. Most craft, in generations past, relied on obedient submission to a master's teaching and guidance. You learned through immersive repetition, doing the thing over and over again until you embodied it. This is something Sennett refers to as tacit knowledge. Machines have offered us a shortcut to this process. But I can't help but wonder if it's a good thing. We are replacing the very concept of learning.

Anyways, this past weekend I spent a bunch of time in the garage making some benchhooks and a crochet.

"The calculations draw a false inference about how well the finished object will function. Overdetermined design rules out the crinkled fabric of buildings that allow little startup businesses, and so communities, to grow and vibrate. This texture results from underdetermined structures that permit use to abort, swerve, and evolve."

It's hard not to think about AI while reading this book and there's something in this idea that I am intrigued by. Computer driven responses tend to deal in the complete or finished. We ask a question and we get an answer. Yet Sennett's point here is that the real world is harder to predict. Life happens in the unfinished parts of the structures or rules we design.

I think of it as potential, something perhaps machines are incapable of considering.

"Bedded in too comfortably, people will neglect the higher standard; it is by arousing self-consciousness that the worker is driven to do better."

Continuing in the Craftsman, Sennett is asking what it is that gets people to do good work. He explores several problems in oversimplifying an answer and then draws us to what he calls a "liminal space between problem solving and problem finding." It is here, he seems to say, that self-awareness elevates craft.

Perhaps what makes a craftsman great is thoughtfulness, a cyclical and perhaps even obsessive reflection on what you're making. It sits in you, inhabits you. You consider it, then do, then reflect, and do again.

First, I love this way he talks about Hannah Arendt as a teacher.

"The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher — as Arendt was — unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument."

In a book about craft, I appreciate the nod to what skilled teaching is a capable of. A significant portion of my interest in reading this book in particular is in thinking about craft and skill in the age of AI. I think it is Sennett's separation here between good and great that we risk losing.

"People move through a space and dwell in a place."

In Building & Dwelling, Sennett draws this interesting relationship between spaces and places in terms of the speed at which people travel through them. He makes an interesting note around the way in which we can take in more liminal visual information when we are walking as opposed to being in a vehicle. This speaks to the role of a place in nurturing a desire to slow down and take in all the sights and sounds that it has to offer.

He also noted how the anxiety or frustration around the speed at which we are able to move through a city is a relatively new thing that came as we attempted to "improve" it. Slow movement through cities used to be the norm and this kept people in a far more relaxed state. Now, as sought to make moving through cities at greater speeds a goal, when it slows down it feels as though something with the city is broken.

Mobility then became a core goal or urban planning. And in the process, places to linger were reduced to spaces to get through.

In this book Sennett is exploring the relationship between the built environment of cities (the 'ville', or buildings) and the character of life within them (the 'cite', or dwelling). He begins by posing the question, "should urbanism represent society as it is or seek to change it?"

He points to several hallmarks of modern cities emerged almost accidentally, as urban engineers were often trying to improve the quality of life of people within cities. One example he gives is smooth stone paving for streets was initially thought up in an attempt to make it easier to clean up horse droppings and hopefully by making them easier to clean, people would be less likely to dump their garbage all over them. This had the added effect of making streets cleaner and more useable as a social space.

"Every parent has fear that their teenage kids won't make it home alive. Every parent fears putting their baby into the car seat in the back of the car. Everyone with elderly parents fears finding out that they have been involved in some kind of traumatic crash while behind the wheel...

Everyone wants the street in front of their own home to be safe. Start with that. Here are all the ways your street is designed to kill people. When you show people, they get it—and they get their part in it."

I remember reading a similar idea around activism that suggested drawing your 'line of division' in such a way that gives you the most allies as possible. This is something that progressive causes just do not seem to understand, often pushing for full agreement on an issue before collaboration. We need to draw a larger circle.

This seems especially true when dealing with multisolving opportunities in which we are trying to rally multiple issues around a shared solution. Not everyone is going to be aligned on every aspect of all of those issues, rather we must paint a picture of a better future that the most amount of people can agree with. Embracing a new spirit of collaboration across our differences will be the defining value of the coming decades.

I hope.

"She gardened and made spectacular flower arrangements in every room. She sat on her porch and watched birds at the feeder. She made dozens of handmade quilts. She made travel scrapbooks, wrote a daily journal entry, called her children and grandchildren weekly, mailed birthday cards to everyone, hosted friends for lunch, and volunteered in her community. She had a huge dollhouse (because she never had one as a child) that was meticulously decorated, with tiny electric lights. She only watched TV at night when she grew tired of reading. Her days were spent on tasks that may have appeared work-like, but also seemed to give her satisfaction and pleasure.

It seems that we, collectively, as a society, have forgotten that there is value in active pursuits and that relaxation can be found in doing and creating, not just lying on the couch and passively consuming."

Of course there are other factors to consider in the way lifestyles have drastically shifted between two generations and I want to avoid romanticizing the past too much, but there is certainly a truth to considering what we could gain if we gave up time spent just staring at our phones.

While writing about property ownership, González mentions that a major difference between the Roman legal system and the Jewish one is that under the latter owners of the land were required to offer some of it to the poor. This was called the pe'ah (meaning corner) and included the edges of the field, any fruit that fell to the ground, and anything the harvesters left over after their first pass. There was significant debate over some of the applications of this, but the core of it was that the poor had actual rights to the land that superseded the rights of the owners.

This is a fascinating example to bring into conversations of wealth redistribution and the relationship between private and public; because here we have a public legal framework enforcing the stewardship of private property ownership in a way that upholds a social policy in favour of the poor. It isn't quite common ownership but perhaps more rooted in the idea that we never truly own the land, it is more of a gift that we can share with others.

"The existence of a radical flank... seems to increase support for more moderate factions of a social movement, by making these factions appear less radical."

This is then backed up with studies done on other social movements, including both the women's movement and the civil rights movement in the twentieth century. The general point seems to be that acts of civil disobedience have a long and necessary history in advancing causes that seem more obvious today.

I think the key takeaway here is a reminder that centrism alone cannot make progressive change. It requires the existence of a more extreme version in order to help shake it out of complacency. So while many — in fact the vast majority — will denounce acts of civil disobedience as damaging the cause or targeting the wrong people, the opposite is actually true.

"For decades, society tolerated — even encouraged — public smoking. But then a growing awareness around public health risks associated with secondhand smoke, combined with harsher government regulations, led to a shift in public perception. The same could eventually hold true for driving."

From a 2023 article that provides a bit of a scientific basis for the notion of car-brain, or 'motonormativity' as it is referred to in the study referenced. The core idea here is that people are less tolerant of bad behaviour that doesn't involve a car. The challenge, according to the article, is that we don't currently look at driving through a public health lens. However, this seems to be changing, albeit slowly.

It's something I think about often as I walk my kids past all the idling vehicles in the school kiss-and-ride. The very narrow sidewalk runs parallel with the car entrance with no buffer and a property fence on the other side. So we are forced to breathe in all the exhaust fumes and tire particles. Imagine us being okay with an equivalent line of people smoking cigarettes in front of a school every day. We simply wouldn't. And that's the key point because despite immense lobbying and money, society can and does change.

"Living in walkable neighborhoods, spending less time driving and commuting, and having access to third places like coffee shops and parks are associated with better well-being and social connectedness."

We know that density is necessary to stop sprawl; but if we want people to embrace it, we need to ensure that these benefits come with it. This will likely involve some changes to our zoning and parking requirements. But let's plan for a better future, not continue doing it in a way that perpetuates the problems associated with car dependency.

Also noted is that people are willing to pay more to live in areas like this. I'm not saying that's a good thing, walkability shouldn't be a luxury. But it does show us that people want to live in dense, walkable neighbourhoods.

The thing is, this loss of trust also erodes empathy. Humans are naturally tribal, it's how we've survived. Yet, we've shifted so much of that into online communities with people we don't actually know and do not share geographic proximity with. This leaves us more likely to extend empathy to @username10128 than the family living across the street.

What I want to note here is that as our world continues to move into crisis after crisis we need to reclaim the art of working together for a shared public good. Cooperation might be the most needed skill of the 21st century. And it begins at a neighbourhood level.

As Bill McKiben writes,

"We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for [North] Americans will be hard."

"[North] American parents can become immune to just how rarely their children really play."

Reading a reflection this morning on how rarely parents let their kids just play, uninterrupted by adults and without screens, toys, or really even direction. The idea here is that real play is just pure imagination and environment. It's part of a growing conversation around the need for kids to engage in more 'risky play' time. It also could be seen as a direct reaction to the era of helicopter parenting we have been experiencing over the last decade or so.

One thing I really enjoyed about this particular reflection is the way it connected outdoor play with cultivating a love and concern for the natural world in kids. It notes how modern society tends to throw a book at every problem (something I'm definitely guilty of); but there is no replacement for simply being outside. The author writes, "[if you] want a world very different from the one we currently know? Let kids build the capacity to imagine it."

What I have noticed in my day-to-day travels is that most drivers seem to feel a certain entitlement to the streets, as though it is by default their space and everyone else is an inconvenience to their needs. This mindset is ever expanding to the point where it is barely challenged; and, I assume many drivers would scoff at the idea that streets weren't made solely for their vehicles. But, as I have noted before, this is not the way it always was.

The thing I liked about this is that it's a relatively inexpensive infrastructure change to make. Smaller communities could easily make this change. In fact, with proper enforcement, it could be a bit of a money maker for a while as drivers get accustomed to this change. Of course drivers will bristle at this, but tackling car dependency is a major multisolving opportunity for us.

If we ever want to get serious about our car dependency we need to invest in alternatives in a way that makes them more compelling than driving ourselves. Nothing would boost transit more than sitting in traffic and watching busses move along quickly in their own direct and dedicated, congestion free lanes.

"The deeper issue is that convincing companies to adopt four-day weeks does little to change the balance of power between workers and employers. Left unchanged, the negotiation over how many hours should constitute “full-time” would continue being held in the boardroom, where workers and their interests are largely without representation, and given today’s hampered labor movement, without much influence. That would significantly reduce the scope of our potential leisure time by leaving employers — rather than workers or an empowered labor movement — in virtually sole control of deciding when economic growth translates to more time off."

The main point behind the article is that we have stopped seeing productivity increases translating into more and better leisure time for workers; instead it has mostly just increased profit for employers. It also highlights the role and value of leisure time in our lives, something that the current capitalist system wants us to ignore. Rather than seeing the richness that leisure time can bring, we are increasingly asked to find value, meaning, and relationships in our work. Hustle culture was the previous incarnation of this. Now its the rise of solopreneurs and a sharper focus on company culture. These aren't bad in and of themselves, but they will never replace the meaning that good and frequent leisure time can provide.

We are in a time when people are increasingly cut off from their neighbours and surrounding communities, mental health crises are compounding, smart phones give us the ability to always be 'on,' and civic engagement is decreasing. Just as public space can be a physical solution to many of our problems, leisure time can a metaphysical one.

The major takeaway up front is to be reminded that there is no single, clear trajectory of the Christian tradition; it is something fluid, constantly evolving and recontextualizing for every new time and place. It emerges from lived experience, responses to challenges and controversies, and interactions with other cultural forces. Contextualizing, more than preserving, is the more accurate understanding of the tradition.

What's more, for the first few centuries at least, belonging to the church (in a universal sense) was about relationship rather than adherence to rules or doctrines. Bishops, were meant to be those who could trace their lineage of appointment back to the apostles; sort of like an apprenticeship model that lent credibility to one's leadership. Cyprian's famous quip, "outside the church there is no salvation," is a response to the question of rebaptism by those who were not baptized by bishops who carried the proper lineage credentials.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that we spend a lot of time arguing about what set of beliefs or practices constitute the right version of Christianity but history is rarely that neat and tidy.

A good example of this is the increased use of surveillance tech. As more and more people leverage it to protect their private assets, it has a negative ripple effect of eroding the public trust and hospitality of our neighbourhoods. I was confronted with this the other day as I walked past a house the other day and heard a loud, recorded voice call out, "smile, you are being recorded!" What stands out to me here is that I was on public property, the sidewalk, where I had every right to be. Yet, this individual's need to protect their private interests made that public space less hospitable. The private space spilling into the public and ultimately trying to claim it as its own. Heaven forbid I had decided to stand there for a while; a picture of me might have ended up on facebook labelled as a "suspicious individual."

It's sad to think of sidewalks going the way of streets before them, hijacked by private freedoms and interests to the point of no longer being truly inclusive spaces for everyone. But it is something I am reminded of whenever I see them covered in snow while the streets are cleanly plowed, or cars parked halfway across them to fit more vehicles in a driveway, or whenever I warn my kids to interrupt their play in order to make it their responsibility to pay attention to the massive SUVs and trucks that are backing out of their driveways across the sidewalks.

More on this to come I'm sure.

Yesterday I was walking my kids to the library and I had a thought around collective vs personal responsibility as it relates to safety. As the girls ran up ahead of me I considered how this is what parenting is, watching your kids exhibit freedom and move forward into the world in ways that will always be ahead of and beyond you. We're in the process of trying to decide when to start letting our kids walk to school on their own and a big part of that comes down to trust.

But the thing that struck me was that it's not only about trusting my kids to be safe, it's about trusting the community to keep my kids safe. To make this thought even more brazen, it is your responsibility to keep my kids safe. Just as it is my responsibility to keep other people's kids safe.

This is a mindset that I think we've really abandoned here in our neoliberal 'western' society. Here, one's wellbeing is primarily a personal concern. Watching out for one another, especially strangers, increasingly feels like a quaint, naive thing of the past. At best, we accept that there are certain structures in society (laws, systems, etc) that are designed to organize us in a way that keeps people safe. Yet, even those are often pushed back against in exchange for personal freedom. Our car-centric way of life is perhaps the best example of this. There are so many small steps we could take to make our streets safer, but we often reject these as they might interfere with our freedom of movement. And perhaps no one bears the burden of this more than kids.

But, coming back to this idea that kid's safety should be a collective responsibility. I think this is part of what fuels helicopter parenting. We simply don't trust that society will put our kid's wellbeing before their own freedom. So we adopt that mindset as well and our kids experience the world from the safety of their homes, backyards, and the backseat of cars. Never mind that this is having negative effects down the road.

I believe this is something we should reject and move away from. The old adage, 'it takes a village to raise a child' had it right. Kids should be seen moving around freely in our communities as though they belong there, not as a failure of parenting; because we should look at those kids and think it is my responsibility that they feel safe here.

"For most of urban history, city streets were for everyone. The road was a market, a playground, a park, and yes, it was a thoroughfare, but there were no traffic lights, painted lanes, or zebra crossings. Before 1903 no city had so much as a traffic code. Anyone could use the street, and everyone did."

Today, it seems to have been collectively decided that the streets are, actually, not for everyone. Despite the 'share the road' signs that are common in rural areas, we have largely closed the book on any debate that maybe our streets could become public spaces once again. For most people, it's not really something they think could be any different. Streets are for cars. Period. But even I'm old enough (and I'm not that old) to remember a time when riding my bike as a kid through the streets was perfectly normal behaviour - and much safer. Something I've written about elsewhere. We just seem to have abandoned the idea that it could be any different.

But it wasn't always this way. As cars first entered the scene people rose up en masse against the private interests of drivers. They fought to keep streets public; banning things like curbside parking and keeping speed limits to 16 km per hour. And when a driver killed a pedestrian, they were met by an angry mob.

What's particularly interesting about this shift is the way that auto companies were the ones who drove it (pardon the pun). One of the more significant changes was the way they seemed to move the burden of safety onto the pedestrian, rather than the driver. They did this by intentionally designing and legislating streets to keep pedestrians in their place. Again, this perhaps seems like a very unremarkable thing today; but this is why understanding the history of change can be useful. The author quotes urban historian, Peter Norton on how this change came to be.

"They had to change the idea of what a street is for, and that required a mental revolution, which had to take place before any physical; changes to the street."

There's a lesson here in how we both win and lose the fight for public spaces, as well as an important reminder that things that feel permanent emerged from some place at some time. Sometimes that's enough for starting to imagine that we can do better.

She also references the pandemic as a significant turning point in this new labour movement.

"The experience of the pandemic has made people really rethink how much they’re willing to sacrifice for jobs and their employers. Workers are much less likely to put up with bad working conditions, and there’s a generational component to that as well."

This seems to square with other things I've been reading over the last little while that suggest seem to suggest our relationship to work is changing significantly. I think there are a lot of factors at play here -- remote work, safe working conditions, the looming threat of AI, to name a few -- but it all adds up to the way the promises of capitalism are falling out from under us and people are becoming increasingly disillusioned to it. As the labour movement increasingly pushes its way into the forefront of these issues, it's important we find ways to build bridges with our other social concerns as well.

"The labour movement is leading conversations about what kind of society we want to have in a very public way, not just in negotiating rooms where nobody can see."

Time to rebuild in a way that works for everyone, not just a few.

Ortiz says that so far the kids he has put through this program have resulted in "reduced anxiety in kids and their parents, increased self-esteem and willingness to try difficult things, and more free time for parents."

What interests me most here - apart from being highly relevant as a parent - is the way this intersects with how we plan and build our communities. One of the biggest impacts our car-centric planning has had is on kids. As I've written about elsewhere, I remember moving around quite freely and independently as a 90s child; biking to the library, friend's houses, the bulk candy store, and just exploring the town. My observations have been that this is no longer normal and that many kids primarily experience their communities from the back seat of a car. (Note: I am referring primarily to my experiences in more suburban communities as opposed to denser urban settings.) As kids spend less time moving about on the streets, people become less used to seeing them there and drive less carefully than they should.

I believe that design is always rooted in an ethical choice, communicating something about our values. When we design our communities in this way we are choosing to make them less safe and less inclusive for many people, including kids. It is certainly worth considering that this may be one of the reasons kids are feeling more anxious than ever before - we've taken away their independence.

It's a good example of the way tech is increasingly mediating our interactions with each other in ways that have become so normalized that we're not even noticing it anymore. The pandemic threw many of us into a remote work setting. A side effect of this has been accepting video calls as a part of our lives; and with that has come all sorts of innovations to make our video calls even better.

Yet I can't help but think about what we're losing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for a back to the office pendulum shift. I prefer remote work, it's contributed to a much more fulfilling life rhythm. No, my interest is more around the things that contribute to a meaningful life and the ways tech is slowly eroding that.

One of the books I've been reading lately is all about the way in which our environment can have an impact on our happiness and the author makes some good points around the role that other people play in that. Not just in terms of our close relationships - though those do matter - but on a societal level. By being around other people that we learn to trust, we grow in empathy, and that increases our sense of wellbeing. The author writes,

“Not only does it feel good to experience positive social signs from others — smiles, handshakes, opened doors, bargains kept, and cooperative merging in traffic — but it feels good to reinforce those feelings of trust among both friends and strangers. It works best of all when we do it face-to-face: in the kitchen, over a fence, on the sidewalk, in the agora. Distance and geometry matter.”

This is one of my main concerns with the way tech is creeping into our lives. The digital realm is replacing many of the day-to-day touchpoints we once had with other people. Shopping, interacting with neighbours, learning, even borrowing. And what's important to note is that the tech that now mediates these interactions is made for the primary purpose of extracting profit for someone else. Yes, you can argue that a grocery store is the same; but those micro interactions with real people in the store were not.

This is why truly public spaces will always matter. Parks, libraries, trails, sidewalks/streets, community centres, public schools, etc. These are the places that belong to us all, they don't exist for the sake of profit, and they're where we practice and learn what it is to be human. This is something that online will never be able to replace.

She recalls a story in which she came late to tea and began flipping through the loaf of bread to get to one of the highly coveted square end pieces. Her father stopped her and asked, "do you expect any other human being to eat the food you have rejected as not fit for your consumption?" He then said those five slices of bread that she flicked through would be her dinner and/or breakfast and that no one else would eat that bread but her. In her reflection, he did this not to teach a lesson in obedience but one in having consideration for others.

Her father would also tell the kids stories at bedtime that came out of Ireland's history. Stories of legend and of political struggle. They were told, as she notes, "by an Irishman, with an Irishman's feelings." She remembers one of her first nursery rhymes being a poem about the English flag being found wherever there was 'blood and plunder.'

I often wonder about how much we have given over to technology when it comes to raising our kids. Not just time, but the underlying values of the creators of that tech. What's behind the stories and songs that our kids consume? Anything? Or is it just mindless entertainment? Maybe it's just teaching them to be a good consumers...

There's a value in understanding the history of things, including the people you admire. You can't separate who Devlin became with how she was raised and that's an important reminder for us as parents.

In the forward she acknowledges the protest movement in Northern Ireland of which she is just one small piece. Of her generation of struggle she writes, "we were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it." I love that. It captures both the bigness of the problem as well as the hope needed to keep going in resistance to it. This is the sort of mantra I want for parenting as well; teaching my kids that the world they have inherited is not their mess but it needs to be their fight. And to root themselves in the history of struggle that came before them, people just like Bernadette.

Another thing I wanted to draw attention to is the way she specifically points to her religious upbringing as what helped radicalize her. She writes,

"If it hadn’t been for the fact that I had an essentially Christian background from my mother, poverty would have made me bitter rather than socialist."

There are many, MANY good reasons to turn away from Christianity - both in its present and historical expressions, and I fault no one for doing so - however, there is also a strong legacy of struggle and justice within it. This again speaks to the sort of tradition that I want to raise my kids in. Not the forms of it that are tied to capitalism and colonialism, but to seek truth in the saints who fought for justice on behalf of the most vulnerable and oppressed. This is, in my opinion, the only kind of faith worth having.

I've been reading a book that explores the relationship between happiness and the built environment, basically asking whether or not how we design and build cities can contribute to the happiness of people who live in them. The author suggests that studies have shown that people are able to accurately describe their feelings of happiness; meaning, when someone says they are happy, they usually are.

The reason this matters in the context of the book is that it cuts against some of the market logic that happiness is best determined by analyzing how people spend their money. People will spend their money for many reasons, not all of them because it's what makes them happy. This squares with the theory that increased consumption actually has a point in which it no longer brings real happiness.

It also means that even though people might accurately describe how they're feeling, they may not really understand why. Market logic takes advantage of this by promising a feeling that people only know when they've achieved it. Consumption might bring fleeting pleasure, but it does bring lasting happiness.

Understanding the role that individual, subjective experiences of happiness play is important; but we also need to go further in understanding the various factors that can contribute to a long-lasting experience of happiness across an entire population.

Of course not all of these changes were readily accepted by the public and certain demographics pushed back. But he held to a conviction that we don't have to just give in and do things the way they always have been. Cities can be whatever we want them to be.

“A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can't be both.” -- Peñalosa

It's amazing how easily we acquiesce in our planning to car centric thinking. We look at busy streets, backed up traffic, drivers making unsafe decisions, and think we can solve this by adding more infrastructure for private vehicles. Give them more lanes, make it so they don't have to wait at lights, make parking more available. The results of this are always the same: if you make streets better for cars, more people will drive on them. We need to fight this impulse. Instead of making things easier for drivers, make them harder. De-prioritize the convenience of private vehicles and invest in helping people get around in other ways.

In every way this makes a city better.

In an interview that O'Connor did in 2021, she herself said,

“I don’t define success by how much money you make. I define success, personally, by [asking myself] did I keep the contract I made when I made my holy communion and my confirmation? Which was to stay true to the very Christian beliefs that were drilled into me by the Catholic Church, which were the rejection of the material world in favour of truth. So I was just being me. I was just being a punk.”

As someone who has at times had a similar lack of career self-preservation because of my ideals, I resonated with all of this. I had a mentor who used to say, don't smoke your own supply. That is, don't buy into the hype of what people say about you -- good or bad. This seemed to be what Sinead O'Connor lived by. Do what seems right to you based on the values you try to live by, not aligning yourself to other people's expectations. That's not to say you shouldn't reflect on those values often, but let that be your measure of success; not status or money or whether or not people who don't even know you liked what you did.

Anyways, she was wonderful and I'm really trying to track down a copy of her Sean-Nós Nua album.

A couple of the clear benefits they mention are:

• Significantly less house maintenance;

• Reduced heating costs (due to shared walls);

• Achieve a remarkable amount of density (which leads to better walkability);

• Can do mixed development properly and add small businesses onto the corners;

• Great cross drafts for cooling;

• Easily sectioned into apartments;

• Residents still get an entire home with multiple floors.

I remember when we lived in Stouffville some of my favourite builds were a street over from me. It was a row of town houses with the garages behind them. This allowed for the entire house to be used for living (no wasted space with a garage) and also created a nice framing in of the backyard. It's a style popular in the cities but should maybe make a stronger comeback in suburbia. It's definitely time to let the detached, single family home dream die and townhouses might just be the best way forward.

“Right now it is impossible to take even obvious steps toward climate mitigation (such as scaling down fossil fuel production or other destructive sectors), because people in affected industries would lose access to wages, housing, healthcare, etc. No one should accept such an outcome. With universal services and an emancipatory job guarantee, we can protect against any economic insecurity and guarantee a just transition. There is no necessary contradiction between ecological and social objectives. The two can and must be pursued together."

His ideas are worth engaging with, mainly because we need to take seriously the limits of something like green capitalism as a solution. This is a compelling vision of a society that seeks the welfare of all alongside the welfare of the planet. He ends by suggesting that these demands should be part of a united climate and labour movement.

I agree.

This morning I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive into family-work conflict theory. This is when the energy, time, or behaviourial demands of work comes into conflict with your family (source). It seems that for a long time these were two spheres with not a lot of overlap in terms of academic research; however, as women increased in the workforce, more attention began to be given to this conflict. This is largely due to the way in which women’s roles in these two spheres tended to overlap with simultaneous demands on them from both.

What is most relevant to my research is the way in which work-family conflict relates to an overall sense of wellbeing. Studies show that,

“Workers who are satisfied with and engaged in their jobs, who can manage the daily stresses of work, and who are able to integrate their work with the rest of their life are happier and more productive."(Source)

Stress, on the other hand, is highly tied to work hours and when the demands of the job bleed into other areas of life. When that balance is thrown off, workers report higher stress which can lead to “psychosomatic symptoms, depression and other forms of psychological distress, use of medication, alcohol consumption, substance abuse, clinical mood disorders, clinical anxiety disorders, and emotional exhaustion.”

This is sort of the central point this paper will be exploring, one’s work life is directly related to the wellbeing of your whole life. Thus, advocating for better work for everyone raises the wellbeing of the whole society. As I will be arguing, this is something churches should take seriously in order to better care for people - as both individuals and families.

Cavanough suggests that America as a nation came to view itself as God’s blessing to the world, replacing the priority of the church. In this way, American style freedoms are thrust upon the rest of the world with evangelistic zeal. In a particularly acute moment Cavanough suggests that “[America doesn’t] worship God, we worship the freedom to worship God.” This subtle distinction, I believe, really starts to help diagnose the state of American evangelicalism. It idolizes itself.

In a later essay he outlines the rules that allow this idolatry to perpetuate:

“American civil religion can never acknowledge that is is in fact religion: to do so would be to invite charges of idolatry. Here liturgical gesture is central, because gesture allows the flag to be treated as a sacred object, while language denies that that is the case. Everyone acknowledges verbally that the nation and the flag are not really gods, but the crucial test is what people do with their bodies, both in liturgies and in war.”

There’s a passage in the book of Isaiah that Jesus references. In it, the prophet condemns Jerusalem for coming near to God with their mouths and honouring God with their lips while their hearts were elsewhere. The thing about self-deception is we usually can’t diagnose it ourselves. I also think it’s fitting that that judgement is communal and not individual. Cities, communities, and especially nations often have narratives of self-deception woven in. These are places of belonging and identity making.

Cavanough’s overall brilliance in these couple essays is in highlighting the way the development of the nation-state generally has replaced the role of religion across Europe and North America and specifically how in the case of America, it has blurred the lines between nation and god.

"A concrete form of hope. Impatient endurance entails 'cold' or 'righteous' anger, which points to God's anger for sin and idolatry. Such anger is born out of grief for the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be and hope that things can change."

Of course, the tension is in determining what qualifies as this sort of evil. Certainly different groups will have opposing answers to this. This tension seems to be core to Bretherton's whole argument, we must seek to build a common life across diverse groups with different views on what practices or beliefs are objectionable. This is where he offers hospitality as a way forward.

"Contemporary theology does in fact find itself in direct and fruitful confrontation with Marxism, and to a large extent due to Marxism’s influence that theological thought, searching for its own sources, has begun to reflect on the meaning of the transformation of this world and human action in history. Further, this confrontation helps theology to perceive what its efforts at understanding the faith receive from the historical praxis of humankind in history as well as what its own reflection might mean for the transformation of the world." (emphasis mine)

Part of what I'm trying to explore in this course is the intersection of Marxist thought with theological reflection on the role of the church. This is a really nice framing of the relationship between the two.

What both of these movies have in common is a strange sort of optimism towards humanity as a collective in the face of massive adversity. Roland Emmerich, the director of both films, seems to believe in people ultimately doing the right thing. It's a theme that comes across very heavy handed in 2012; but I think Emmerich is intentionally doing so. There's a whole subplot about John Cusack's character being a writer whose work is criticized for being too optimistic about the way humanity would work together. He's held in deep contrast with Oliver Platt's character, the White House's Chief of Staff who represents self-preservation at all costs. Guess which POV wins in the end?

There is a sort of dissonance watching a movie like that in 2023. Most of our narratives have turned highly cynical - and for good reason. However, I think there's an interesting meta lesson to be learned from 2012 and Emmerich's charitable view of people. It was, in part, Cusack's writing that saved humanity. His work helped inspired Chiwetel Ejiofor's character to plead for the people with the means to save as many as they could. Despite being dismissed as naive, it made a difference in the overall trajectory of how that group of people chose to act as a society. Maybe we need those stories even if they feel out of place or overly simplistic. Maybe we need to choose to let narrative of what humanity can be find a spot in our future.

Better that than letting the other narrative win.

Anyways, I came across this interesting idea while reading this morning; Bretherton makes a distinction between politics and war, suggesting that war and violence signals the end of politics and the start of something else.

"The bullet and the ballot box are mutually exclusive routes to solving shared problems."

He gets there because his view of politics is based in relational power with others rather than power over others. It is an understanding of power that requires a commitment to listening and negotiating rather than coercing and dominating.

It also requires a commitment to non-violence, something that is largely lacking in our society these days.

• Throughout the holidays my sister was diagnosed with colon cancer and then had surgery to have that removed. She's doing well and the surgery went great so we're all thankful.

• As a result of that, my own health anxieties have been elevated and I've had to have a few tests done to ensure I'm clear.

• I'm in the process of putting some of the essays I've written in the past onto this site. It's a bit time consuming as I have to convert them and make a few edits. Yesterday I put one up that I wrote last year that I quite enjoyed.

• I'm doing a reading course right now that should inspire more writing on here so hopefully that kicks this habit back into gear.

I haven't really used this for personal updates like this in the past but I thought maybe I'd jot a few down for context.

“I want to believe so. Since it’s also the reason that stories exist.”

Love that. Humans tell stories to inspire hope. A hope that calls us to be better than we have been because it truly believes that we are capable of change. Stories that call us to work together, to sacrifice, to overcome; even when the evidence isn’t always there. A mentor of mine once told me that it is the job of each generation to dig through the rubbish heaps of history and pull out forgotten or abandoned stories and reclaim them for themselves. It seems that stories that can inspire that sort of hope are what we need most of today.

Where life-style accounts feature memes about maternal exhaustion and infographics detailing various reasons a woman raising a child might crumble under her several thousand daily tasks. (“Hey mama ❤️ I see you out there with the weight of the world on your shoulders,” an average caption might begin, gesturing toward support while suggesting that an impossible individual burden is simply what motherhood means.)”

(Emphasis mine)

There's a lot more to the article, it's worth reading in full.

Non. Stop. Guilt.

To them I say, you should stop.

You should stop because guilt is an unproductive feeling that an already broken system wants you to feel in order to avoid structural repair. As long as you feel guilty, the system never has to change. Its brokenness becomes your burden to carry.

Overworked employees, underfunded healthcare or education settings, unpaid and undervalued childcare, our most vulnerable populations abandoned by the system and the burden of their care falling on already burned out PCWs. These are the people (most often women) the system unloads its burden on.

Unhealthy, abusive systems thrive on guilt.

Guilt is the domain of governments who strip essential services bare in the name of fiscal responsibility. It’s the way of employers who cut costs by rewarding overwork rather than hiring more people to carry the load. It’s the weekly reminder from a church that tells you’re not giving enough, doing enough, or trying enough. It’s plastic straws as opposed to dealing with fossil fuels.

These broken systems want you to feel guilty because it keeps you looking at yourself.

If you’re looking for a more productive feeling, my suggestion is anger. Anger - directed at the broken system, on behalf of those who have been exploited and oppressed by it - is how we change things.

The system, and those who benefit from it, fears your anger because it gets you pointing fingers. And I know that many of us were raised in settings that taught us not to point fingers in blame. But have you ever noticed how often that is used to avoid critique? Also how those same settings had no problem with you blaming yourself?

The system fears your anger because it knows that if enough people get angry at its brokenness or abuses we might actually hold them accountable.

Imagine what we might build in its place.

Thanks for reading to the end.