“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church
Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:34 PM PST
January 14th, 2009
Apocalypse Now small group - Introduction
October 28th, 2008
Sabbath as Interruption
Stan Goff
Much has happened in the last couple of years, including the necessity for me to look for, take, and hold a job… not a position, a job. Even then, when I started searching at 55, after a decade of politics and all the infighting, and all the inflammatory statements, and all the travel, and all the public stuff…even before the great burst of the great bubble, the non-profit world was not looking for a middle-aged man with things like sniper and communist tucked away in his CV. No craft experience, not even a clue about the latest cubicle-work divisions of labor, no accounting experience, no nothing…55 mattered, too, and 57 matters now. Having a couple books on one’s resume then creates the “overqualified” stigma, because people think writers earn good money. So there were three tries before I settled into the job I have now.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by stan as Analysis at 4:12 PM PDT
April 25th, 2008
Politics is Food is Politics
BY D. A. Clarke and Stan Goff
In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the crash of the financial sector create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance.
As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable. This is how one cascade pours into another. The manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify.
Tourism was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping. It turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.
The end of cheap air tourism may seem like a good thing at first glance, from a metropolitan-green point of view. And yet the collapse of tourism, in economies where the culture and scenery have become a last-ditch cash crop, can have effects just as disastrous as the collapse of any other external commodity market in a country that has been sucked into the undertow of global capitalism. The marginal suffer first, most, and longest.
And they starve. How much more devastating is the catastrophic cascade of food price inflation than the collapse of some airlines?
Food riots are also directly related to the plateau of global oil production in the face of relentless expansion of “demand.” They’re intertwined; the downsizing of air tourism reduces money income for populations dependent on the global capitalist economy for staple foods, just at the moment when scarcity, uncertainty, and rampant speculation are causing staple food prices to spike.
It’s not a pretty picture, and the mainstream media are reporting on it with breathless alarm and utterly unjustified surprise; commentators from various perspectives (left, environmental, anti-colonialist, even libertarians) have seen this coming for a while. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by stan as Analysis at 7:15 PM PDT
March 11th, 2008
Bruce F’s rooftop garden
Enjoy this amazing story of food independence and design from the rooftops of Chicago.
Flikr slides and commentary, and they are well worth the time spent to study and admire.
Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:04 AM PDT
February 28th, 2008
Bello on financial-imperial apocalypse
Part One
An apocalyptic mood has seized the highest levels of global capital as the global financial system continues to implode. This implosion is but the latest financial crisis to wrack global capitalism. Financial crises are inevitable since capitalist growth has increasingly been driven by speculative bubbles such as the housing bubble in the United States. The increasingly uncontrolled financial gyrations stem from the increasing divergence between an expansive financial economy and a stagnant real economy. This “disconnect” stems from the persistent stagnationist trends in the real economy owing to overproduction or overcapacity. The search for profitability is capitalism’s driving force, and increasingly, significant…
Part Two
The housing bubble fueled US growth, which was exceptional given the stagnation that has gripped most of the global economy in the last few years. During this period, the global economy has been marked by underinvestment and persistent tendencies toward stagnation in most key economic regions apart from the US, China, India, and a few other places. Weak growth has marked most other regions, notably Japan, which was locked until very recently into a 1.0 percent GDP growth rate, and Europe, which grew annually by 1.45 percent in the last few…
Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:44 PM PST
February 4th, 2008
Holloway on Christianity, feminism, and more…
Most people in our culture appear to have decided that being a Christian means inhabiting a kind of consciousness that is no longer possible for them, so they have abandoned it and rarely ever think about it. They are fortified in their rejection by the Christians they hear most about today, because they agree with their estimation of Christianity, though they draw diametrically opposite conclusions from it. Both groups believe that Christianity is emphatically committed to a specific way or ordering human relationships that was decreed by God and cannot therefore ever be changed.
Is that it, then? Christianity has already been pushed to the edges in our society as an eccentric type of consciousness that is profoundly antipathetic to contemporary values. Are we to witness its slow but inevitable death, apart from a few refugee encampments here and there?
There is another group in the game - though whether it will be sent off the field is still an open question, since it tends to be despised by both the other groups as traitorous.
This group believes that it is possible to be a Christian and post-modern, to be a member of a church and a supporter of feminism and the rights of sexual minorities in spite of Christian tradition.
It is a radical position, which has uncoupled Christianity from absolute claims about the status of the Bible and tradition.
And what broke the chain, as the traditionalists rightly foresaw, was the emancipation of women. Having embraced the ethical imperative of feminism, those of us who are members of this group came to realise that we were now reading the Bible as a human not as a divine creation.
The issue for those of us who find ourselves in this position is whether we can discover new ways of using the Christian tradition that will deepen our humanity, our care for the earth and for one another. That was the agenda I set myself in this series of lectures.
Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:28 PM PST
January 13th, 2008
Hot Links - January 13, 2008
Pentagon stonewalls Senator’s rape inquiries.
Leniency for troops who raped and murdered 14-year-old then killed her family.
Deconstruction (not the pomo kind)
Posted by stan as Analysis at 12:36 PM PST
December 21st, 2007
Toward a Christian Social Ecology - Ched Myers
Sahlins argued that the archaeological and ethnographic evidence turned the traditional portrait on its head: hunter-gatherers were, on the balance, healthier, freer, more egalitarian, less violent, worked less and enjoyed life more than urban cultures, not least our own. Interestingly, over the last three decades of anthropological research Sahlins’ view has generally become accepted by the mainstream of the field, prompting no less a social philosopher than Robert Heilbroner to admit that the new consensus about primal cultures is “as dangerous as it is fascinating, dangerous, that is, to the premises on which rests so much of our economic thought.” Yet the bias is already well-entrenched in our consciousness. “So scandalous,” writes Bob Black, “are the foragers and their small scale, sustainable and bountiful economic practices to modern economists and their addictions to the twin fatalities of infinite wants and finite scarce resources that they call forth paroxysms of pulpit-thumping prejudice.”
FULL ARTICLE BY THEOLOGIAN CHED MYERS
Posted by stan as Analysis at 11:12 AM PST
December 17th, 2007
Hot Links - December 17, 2007
Rev. Edward Pinkey Jailed for Criticizing Judge
Intersubjectivity & the Divine
Turkey fails to heed US press prognostications, bombs Iraqi Kurdistan
Congress prepares to posture on KBR gang rape
Food for thought (and thoughts on food)
Posted by stan as Analysis at 3:18 PM PST
December 10th, 2007