Quote night.

"Wow, you went to Oberlin, and you'd never heard of the UTNE Reader..." - Dad, paraphrased

Better late than never. One of the things that LVC does is give us a free subscription to a social justice-y magazine, and luckily my house picked one that we want to read cover-to-cover. I finished it last night, and wanted to share some of it with you.

"Prisons are madly violent places...that part of the developed world least altered by civilization, by modernity, by the growth of any consciousness of peaceful interaction. In here, the old scourges hold sway in epidemic proportions. Racism, tribalism, all the old "isms" are still vital and dominant, still driving behavior and ruining lives. In a sense, prisons are society's dustbins, the dumps into which are swept...the various felonious ideas no longer acceptable in polite company." 
-Kenneth E. Hartman, reflecting on life in prison - he has a website.



"The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line." - Michael Pollan

"Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it" - Rachel Laudan

"Inequity and politics, not food shortages, were at the root of almost all famines in the 20th century...It can be hard to grasp the degree to which the Western lifestyle is implicated. We don't realize that when we buy imported shrimp or coffee we are often literally taking food from poor people. We don't realize that our economic system is doing harm; in fact, the system conspires to make it nearly impossible to figure out whether what we're doing is destructive or regenerative." - Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton



"Leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that's heading toward the cliff."
"Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is talking to another person you can trust, to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things-to acknowledge things to yourself-that you otherwise can't. Doubts you aren't supposed to have, questions that you aren't supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities."
- William Deresiewicz





"...sometimes the people who are living on the resource are in the best position to figure out how to manage it as a commons...I'm not against government. I'm just against the idea that it's got to be some bureaucracy that figures out everything for people."
"We need to get people away from the notion that you need to have a fancy car and a huge house...Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life in which we help one another in ways that also help the earth."
-Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, interviewed by Fran Korten

"In the truest sense of the word, the commons is a conservative as well as progressive virtue because it aims to conserve and nurture all those things that are necessary for sustaining a healthy society." - Jay Walljasper


Another time I'll put some quotes up from my current "homework assignment" - the book Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other and the Spirit of Transformation by Stephanie Spellers.

Books on my reading list:
Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril - Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson, eds.
Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx - Heidi B. Neumark

Books I have read since August:
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul Alinsky
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott


Music will be a whole other post. Speaking of which, I'm going to Oberlin this weekend for the memorial concert for Professor Wendell Logan on Saturday October 9th. I was nowhere near as close to him as many, many other people, but he was such an inspiration to me, and I miss him.

It is always good to walk into that hug that is Oberlin, though. I imagine it will feel rather different this time, but I'm okay with that. :-)

No blogging for a while because of my upcoming Ohio weekend - but I also wanted to tell you that tomorrow I am leading community night discussion. This month we are focusing on social justice, and tomorrow night I want to lead a discussion on how to practice self-care and the importance of good relationships when working for peace with justice. I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

Enjoy your October!