I think Odyssey fatigue has probably set in by now. Too many opinions colliding at high volume, many of them miles apart.

One usually sober friend of mine posted his view that Christopher Nolan had created “the greatest film I’ve ever seen!”

Meanwhile YouTube is overflowing with outraged denunciations, lots of them carping about casting and about “historical errors”, whatever that means in the case of a movie about mythological monsters and dream landscapes.

I have, as they say, a different take. My Homeric Greek (cough, cough) is rusty but not entirely gone yet—I’ve read quite a bit of the poem in the original. Although I’ve never believed the classical scholars somehow own the poem.

And certainly the Homeric poem’s greatness allows for many interpretations—archetypal, Freudian, Marxist, Neoplatonic, feminist (don’t forget Samuel Butler’s 1897 classic, The Authoress of the Odyssey), and so on.

Among all these interpretations, one of the most powerful and persuasive in my experience is what I am extrapolating to be Hannah Arendt’s reading. (For a deeper dive into Arendt, here’s the first of two episodes on our Lost Prophets podcast.)

Her sense of the poem, I want to argue, would not be so much one of a tale of personal self-discovery but as an education in political (or pre-political) existence.

And surprising as it may sound, we know from her work that in the ancient battle between the poets and the philosphers, Arendt (the famous political theorist) sides with Homer against Plato, the author of the founding document of political science, The Republic.

My own reading of Arendt’s views here are not based on any specific writing of hers—she never wrote anything specifically on the Odyssey—but on scattered comments (including numerous ones on the Iliad) in several of her books.

But now, as in a dream, let’s imagine we can travel to the campus of the University of Chicago where Arendt (somehow, still) has an office and keeps office hours.

A bit nervous, I knock on the door.

Hannah Arendt:

Ja, come in.

Myself:

Hello, Professor Arendt. I hope you got my letter about the movie.

HA (moving papers from a chair):

Just a moment. Please sit down. Do you smoke?

Myself:

No, thank you.

HA (lighting a cigarette):

I did receive your letter and, as you requested, I saw this film, two days ago. I believe my ears have almost stopped ringing from it.

Myself:

Ah yes, sorry. I had the same difficulty. Movies these days seem designed to derange our senses, don’t they?

HA:

This has been tried before. Richard Wagner tried to stage his operas as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a totalizing work of art which drew all forms of art together in an overwhelming experience. Although I must say this film was a far cry from the Ring Cycle.

Myself:

May I ask: did you enjoy the film?

HA:

I should probably say I understand why many other people enjoyed the film. One of the strongest emotions I feel in films of this kind is sadness—at the enormous misdirection of resources and missed opportunities, especially when presented with so monumental a story as Homer’s.

Myself:

What did you think was the major missed opportunity?

HA:

Like many other children, I loved the Odyssey as an adventure story about homecoming. When I was older I realized it concerns much more than that: it is about restoring the world of Ithaka, a place of the household, citizens, public memory and public recognition.

Myself:

You’ve written that action only becomes intelligible once it can be told as a story.

HA:
Ja, and here’s a big example of a missed opportunity: the film entirely omits Odysseus’ visit among the Phaeacians, you know, the court of Alcinous and the young Nausicaa. Four entire books in which the hero becomes a storyteller to his hosts, recounting his encounters with the Cyclopes (more than one), the Sirens, and Circe before descending into the Underworld.

Myself:

And there’s the famous moment when Odysseus, in disguise and moved by hearing the bard Demodocus sing of his deeds at Troy, attempts to hide his tears.

HA:
Exactly so—and when he narrates the episodes of his wanderings, it is that act of remembrance, a most important social force in my work, that makes his deeds intelligible again to the world and to himself. He is regaining his own identity in this process.

Myself:

It seems that at least one historic Greek virtue came through in the film—the practice of xenia or guest/host hospitality.

HA:
A film cannot really convey the depth of this idea. It’s much more than merely being nice to strangers, after all. It was a special kind of social transaction that always involved one’s own community. An act of xenia, you might say, always created a world where newcomers can appear—and possibly even participate in a common world.

Myself:

If, as you suggest, Odysseus’ mission is primarily to restore the world of Ithaka in all its dimensions, than he is more than simply a returning warrior.

HA:

Almost more like a stateman in exile, we might say. The world of Ithaka is so important to him that he declines Calypso’s offer of complete bliss: eternal life, eternal youth, freedom from suffering. Because immortality would cost him the human world.

Odysseus is a mortal being and that implies something about the political possibilities for him: as the restored ruler of Ithaka, he can make binding promises, offer forgiveness, found institutions, and tell stories. In the aftermath of war, these are the things that will give him glory among men. We are looking at the very roots of politics.

Myself:

And what did you make of Penelope’s role in the film?

HA:

We got at least a hint of the way her labor—symbolized by her constant weaving—was a work of conservation. She holds open the possibility of Odysseus’ return by refusing the premature dissolution of their shared household and its community. She represents what I have described as the need for durability in maintaining the world.

Myself:

Did the IMAX technology add anything to the experience for you?

HA:

Ach, I realized that Plato’s cave has come a long way—with the comfortable seats and the enormous “walls” on which to project the narcotizing images. But you don’t need these things.

Perhaps you need instead the “epic theater” created by my friend Berthold Brecht—a living experience among political spectators, not a passive audience. His plays interrupted illusions and exposed social appearances. All this you need now—but I’m not sure how much time you have left.

Myself:

Thanks for this conversation, Professor Arendt.

Disclaimer: This imaginary conversation is not to be confused with the book, On Happiness Revolution: A Spiritual Interview with Hannah Arendt, by Master Ryuho Okawa. This author has published over two hundred “spiritual messages”, purportedly from the spirits of historical men and women and “the guardian spirits of today's living figures”, including former President Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, and the current U.S. president.

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On May 13-15, 2015, the University of Saint Francis and Our Sunday Visitor sponsored the conference ‘Dorothy Day and the Church: Past, Present and Future’ in Fort Wayne.

More than 120 attendees, scholars and workers, gathered together to celebrate both Dorothy’s remarkable life and enduring legacy for the Church. This volume gathers together most of the papers and homilies given at this conference, offering a breadth and depth of material which will benefit both casual and scholarly readers, and both students and practitioners of her experiment in gospel living.

Some topics:

• Spiritual and Liturgical Influences on Dorothy Day

• Dorothy Day and Distributism

• Peter Maurin’s Influence on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker

• An Ecology of Hospitality

• Dorothy Day’s Far-Flung Friendships

• The Personalism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker

Paperback, 436 pp. $20.95

Maybe the best way to explain why I perpetrated this little book is a short self-interview…

What’s this book about?

It’s a collection of my very unauthorized, highly debatable and possibly wrongheaded opinions about one of the largest and oldest voluntary organizations in the world—the Roman Catholic Church.

Or as cradle Catholic James Joyce once referred to it, Here Comes Everybody.

Who’s the book for?

Anyone curious about what it’s like to be “inside” the Church. Turns out it’s actually quite roomy.

But more specifically, I wrote it for the following kinds of people:

• Anyone who suspects that buried somewhere beneath the foundations of this tottering Catholic ecclesial culture are treasures of spirituality and even a kind of indigenous wisdom, however barnacle-encrusted, betrayed or forgotten.

• Anyone who suspects that a good deal of what passes for American Catholic culture today is a lame imitation of evangelical culture--with even worse music and an equally compromised public witness (although the immigration crisis may be changing that, let us hope).

• Anyone who suspects that Catholics in America were once risk-takers in their sense of justice, as demonstrated in their historical solidarity at certain moments with workers, with people of color, and with non-Americans, and that this kind of authentic witness could, just possibly, be recovered amidst our current cascading crises.

• Anyone who hungers to be in solidarity with the poor, with what the Old Testament calls the anawim (Hebrew for the “poor ones” who remain faithful to God even in their distress), especially those in the global South who do not even have the possibility of having possibilities.

• Anyone whose loyalty is first and foremost to the Gospel, not to nationality or local culture or politics or even a denomination.

Who won’t like this book?

It may annoy a certain kind of Catholic zealot due to its lack of concern for making sure everybody is rigorously catechized before we actually (or ever) get around to being faithful witnesses.

On the other hand, committed revolutionaries won’t like my wasting time with talk about devotions, contemplation, that kind of stuff.

Why are the chapters broken up into short sections?

I hope it sounds impressive to say I’m using “a mosaic approach”. Which is how my own conversion happened. First you notice this thing and then you notice that other thing—and eventually a bunch of small pieces have accumulated to show you something much bigger.

You seem to spend a lot of time in the book on Pope Francis and his writings. Are you a papolator?

I used to be. That was back when Pope John Paul II was in office. He could do no wrong. Not only infallible but impeccable.

But I no longer think that way. Pope Francis had his weaknesses—his enemies couldn’t stop calling everything he did “divisive”--but it’s not hard to separate him from his accomplishments.

Well I hope this book at least has an imprimatur!

Consumer alert: this book does not have an imprimatur.

An imprimatur, a Latin phrase meaning “let it be printed”, was an old-fashioned way of signaling the Catholic reader: “No worries, at least one bishop somewhere took a look at this book and couldn’t find anything that would damage your Catholic faith.”

I’ve only known one Catholic bishop personally, a nice enough chap. He was transferred to a distant state several years ago. Neither he nor anyone else in the hierarchy (that lovely term still in use) was consulted here. Just so you know.

I’ll add that I’m not trying to play here the familiar role of the Angry Catholic Dissident working out a personal grievance. Certainly many things about the institutional Church should make anyone angry but I’m not writing a jeremiad—more like a user’s guide in the form of a memoir.

After all, being a Catholic is not like being in the Army: you’re free to get up and walk out any time. (Although your parish will find you and continue sending those packets of weekly donation envelopes, wherever you go.)

So what follows in this book is simply a personal essay, not a work of sociology…

I asked a few people for their opinions of the book—

And finally, a description from the back cover of the print version (coming soon):

Street Catholic is both a personal memoir and an “unauthorized” guidebook that explores the global Catholic Church through the lens of social justice and reform.

Author Elias Crim reflects on a conversion journey that began in Chicago, contrasting “beige” institutional Catholicism with the radical witness of figures like Dorothy Day and the Polish Solidarity movement.

Offering here a critique of bourgeois Christianity, the author argues it must be replaced by ecclesial solidarity and the “preferential option for the poor” championed by Pope Francis and Pope Leo.

From a grounding in Catholic Social Thought, the author advocates for a “street” perspective that moves beyond comfortable pews to engage with marginalized communities and indigenous wisdom.

Ultimately, the book calls for a spiritual metanoia that rejects nationalism and wealth in favor of a humble, non-violent witness to the Gospel.

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Finally available in English: a new translation of Reflections, the little book of insights and practical wisdom of the founder of the largest democratically-run and worker-owned organization in recent history, the Mondragon cooperatives.

Fr. Josemaria Arizmendiarietta (1915-1976) was a Basque priest influenced by the social Catholicism of his time as he…

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Social care—childcare, elder care, disabled care—is a sector undergoing several crises currently in the U.S. What if we looked at the much more successful models of care creation and delivery found in other countries?

Social cooperatives are still little-known in the U.S. but they have an admirable track record of delivering high-quality, worker-owned, c…

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My friend Pete Davis has come up with a festive video podcast. That means it’s a celebration—because, as he says, that’s where everything new and good comes from.

Each episode of Festival is comprised of a Main Stage (where Pete and his guest talk about “schemas that could save the world”!) and a Side Show (a.k.a., the Realm of the Strange).

For the first episode, Pete offers a Main Stage conversation with Deborah Frieze, talking about the Two Loops Model (an amazing but simple mind map she co-developed) and its power to explain how promising emergent systems can replace failing dominant systems. (How soon can we start?)

The sideshow guest is Joshua Lengfelder, co-founder of Randonautica, a weird and wildly popular app that invites you to 1) think of a goal or wish and then 2) visit the app’s pick of a randomized, real-world location…and see what you find. (Turns out people find all sorts of bizarre—and very relevant—things.)

I’ll meet you at the celebration!

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[Part One of this series can be found here; Part Two is here and Part Three here.]

I witnessed the workings of the pride economy—and its slow-motion collapse—when I made a temporary move east across northern Indiana to South Bend in 2020. My motive was to collaborate with a project related to resisting gentrification. The idea was to increase the number of homeowners who could be coached into becoming small developers—incremental development being the term for this approach.

Unfortunately, as I was unpacking in South Bend, Covid-19 also arrived--which hampered the community work I had hoped to do. But I spent two enjoyable years getting to know the city in the afterglow of former Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s ascent to Secretary of Transportation in the new Biden administration.

The pride economy described by Arlie Hochshild was plainly still operative in South Bend in the ever-present ghost of the Studebaker automobile company. This hometown enterprise dominated the civic spirit of South Bend for over a century, employing thousands of workers—over 16,000 at one point in 1956 in a city of only 100,000—with well-paid, unionized jobs.

The date many older citizens remember, however, is December 20, 1963, only a few weeks after the assassination of President John Kennedy. That’s the day the 111-year old South Bend Studebaker plant closed after a decade of gradual decline. Some 7,000 people lost their jobs.

One weekend, I visited the Studebaker National Museum, an marvelous collection of historic vehicles, including several concept cars which gave me twinges of teenage glee.

The museum’s parking lot was taken over that morning by Studebaker owners, several dozen local enthusiasts who parked their mint-condition Avantis, Hawks, and Starliners, in lemon yellow, lime green, or a special pink-white-gray combination and stood around talking about the glory days.

At one point I was invited to an event at the 1884 Studebaker mansion, now a swanky restaurant. And I often took walks past the Studebaker Electric Fountain in Leeper Park. Some millennial friends organized a story-telling event in the former Studebaker factory called “The Studebaker Talks.” Today there’s still the Studebaker School, the Studebaker Golf Course, Studebaker Plaza, and the Studebaker “living tree” sign—more than 8,000 pine trees planted in 1938 to spell out the company name in huge letters visible to an airplane overhead.

In 2012, the year of his first mayoral run, Mayor Pete gave a very good local TED talk invoking the spirit of innovation the world once associated with the city of South Bend. (Equally or more important, I discovered, was South Bend’s hidden resource in its sizable cohort of talented millennials—Pete’s people—who are devoted to their place.)

For every city like South Bend attempting—with some success—to overcome its post-industrial status, the state of Indiana has perhaps a dozen other places which are sliding into the status known as “ghost towns”, a label already applied to some 41 in all by one estimate. Their decline is not entirely from the last half century’s industrial restructuring and offshoring. Some began after the state’s natural gas boom of the 1880s began to play out in the 1910s.

Driving across Indiana north to south on the smaller state roads, you have the same experience today as a driver crossing, say, Texas, Kansas, Louisisana, or Oklahoma. You might call it a “Twilight Zone effect.”

You enter a little town whose skyline includes an historic courthouse with a pleasant-looking park nearby. Then, as you proceed down the town’s main street, you have the grim realization that the storefronts are all empty, with maybe a tattoo parlor and a bar remaining. Almost no one is around.

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My experience with sacrifice zones and places of abandonment is not limited to urban areas. For a few years I was a founding board member of the Northwest Indiana Food Council, a non-profit focused on small farms, healthy food systems, and an annual tour we called the Farm Hop.

The Farm Hop was a daylong bus ride around the Region, with stops to visit a mix of operations, including urban farms in the city of Gary, a peace garden, an aquaponics farm, and a 13-acre specialty farm growing 130 varieties of vegetables, herbs and flowers.

The Hop also offered a visit at a 1,160 acre place operated by one (!) person—a former Wall Street professional with farming roots. Whereas, as he told us, his family’s farm back in Wisconsin required numerous hands working on small tracts of land, he is able to handle his commercial corn and soybean crops with only one occasional hand. That’s partly because, as we witnessed, he owns several enormous pieces of farm equipment, including a huge digitally-outfitted tractor.

One question which our Farm Hop participants might well have asked is: what percentage of the food Hoosiers eat do they actually produce themselves? That number turns out to be less than 10%, in fact.

Years ago, the agricultural economy in Indiana and the U.S. generally was quite different. The USDA records for 1945 shows 176,000 farms operating in Indiana, with an average size of about 100 acres. Today the numbers are roughly 45,000 “family farms”, averaging almost 300 acres.

In 1940, U.S. farms numbered around 6 million, each averaging about 175 acres. Today, the long-term decline continues, with the current number being about 1.8 million farms, averaging 441 acres with the median size at 72 acres.

Those numbers disguise what agrarian philosopher and farmer Wendell Berry has described as another Great Migration—the 25 million rural people who left the farming economy between 1940 and 1967, i.e., in less than half a lifetime, as he notes.

For half a century and more, Berry has been our most perceptive public philosopher on many topics but especially in his lament for the destruction of what was once “an intact, authentic, functioning rural culture.”

To understand better why our rural areas have also become sacrifice zones, Berry suggests “Farmers and the land have been sacrificed to the need for cheap food, just as the miners and the land of Appalachian coalfields have been sacrificed to the need for cheap energy.”

He continues, powerfully: “As a result we live in and from an abandoned, unloved, toxic, eroded and degraded country that most of our people have forgotten or never knew.”

Our emergency, as he explains in his The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, “is that the both the land and the people are unhealthy.” Which also means: they are unhealed.

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In old black and white photos from the 1940s and 1950s, the streetscapes of New York, Chicago, San Francisco inevitably look like noir film sets.

Looking more closely, there’s something else: the modest scale and the gritty, unfinished appearance of these places, a far cry from the glossy “perfume bottle” skylines of today.

As photos from these years also document, cities across the U.S. once contained many “urban villages”, lower-income but vibrant, functioning neighborhoods with the kind of social connectivity whose loss in terms of social cohesion we lament today.

This cultural density is where we got urban flowerings such as the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago’s Bronzeville society, San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood, and the New Orleans-like culture of Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District.

It was segregation which made the ghetto, as social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove pointed out, which in turn made “the archipelago state and its local representative, the neighborhood.” These island-like communities had a shared common life which maintained the practice of older customs, especially the kinds of mutualism and cooperation needed to survive under enforced apartheid.

White citizens did not know much about these enclaves of color but assumed they were slums—meaning, unsafe, unhygienic, and detrimental to nearby real estate values. Some them still had outhouses. And, perhaps worst of all, they were located too near to downtown, thus giving out-of-town visitors a bad impression.

But in the years immediately following the Second World War, the pressure for housing and the hunger for civic “progress”—in the shape of a futuristic glass-and-steel skyline--was growing.

Thus the passing of the 1949 Urban Renewal Act was an effort to clear “slum” housing for private developers in order to extend the central business districts—Manhattan’s Lincoln Center being only one notable example. Similarly, as Fullilove documents, Roanoke built a new post office, civic center and a Ford dealership in the northeast corner of the city on land which had for decades been a strong and close-knit Black community.

Altogether, over the next several decades, some 2,500 urban renewal projects in 993 U.S. cities were undertaken, of which 1,600 were in Black neighborhoods.

The result was the displacement of nearly one million people, 66% of whom were Black, along with the loss of their churches, businesses, and social spaces.

The multiple impacts of this enormous exercise in social engineering may not have been apparent to city officials, planners and developers, almost all of whom were in lockstep agreement about the “costs of progress.” Certainly Native American communities had historic knowledge of mass removals from decades ago.

As we now know, urban renewal had many indirect costs: destruction of local businesses and livelihoods, loss of social organizations, and psychological trauma—what Fullilove called the loss of the “life world.” The title of her 2004 book on this tragic history is Root Shock, a term she coined to describe the traumatic psychological effects experienced by whole neighborhoods of people who are suddenly uprooted.

Fullilove unpacked the term root shock by listing three ways urban renewal policies affected the general wellbeing of displaced community members.

First, root shock generates stress, trauma, and prolonged grief among those who whose social bonds and sense of stability are radically shaken. It destroys the working models of the world that had existed for generations inside people’s heads.

Second, it is an indirect cause of illness caused by sub-standard living conditions often found in the new places (i.e., public housing projects) to which people were relocated. In urbanist Jane Jacobs’ distinction (Fullilove was a student and mentee of Jacobs), one kind of area may operate as a perpetual slum—i.e., people are continually leaving it—while another could be called “unslumming—i.e., people are continually staying.

And third, it was a forced outlay of resources on resettlement instead of maintaining wellbeing in place.

Altogether, the process could be described as having three sets of costs for neighborhood residents: financial, social and political. Not all these impacts were immediately obvious.

For example, local jazz clubs were once a staple of cultural life in numerous U.S. cities. One answer to the perennial question of “what happened to jazz” is simply that its national web of little clubs was almost entirely bulldozed out of existence in the 1950s and 1960s. We could say the same for most of the small restaurants and shops that once gave a place a distinctive character.

The striking nature of Fullilove’s research for our purposes is that it focuses on community grief from dispossession, and a form of spatial injustice we have come to recognize very belatedly.

Fullilove’s teacher and friend, Jane Jacobs, was a deep critic of modern urban development, notably the kind practiced by New York’s Robert Moses in the 1960s. In these matters, Jacobs sometimes invoked the “sparrow principle”, as she called it. Not a sparrow should fall in executing planning schemes—i.e., no one in the neighborhood should be hurt, nothing done at anyone’s expense. No one experiencing a shock down to the roots. We might guess that such an idealistic standard has almost certainly never been applied—anywhere.

While Black communities suffered most from root shock, the phenomenon was never limited to any sincle racial group. To take a famous example, what was the psychic price paid in 1957 by white neighbors of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field when, after 44 years in the same ballpark, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles? Beyond the demolition of the stadium to build apartments, what else changed for Brooklyn in terms of its civic spirit?

If the latter example of an abandoned sports stadium seems merely sentimental, consider the impact in recent decades of the Catholic Church’s closing hundreds of local parish churches, many of them sites of generations of family history—christenings, weddings, funerals—for large numbers of residents in the area.

Even for non-Catholics, it turns out, certain kinds of landmark spaces retain an aura of stability and authenticity which make them beloved essential pieces of the local fabric—like familiar friends. The calculus of progress simply cannot account for these things.

[To be continued.]

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When big financial interests buy up a local software company, its own employees may feel the change but its home community will likely not even notice.

Not so with businesses providing social care—child care, elder care, disabled care. When these small enterprises are bought up—often in multiples—by large holding companies, suddenly employees find themselves tied to an app and new work procedures. The result usually forces them to lower care quality standards which can impact their clients adversely.

Home care is a sector of social care under tremendous pressures—due to a mismatch between exponentially growing demand for services and severe workforce shortages driven by poor job quality, regressive immigration policy and shrinking public investment.

Here’s a whole page of stats that will give you a picture of the situation—which is pretty dire.

Addressing these issues requires innovative solutions that meaningfully transform the work lives of home care workers. The ICA Group, a national non-profit based in Northampton that is a leading expert on worker-ownership, is driving scale of just such a solution.

Their vision is to create (and convert) home care cooperatives—home care companies which are caregiver owned and led—where workers will enjoy improved working conditions through better training, higher wages, and job supports. The result: increased worker satisfaction, decreased turn over, and ultimately higher quality, consistent care for care recipients.

In countries like Italy, Quebec, or South Korea, this incubation process is greatly facilitated by the existence of support networks which are themselves “secondary cooperatives”—i.e., co-ops comprised of co-ops.

This is a critical piece of support infrastructure that has been almost entirely missing in this country. Until now.

After several years in development, the ICA Group recently announced the launch of Elevate Cooperative, a national network and membership organization designed in partnership with caregiver-owned home care agencies and development partners in the field. Elevate aims to strengthen, scale, and unite home care cooperatives to build quality jobs and improve the lives of caregivers.

Elevate already has 14 member organizations employing over 1,500 caregivers in 11 states. Their membership categories include 1) operating home care co-ops; 2) startup home care co-ops; and 3) co-op developers, workers centers and community organizations.

Service for member co-ops include:

• business strategy and growth coaching

• growth capital

• education, training, professional development

• group purchasing (including software systems) and back office optimization

• peer networking and information exchange

• affordable employee benefits (healthcare, etc.)

• policy advocacy and public education

One newly-launched member organization of Elevate is the Colorado Care Cooperative (CCC), a state-wide initiative incubated by the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center.

After years of gathering data and talking to stakeholders, Colorado’s first homecare coop is preparing to launch their community-driven services in the Front Range, Western Slope, and Southern Colorado as they await approval of their Class A Medical Home Care Agency license.

Recently, Debra Brown, the RMEOC’s program director for the CCC, did a presentation about their work which you can view here.

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Dante is never more self-consciously the poet and the artist, conversing and musing with his fellow artists, than in the second major section of his great poem, the Purgatorio. If the Inferno was the favorite of 19th century romantics, the Purgatorio has been claimed by modernists, especially the poets and artists.

It is also the part of the Comedy most concerned with the hope of earthly politics, as Dante encounters striking figures whose stories reveal qualities of both civic virtue and vice. In the Purgatorio, the poem’s scene widens out beyond Florence (the focus of the Inferno) to all of Italy viewed as a landscape of little kingdoms.

And most importantly: of the Comedy’s three dreamworlds, only the Purgatorio unfolds in real time, allowing for hope and change.

We’ll read the Purgatorio together, three cantos per session, on Tuesdays at 2-3:30 PM EST, starting May 5.

To register for the Purgatorio class, please click here.

There is a tuition charge with scholarships available.

Text

For our common reference, I recommend we use the well-received translation by Jean and Robert Hollander. It has extensive notes and includes the Italian text. The translation is both accurate and readable.

If you’d like to explore versions which bring out more of the poetry, you might look those by at W.S. Merwin, D.M. Black or Jason Baxter.

In our class discussions, I will make it a point to always refer to the line numbers of the Italian text so that if you prefer another version over the Hollander, that should work fine.

Schedule

(All 10 sessions will be 90 minutes and will be recorded.)

We’ll meet via Zoom on Tuesday afternoons 2-3:30 PM EST.

May 5

Canto 1: Morning; Venus; the four stars; Cato; the rush and the dew

Canto 2: The ship of souls; the angel pilot; Casella’s song; Cato’s rebuke

Canto 3: Dante’s shadow; the Contumacious; Manfred

May 12

Canto 4: The ascent; the sun’s course; Belacqua; the Lethargic

Canto 5: The Penitents of the last hour; Jacopo del Cassero; Buonconte da Montefeltro; La Pia

Canto 6: The power of intercession; Sordello; the disorders of Italy and Florence

May 19

Canto 7: The greetings of Virgil and Sordello; the Valley of the Princes

Canto 8: The guardian angels; Nino Visconti; the three stars; the serpent; Conrad Malaspina

Canto 9: The dream of the eagle; St. Lucy; the gate of Purgatory

May 26

Canto 10: The First Terrace; the sculptured wall; examples of humility; the purgation of pride

Canto 11: The Lord’s Prayer; Omberto Aldobrandeschi; Oderisi; Provenzan Salvani

Canto 12: The figured pavement; the proud brought low; the angel of humility

June 2

Canto 13: The Second Terrace; examples of kindness; the purgation of envy; Sapia

Canto 14: Guido del Duca; the Arno; the degeneracy of Romagna; examples of envy

Canto 15: The angel of mercy; spiritual partnership; the Third Terrace; visions of gentleness

June 9

Canto 16: The purgation of anger; Marco Lombardo; human degeneracy; the Church’s misguiding of the world

Canto 17: Visions of anger; the angel of peace; disordered love as the principle of sin

Canto 18: The exposition of love; the Fourth Terrace; the purgation of sloth: examples of zeal and sloth

June 16

Canto 19: The dream of the Siren; the angel of zeal; the Fifth Terrace; the purgation of avarice and prodigality; Pope Adrian V

Canto 20: Examples of generosity; Hugh Capet and the Capetian Dynasty; examples of avarice; the earthquake and the Gloria in Excelsis

Canto 21: Statius; the completion of his penance; his greeting of Virgil

June 23

Canto 22: Statius’ indebtedness to Virgil and his conversion; the Sixth Terrace; the purgation of gluttony; examples of temperance

Canto 23: The wasted form of the penitents; Forese Donati; his warning to the women of Florence

Canto 24: Bonagiunta; “the sweet new style”; the second tree; examples of gluttony; the angel of temperance

June 30

Canto 25: The generation of the body and creation of the soul; the Seventh Terrace; the purgation of lust; examples of chastity

Canto 26: Dante’s shadow on the flames; examples of lust; Guinicelli; Arnaut

Canto 27: The angel of chastity; the passage through the fire; the dream of Leah; Virgil’s last speech

July 7

Canto 28: The Earthly Paradise; the fair lady and the stream; the seeds dispersed on the earth

Canto 29: The walk by the river; the pageant of revelation

Canto 30: Beatrice on the chariot; the disappearance of Virgil; Beatrice’s rebuke of Dante

July 14

Canto 31: Dante’s confession; the passage through Lethe; Beatrice unveiled

Canto 32: The wheeling of the pageant; the great tree; disasters to the chariot

Canto 33: Beatrice’s promise of a deliverer; the sanctity of the tree; the passage through Eunoe

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Why are Italian social co-ops famous for delivering community-owned high-quality social care? How could we recreate their model in the U.S.?
Matt Hancock is an expert on employee ownership strategies, speaks Italian, and has engaged with the Italian social co-op over several years.
This conversation will be a chance to "go under the hood" with Matt!

Join us today, Feb. 4, at 1 PM EST.
Get a zoom link here: https://lnkd.in/eVE5thQb

I’ve been reading and occasionally teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy for most of my adult life, starting back in my undergraduate days at UT Austin.

Recently I pitched my friend Samantha Hill on the idea of teaching the Comedy together in one of her wonderful reading groups and she liked the idea.

So we’ll be offering a series of 10 Zoom sessions (Sundays, noon to 1:30 pm EST), starting Sunday, January 18. The course is $333 but we’re offering a “pay what feels right” option so everybody is welcome. You can register for the reading group here.

Sam just posted a notice about the Dante group on her Substack Reflections (recommended!) but I’ll add some thoughts here.

1. Here’s one of the most surprising things about this poem describing a journey to Hell, Purgatory and Heaven—it’s not really about these other worlds. To a surprising degree, it’s about this world, seen from an unearthly perspective.

2. Dante’s Comedy (which is the original name—the adjective “divine” was added many years later) was written over 700 years ago. You would not expect a poem of the Late Middle Ages to offer much in the way of realism in its depictions of human characters. Yet this is exactly the quality Dante brings to his luminous figures like Francesca, Ugolino, Brunetto Latini and others. Their voices break through to us, eager to be heard, before falling silent and then haunting our memories.

3. A poem which is literally about the entire universe naturally invites many different perspectives—theological, historical, sociological, etc. In this reading group, Sam and I will mainly focus on opening up two aspects of the Inferno: 1) the nature of the poetry and 2) the world of the politics (i.e., the socioeconomic background). Just to set expectations!

If you’d like to make a start on the poem, we’ll be using the translation by Robert Pinsky, available here.

And we’ll be sharing a Google folder with recommended readings closer to the Jan. 18 start date.

Happy New Year!

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This is a little unusual for me—a personal pitch letter. So apologies in advance!

But I want to share with you a brilliant crowdfunding project which is hosted on the Small Change platform here. If you care about community wealthbuilding, here she be.

You may recognize two of the key people behind the project: attorney Jenny Kassan and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. (Here they are discussing time banking—part of the Baltimore Community Commons vision.)

I’m hoping you and/or others in your orbit might consider making an investment ($1,000 minimum) in it. I’m already in!

But the window for action will be closing soon–Wednesday, December 31!

The Mulberry is a historic four-story townhouse at 15 W. Mulberry St. in downtown Baltimore’s Cathedral Hill neighborhood.

Jenny and a group of community investors purchased the 6,500 sq ft building and are restoring it as a ground-level community space with five gorgeous one-bedroom apartments on the upper floors for short-term and corporate rentals. (Cash flow!)

So this is not a pitch for donations. We’re talking about a social enterprise-focused real estate project which expects to generate a return-–i.e., double your investment within 7-8 years. (More about that on their crowdfunding page here.)

But there’s more.

On the ground floor will be the Mulberry’s anchor non-profit tenant, the Baltimore Community Commons. It’s a place-based membership organization that promotes community investing, mutual exchange, knowledge sharing, and connection.

Here’s the thing: I think BCC can become a comprehensive model for building locally-grounded community wealth – one that could be replicated in communities throughout the U.S.

BCC will launch with three key initiatives:

● A community-focused business school: A hands-on, alternative business school focused on training and supporting local solidarity-minded entrepreneurs.

● A timebanking program: A network that promotes the interpersonal exchange of skills and services. This ecosystem-building project is a collaboration with former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Steve Dubner (of Freakonomics fame).

● The community investment initiative: A program that helps local residents pool capital to create a fund specifically to invest in local businesses.

Next step: I hope you’ll go to the Mulberry’s crowdfunding page on Small Change, the investment portal where you’ll find more info.

f you would prefer to have a call with me and Jenny first, then just send me a note at elias.crim@solidarityhall.org.

Thanks much,

Elias

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Note: We plan to begin sometime in the week of Nov. 17. The final meeting schedule will be determined after a signup survey–see below. All sessions will be live on Zoom and recorded.

Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political thinker who died a half-century ago, has never been more in the news.

Her work on tyranny–which focused primarily on Nazism and Stalinism–offers powerful insights into our Age of Trumpism. Given her personal history as a refugee from Nazism, she became an expert witness testifying as to how the forces of nihilism quickly rose in service to raw power.

That’s why you’re seeing her quoted everywhere today.

But she was also brilliant at describing a phenomenon much harder for us to grasp: how a people-powered politics can emerge surprisingly in the worst of times. Recovering this understanding is the goal of our project.

The School of Public Life (name borrowed from this book by Fred Dewey) will be a public conversation in a public space we create together. We will use short readings from Arendt’s writings (to be supplied) to prompt us into thinking out loud together.

In the six sessions we’ll seek out the path back to the roots of public freedom and an authentic politics, from the Athenian agora to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring.

And we’ll use the last two sessions to review the legacy of one of the most successful Arendtian “activists”--the late Fred Dewey.

Note: The School of Public Life will not be an academic exercise focused on mastering texts. No background in philosophy or politics is required.

Nor will it be a forum for partisan debates over issues or ideology–there’s no shortage of those.

Instead, we want to clear a space to think, especially about power–our power–to understand where it comes from, how we have been talked out of it, and how we get it back.

In this exercise in proto-politics, we seek to be present to each other, to speak, and to hear each other speak. And to remember our embodiment, despite our virtual setting.

In addition to a Zoom link, participants will receive the readings in PDF form after registration for the school.

The School of Public Life is free, with a suggested donation to Solidarity Hall of $25.

Session 1: What Is Our Condition?

Session 2: What Is Power?

Session 3: What About the People?

Session 4: The Lost Treasure

Session 5: The Portable Polis

Session 6: Working Groups

1. Please use this link to register for the School: https://forms.gle/JFYUzc4Pdk5qcBAr7

2. Our first session will be your choice: either Nov. 18, 19, or 20, at 7 PM EST. Please use this Doodle poll to pick your preferred evening!

[Part One of this series can be found here; Part Two is here.]

I have not read Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 memoir of Vice President J.D. Vance, whose successful escape from Appalachia and his troubled family put him on track to political fame and even the White House. Some reviewers wanted to take the book as an insider’s explanation of Red America, especially the Heartland and its forgotten-man culture of Trumpism.

From the reviews of Vance’s book, it does not sound like an elegy, certainly not a nostalgic reflection on lost folkways like the joys of mountain dulcimer music. It will not put anyone in mind of Wendell Berry’s writing about community and membership in Port Royal Kentucky. The reviewers suggest it reads more like the effort of a rising politico trying to establish his policy chops.

A better title might have been Hillbilly Makes Good, given the air of self-congratulation which seeps through the story of Vance’s ascent to Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley venture capital fund before being discovered by the Man of Destiny.

As a better title—and a better analysis of his own roots—I would have suggested Hillbilly Grief. A culture of unacknowledged grief lies behind the three generations of the Vance family described in the book, born out of living through, like millions of others in post-industrial America, several decades of economic devastation, cultural demonization, opioid overdoses, and deaths of despair.

To bolster my claim as a participant and witness in this history, let me insert here an autobiographical note.

With a population today of 13,000, my hometown of Henderson Texas is only slightly larger than when I grew up there in the 1950s. In some respects, it resembles Vance’s Jackson Kentucky, the place he calls home. (It also resembles the fictional Anarene Texas, site of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 filmThe Last Picture Show.)

Its location in East Texas, with Shreveport only an hour away, means the local culture in my hometown today was always more Southern than Texan. The poverty rate is 13% with an additional 33% of the population classified as ALICE (asset limited, income constrained, employed), which means almost half the town is not making it, economically speaking. That statistic has definitely changed since my childhood and not for the better.

Like Vance, I always knew growing up that I had to leave town. But it was once in better shape before the neoliberal economy of the 1980s began to take a toll on its main street and local families as well. So I’m familiar with Vance’s childhood world and its citizens. Whereas his early world was that of coal country, mine was oil country.

The arrival of the first gusher of the East Texas oil and gas field in 1930—some 140,000 acres across five counties with 30,000 historic and active oil wells—altered the psychology of an entire region. A red-dirt agricultural economy primarily based in cotton suddenly entered boom times and the mass delusion called “get rich quick.” Because that’s what oil could do for you while the going was good.

In my high school days, we played sports against the neighboring town of Kilgore, an epicenter of the oil field. At one time, its small downtown had more than 1,000 active wells, making it the densest oil development in the world.

As we rode the school bus to the Kilgore game, we would pass pumping rigs on what seemed like every other city block. Unless it’s a figment of my imagination, I think there was even one working drilling rig on the Kilgore High School football field. The players had to be careful not to run into the “rocking horse” in the end zone.

My father described the first years of the boom—his high school years in the 1930s—as truly a Wild West. His father was at work one afternoon in a downtown bank building when a gunshot rang out from an upstairs land office where some disgruntled party to an oil agreement decided to settle things on the spot. Because the local jail was relatively small and the number of lawbreakers so numerous, Dad explained, the local sheriff was reduced to tying arrested folk to trees until the police wagon could make the rounds of the county to pick them up.

Whatever reflections the people of East Texas might have had about the coming of oil, there was no thought that fossil fuels might be anything but a divine blessing. Nor was there anyone asking whether this freakish jolt of unearned prosperity and the mania it brought might in fact be a poisoned chalice. Karma waiting underground.

Over recent decades, the gradual depletion of the mammoth oil field—over 5.42 billion barrels have been produced from it—was not accompanied by any meaningful efforts to diversify the regional economy. Which is what allowed almost half the population of my hometown fall into the ALICE category.

While numerous small towns in East Texas have a dilapidated and depopulated look, the region is not the most egregious example of a sacrifice zone, if we extend that term to include the impact of economic devastation as well as that from industrial pollution.

A better candidate, one familiar to me from later personal history, is about an hour south of Chicago—the five counties of northwest Indiana known by locals simply as “the Region,” as bland a geographical nickname as you could find.

                                                              ֍

                                                     Soured dreamlands

The region of Northwest Indiana, as I discovered years ago, has a nickname: locals refer to it simply as “the Region”. No one has come up with anything more descriptive, less banal. If you live in the area, you’re a “region rat.”

The Region is an archipelago of a few middle-class towns not far from the shuttered steel mills, polluted industrial sites, and boarded-up storefronts of neighboring impoverished places like Gary, East Chicago, Hammond, and Michigan City. These are towns whose percentage of the population in poverty (officially defined as $16,000 annual income for a single person, $32,000 for a family of four) is around 30%. (The national rate currently is just over 11%.)

One of the Region’s happier islands is the leafy college town of Valparaiso, where I spent twenty years raising my daughters while trying to learn inhabitation, as the poet and ecologist Gary Snyder calls it. Snyder’s term refers to the process by which you come to deeply understand the place in which you live in all its dimensions—historical, environmental, geographic, and economic.

Around our little town, as I came to realize, lay a vast expanse of the Rustbelt or the “soured American dreamland”, as the urbanist James Howard Kunstler once put it acerbically after visiting the area two decades ago. Here’s a sample of his impressions:

“The storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the numberless small shops and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of highways…Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaining denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel…Yet people were coming and going in their cars from the welfare ruins of East Chicago to the even more spectacular tatters of Gary, where the old front porches are disappearing into prairie grass and the 20th century retreats into the mists of mythology.”

My first impressions of the sacrifice zone known as Gary were drive-by glimpses from the interstate which passed just above the weedy backyards and along the empty-looking city center—a small Detroit, I kept thinking.

In 1993 it held the title of “’murder capital of the U.S.”, with an annual rate of 91 murders per 100,000. (The data for 2024 indicate the rate is down to about 70 murders per 100,000.)

Looking down from I-90, I felt the typical white person’s nervous shiver at the thought of the car breaking down somewhere along this stretch of road.

But in the early 2000s, I became involved in some community work in Gary, requiring me to attend meetings in City Hall. Turning off the expressway into the city steets of the downtown area—during the middle of the day, I should add—I had no particular sense of danger. Instead, what struck me was the terrible emptiness of the place.

In 1960, at the town’s heyday as a world center of steel production, the population was around 178,000 people. A litte more than forty years later, the city had only 80,000 residents left. Not even the city’s proximity to the southern beaches of Lake Michigan nor its status as the birthplace and childhood home of Michael Jackson have helped forestall the decline.

Sacrifice zones, with their associated disinvestment and unemployment, are known to bring in their wake deaths of despair, a term referring to lower life expectancy among middle-aged men due to a triple phenomenon of opoid addiction, suicide and alcohol abuse. Originally associated more with white Americans, these deaths have been increasing in Black and Native American populations since 2015, finally surpassing rates for white Americans in 2022.

A 2016 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study compared the life expectancies of the poorest men in two cities: New York City and Gary Indiana. They found the lifespans of the Gary residents was five years less than that of the New York City group, suggesting that income disparities do not tell the whole story: geographical disparities are real and have a measurable impact. Your ZIP code definitely affects your fate.

These kinds of deaths went mostly unnoticed and unremarked until the 2020 publication of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

A few years before the book appeared, it was an incident in our town involving a family member further that awakened me to my own community’s condition.

                                                               ֍

                                       Collapse of the pride economy

About midnight one evening in 2017, I got a call from a police officer of our town. He informed me that our middle daughter, aged 18, and a girlfriend of hers had been picked up for possession of marijuana (still illegal in Indiana today!) and underage drinking. They were being held in the county jail until the parents could come by and pay a fine before taking them home.

I drove down, paid a few hundred dollars through the convenient bail kiosk, and then sat waiting in the lobby until my sheepish daughter appeared an hour or so later. It was all a bit comic, although I was worried about this misstep showing up in her college application efforts. In the weeks following, I located a local attorney who specialized in expunging this kind of court record who, in exchange for that service, expunged a few hundred more dollars from my bank account.

Somehow this small event gave me a window into my own community and its unseen life of despair.

The week following my daughter’s arrest, I was browsing through email and glanced at the local newspaper’s weekly newsletter. Among its regular sections was a photo gallery of people recently booked into the county jail, all of them wearing an orange jump suit. Staring back among the faces was one of my slightly dazed looking daughter.

After the shock of seeing her in this setting, I felt compelled to look closely at the faces of the other jail residents—fellow citizens of my town—as well as noting what they had done to get there.

It was a mix of ethnicities and ages, with about as many women as men. A young white guy with wild hair, smiling broadly. Next to him, an older Hispanic woman with a look of intense shame. His crime was creating a public nuisance (urination), hers was forging checks. I reviewed galleries from earlier weeks, just to get a further sense for these faces and their offenses. Rarely had anyone in this little Indiana town committed a serious crime. Quite a few were cases of DUI, along with several opioid dealers and domestic battery perpetrators. Almost none looked like “criminal types”: they looked like people struggling, in pain.

I imagined them staring back at me to say: See how I’m forced to live, the things I do out of fear or desperation. I can’t get a decent job, I don’t know anyone who is willing to help me get my life back on track. One false step and here I am, my pain on display in the gallery.

These are citizens of a state which at one time could be purplish: it once produced Evan Bayh, Birch Bayh, Richard Lugar, and Vance Hartke, to say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. It is now reliably red, voting for Donald Trump three elections in a row.

It is also one of the places where the effects of globalization landed in the form of offshoring, automation, and union decline. The losses inflicted on families—including their shame and loss of pride--over decades have been documented in numerous places, perhaps most notably by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) and Stolen Pride (2024), both based on extensive conversations with Red State citizens (in Louisiana and Kentucky), revealed the workings of an unseen “pride economy” alongside the material one, an amalgam of anger and mourning.

Well before the collapse of the pride economy—mostly felt by the white working class—there was another planned disaster: the urban renewal policies in the 1960s in communities of color.

Their legacy is called “root shock”, the ripping out of generations of community connection.

We’ll take up that story next time.

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Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty.

–Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

In what feels like a long time ago--mid-April 2020--there reigned ever so briefly a Great Silence in the world. Do you remember?

As the Covid pandemic was beginning to pour across the planet like an invisible tidal wave, a quiet suddenly fell over everything. For a few days and weeks, the whole unstoppable whirring machine of modern civilization shuddered to a halt.

In a state of incredulity, I wrote the following as part of a Substack post:

The unimaginable has occurred. Not only in the form of a deadly virus sweeping the planet. But also as a Great Silence that has, for a time at least, settled over the cities.

For anyone who has learned to hear ‘the cry of the earth,’ as ecological theologian Leonardo Boff calls it, the coronavirus tragedy arrives perversely with a gift: a glimpse of another way of life on earth, a kind of dream interval. We are all, for this moment, Thoreau self-isolating in his cabin, sharing the dream, with time for reflection.

It is not only that smog has lifted over Los Angeles, Tokyo, and everywhere else or that power usage is markedly down. In the Punjab region of India, one can see the mountain range of the Himalayas again in the distance. In our city parks, people are noticing the sound of birdcalls once again. Seismologists are noticing a significant drop in detectable noise in the earth’s crust, for both surface traffic and ocean traffic.

The story of dolphins appearing in the newly blue-green canals of Venice is apparently an urban myth but, as the Italians say, Se non é vero, é ben trovato (roughly, “If it’s not true, it sounds like it should be.”)

While humans are in a great pause, nature is taking a breath. Amidst great human suffering, with no discernible end in sight, we find ourselves not merely in isolation but altogether in something like an enforced silent retreat.

How can we interpret this unfathomable irruption of the natural into the busy human machine-world, I wondered aloud. And I offered two ways of understanding this moment.

One approach — especially for those who imagine themselves as practical-minded — was to take this interval as a glimpse of Eden, an image of a lost world in which somehow we are miraculously, momentarily dwelling. We know our joy will not last.

The other approach — especially for the despairing greens among us — was to understand that moment as a glimpse of Utopia, even if the political atmosphere in recent years has damaged our ability to imagine new worlds.

Undeniably, I argued, this crisis is also a dire warning about our lack of preparation and foresight in so many things. We are already hearing the cries urging us to go back to the Old Normal, the one that led up to these multiple catastrophes in the first place.

I concluded, “Our ability to withstand these powerful ideological forces may depend on the strength we’ve drawn during this moment of nature’s ‘reset.’ Let’s use this time of silence well.”

In justification of this advice, I might have added, had I known enough at the time: “After all, great grief is about to come over our country and beyond.”

                                                              ֎

Covid time

Only a few weeks later, well before we’d had much time to reflect together on the great pause, the murder of George Floyd set off almost a year of what became the largest collective protest in U.S. history, with nearly 8,000 separate demonstrations, in addition to many others outside the country. It elevated a painfully needed national conversation about racial justice and likely influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

By the end of 2020, while we were still in the pre-vaccine period, over 350,000 Americans died of Covid-19. Even with the new vaccine which, as many don’t remember, was designed in two days and distributed in two months, another 450,000 died in 2021, as we approached our total mortality count of 1.5 million, with many others disabled from the virus.

It seems more than strange that such shattering recent events are misremembered, which has meant they are still hotly disputed. Might many more have died—perhaps another 2-3 million? Do the notable missteps by various authorities invalidate everything positive in the record of this immense national tragedy? Was our response a triumph or an indictment?

We entered the crisis with an initial show of national unity and cooperation—that was the first phase. It was the Trump administration, improbably enough, which undertook an 18-month expansion of social welfare benefits in order to address the crisis before allowing them to expire.

The second phase of the pandemic has been called one of solipsism, when we retreated into our private worlds as though other people were simply no longer there or suddenly posed a threat to us in some way. For a time, we recognized our interdependence but soon grew angry and frustrated about it. Why can’t someone just fix this?, we demanded to know. Someone, somewhere must be to blame for this enormous disruption to all our lives.

The rise of conspiracy thinking and the loss of calm rationality are symptoms of our condition. Thus the Covid-19 outbreak was taken to be an undeclared state of emergency, beginning on March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic.

In the shift from a sense of shared vulnerability to the release of culture war venting, we almost didn’t notice one other unsettling fact: the pandemic had no formal end, no victory celebration.

Moreover, at those moments when the Black Lives Matters movement exercised the political practice of mourning (“say their names!”), their rituals touched something deep for a nation enduring (and profoundly resenting) a mass death event in which family funerals were mostly disallowed.

                                                              ֎

Lonely deaths

Although the pandemic has subsided, have we all come blinking out of our caves of self-isolation into the sunlight of community? It seems not.

In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory report which described a new national malady--a condition of loneliness, debilitating on a par with tobacco, and affecting fully half the U.S. population. As a response to this loss of social connection, he urged us to recover the health benefits of being better connected to each other.

Social connection turns out to be a social determinant of health, as Johann Hari and others have also pointed out. Recent research on this topic claims to show that joining a club actually improves your longevity while being a loner certainly shortens it. (For an entertaining introduction to the topic of social capital, the Netflix documentary Join or Die—“a film about why you should join a club and why the fate of America depends on it”--is recommended.)

The Surgeon General’s loneliness report had an urgent tone but failed, perhaps unsurprisingly, to offer any recommendations toward genuine system change. The report mostly confined its recommendations to rearranging public spaces, reforming digital environments and expanding the public conversation on social connection.

This state of disconnection is not a new topic in American life, of course. The conditions of loneliness, isolation and solitude have been the sources of reflection by numerous thinkers, perhaps most notably Hannah Arendt.

Loneliness, she argued, was the defining condition of totalitarianism and the common ground of all terror. It is the inability to act altogether, a state of uprootedness when we suddenly find we have no place in the world, nothing to give the world. She linked it to a phenomenon described in her book The Human Condition, namely, our loss of a shared reality—a common sense of things--that allows us to know where we end and the world begins.

By contrast, isolation is the inability to act with others, which is the source of our political power. It renders people impotent. It may be the beginning of terror, Arendt argues, and is always its result.

Finally, solitude is a condition we often seek out for its gifts of calm reflection and tranquility.

I want to suggest that the ailment the Surgeon General was hoping to diagnose has one other dimension, a more desperate one. Instead of loneliness, he should have called our condition mutual abandonment—in multiple ways.

                                                                ֎

The way we die is a mirror of the way we live

The word abandonment puts me in mind of the global phenomenon described in the Japanese term kodokushi, meaning “lonely deaths” or “dying alone.”

In 2017, the New York Times ran an article called “A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death”, a portrait of Mrs. Cheiko Ito, a 91 year-old widow living alone outside of Tokyo as a resident in one of 171 nearly identical white buildings. These elderly tenants spend their remaining months and years cocooned inside their small apartments, often without families or visitors, unknown to the outside world until they expire.

These apartment complexes, some dating back to the beginning of the economic boom of the 1960s, were built originally for the families of Japan’s rising class of “salarymen” and their nuclear families, in a societal shift away from traditional extended family structures. As Japan has emerged in recent decades as the world’s most rapidly aging society, the country has been struggling phenomena like the depopulation of many small towns, now inhabited by a handful of elderly.

Similarly, certain high-rise neighborhoods have become places in which, according to the Times article, some 4,000 kodokushi-type deaths occur per week, a few of which inevitably go unnoticed for some period of time. The lonely circumstances of one elderly woman led her to make an annual gift of pears to a neighbor across the courtyard in exchange for simply observing whether or not the woman opened her blinds every morning. She told her neighbor that if the blinds did not open, someone should check on whether she might have died the previous night.

Mrs. Ito had lived in the same apartment for sixty years, commenting “I’ve been lonely for 25 years.”

In the same complex, one of Mrs. Ito’s neighbors, a 69 year-old man, came to a grisly end when he was discovered lying dead on his kitchen floor after three years and in an advanced state of decomposition. His rent and utilities went on being deducted from his bank account until finally it ran dry, finally alerting the building management of a problem.

As the chairman of the local housing complex remarked sadly to the Times reporter, “The way we die is a mirror of the way we live.”

Such cases of lonely deaths also occur in cities like New York and many others, of course. In Tokyo, the Times reported, a new industry sprang up specializing in cleaning homes where such human remains are found. (See photo above.)

Part of the power of the Times article—which received almost 400 reader comments, almost entirely full of praise—was its depiction of the way its main subject, Mrs. Ito, lived surrounded by ghosts of both the living and the dead. Her many scrapbooks and family photo albums now seemed to serve, as the reporter noted, as proof of a life lived, despite its obscurity from the world.

Mrs. Ito exemplified the Buddhist belief that spirits of the dead remain part of the lives of the living. Preparing herself for the inevitable, she had even given away the family tablets—the miniature headstones precious to Japanese families—from their Buddhist altar.

In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, did we practice a kind of enforced kodokushi? “We allowed thousands of people to die alone,” the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis noted. “We buried people by Zoom.”

                                                            ֎

Ivan Illich and the art of suffering

One of the figures who can help us understand this moment is the radical social theorist Ivan Illich. Becoming famous in the early 1970s as one of the first people talking about the harms of global development, Illich could also be called the father of the modern commons movement, as well as a major force in the deschooling/unschooling movement.

Another notable focus of his critique of modernity’s institutions was the healthcare establishment which he famously attacked in his Medical Nemesis (1974) for its commodifying and over-medicalizing of our human existence amidst the rise of biomedicine. The book is about professional power as well as the way the medical establishment exercises political power—in the name of care and with a carte blanche that usually only the military can claim. (In a war, no one counts the costs, almost no one dissents.)

Illich argued that institutions finally reach a watershed or tipping point after which they do more harm than good—as when medicine itself finally becomes iatrogenic (i.e, it makes us ill).

While generally favorable to large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal, etc., Illich thought we were headed into iatrogenesis in terms of 1) the clinical impact (high rates of preventable errors), 2) the social impact (the art of medicine gives way to the science of medicine), and 3) the cultural impact (the traditional willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality until finally dying one’s own death).

If Illich’s claims sound overstated, think of our extraordinary dependence today upon hospitals and our equally extraordinary lack of confidence in our individual ability to care for each other.

Today any sense of an art of suffering, as Illich called it, is overshadowed by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved—which does not end suffering but renders it meaningless, an anomaly or a technical misfunction.

Death is no longer an intimate, personal act but instead a a meaningless defeat, a mere cessation of treatment.

Illich’s radicalism, here as in so many places, comes from his orthodoxy—i.e., his upholding of the traditional Christian view that suffering and death are inherent in the human condition. They are realities which can be mitigated but should never be lost. We cannot become gods who attempt to take charge of our own destiny.

Over the last century, having lost the art of suffering, we find biomedicine is creating new forms of suffering. Properly understood, then, the art of suffering is a way of taking things—whether as suffering or as enjoyment—through a respect for the givenness of existence.

“The teachings of the major religions reinforce resignation to misfortune and offer a rationale, a style, and a community setting in which suffering can become a dignified performance,” Illich writes. It is the crowding-out of such an understanding of suffering that most clearly outraged him.

David Cayley, Illich’s friend and surely his dream biographer, has written about Illich’s startling proposition that the most dangerous idol the church has faced in its history—one now worshipped also by secular society—is Life itself, i.e., bare human existence. It might be argued that in our therapeutic frenzy we have also made an idol of the closely related concept of Health, redefined into a pursuit out of all reason.

Illich’s student and friend, community activist John McKnight, took up this theme when he wrote about “the arrival of the bereavement counselor,” the professional with whom so many of us have become familiar in this time of almost routine school shootings. We have it on the best advice that, left alone, we are no longer capable of managing public expressions of mourning without calling in strangers to our lives.

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Along with the abandonment of other persons—both strangers and family members—we should consider the meaning of abandoned places. A drive across America today, especially on state roads off the expressways, can be an astonishing experience. Between the major cities, you pass through smaller cities and towns which may at first glance have a gingerbread quaintness until you realize the main street’s shops are mostly empty, with only a tattoo parlor, a bar or two, and a gas station remaining.

The next post in this series reflects on the “root shock” which these places suffered before being left to die.

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Bardo…1. noun: an intermediate, liminal state between death and rebirth;

2. In Tibetan Buddhism, the state between two lives on earth;

3. A metaphor for the shared but unacknowledged condition of American society in 2025—life in suspension, always on the way, with mutual grief never reconciled or consoled.

Introduction (first post in a series)

How to understand this moment in American life—are we not all trying to do this? But I don’t mean understand it in political or sociological terms. And not just this administration.

An exhausting number of explanations have been offered, some of them reasonable and some probably valid.

But they don’t go deep enough. That’s because this time in our history increasingly feels like a shared nightmare. Or like living in a simulation created by invisible technofeudalists.

But the latter explanation implies that our condition is something new, something enabled by latest wave of Death Star platforms.

Making technocracy the sole cause of this shared fever dream only demonstrates our cultural and historical amnesia. It leaves us helpless to understand how we actually arrived at this moment, somewhere in the middle of a mysterious transition to…somewhere else.

In the thought experiment which follows, I’m suggesting that our history of buried suffering has created a shared spiritual crisis of a particular kind.

We find ourselves between past and future, as the invaluable Hannah Arendt described matters more than a half century ago. She was speaking of our intellectual disorientation, given the loss of traditions as well as any shared sense of the world.

Or might we see American society as undergoing some kind of collective rite of passage? This term, taken from Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 book, was coined to describe an individual’s passage from one status to another (as in initiation ceremonies) and from one life situation to another (graduation, marriage), as well as the passage of time (birthdays, the New Year).

Can an entire culture undergo a rite of passage? Is some other kind of transition going on? Perhaps a deep societal process has been underway, one which we rarely allow to surface because we can scarcely bear to confront it.

I’m proposing here that our dreamlike state can better be understood as time in a bardo, using metaphorically the Buddhist concept of a transitional state between between death and rebirth.

I see American society suspended unknowingly inside a Bardo of Grief. Which is to say: as a society today, we’re perpetually, agonizingly stuck, spiritually and existentially.

Tibetan Buddhism recognizes three bardos experienced in life—the bardo of birth/life, the bardo of dreaming and the bardo of meditation—and three experienced during the process of dying—the bardo of the moment of death, the bardo of reality/luminosity, and the bardo of becoming/rebirth.

But suppose grief from a significant loss can also take us—indeed, our entire society—into a bardo realm.

For our investigations here, I want to sketch out the nature of the bardo of grief in order to suggest its resonance with our public and private lives today. So a few words about why I’m exploring this metaphorical approach.

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First, our American malady—which is more than a malaise--goes beyond economics or politics: again, and like many observers, I believe it is fundamentally spiritual in nature, as I suggested above.

But we need a different spiritual lens at this moment in order to see more deeply. I find that the American encounter with Vietnam and its culture of Buddhism, beginning well over a half-century ago, has profound significance today. We, the sick giant, are very much in need of the healing wisdom and spiritual resources of this small country.

Thus the teachings and witness of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (here’s a discussion of his work relevant to this post) will be important in this series.

Grief, as Mark Robert Frank writes, is a reaction to the precipitous, uncontrolled, and undesirable loss of self. That’s quite different from the controlled and desirable loss of self that takes place within the context of spiritual practice, or the uncontrolled but desirable loss of self in the context of falling in love.

In several forms of Buddhism, the bardo realm is the in-between, transitional, liminal state between death and rebirth. Whatever remains of the self goes out in search of its next rebirth. In this state, the deceased may experience a phase of intense grief, especially if they were not prepared for death—i.e., they have not learned to die, as philosophers once described the motive for their inquiries.

In the bardo realm, the deceased gradually realize they are dead and no longer among their loved ones. In scenes perhaps reminiscent of Dante’s great poem of other worlds, they may see and hear their loved ones and yet be invisible to them—a cause of great anguish. According to Buddhist teachings, the deceased experience a range of emotions related to separation, including sadness, loneliness, and a sense of alienation.

The traditional Buddhist texts describing these emotions also refer to visions of both peaceful and wrathful deities, depending on how we have used our lives (which is reflected in our karma) before death.

On the individual level, understanding the bardo of grief is beneficial in two main ways. First, it shows us mourners how to help the deceased navigate this transition and achieve a better rebirth. Second—and especially for our purposes—it helps the living cope with the loss of a loved one.

As many readers here will know, a central text for understanding this tradition is the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Bardo Thodol in Tibetan.

These teachings include a number of ritual practices which mourners can undertake in order to lead the departed toward a fortunate rebirth. And to help them avoid getting caught up in mental delusions that would lead one to the hell realm or the condition of becoming a “hungry ghost”. The latter concept is a very suggestive one for citizens of a society dominated by consumerism.

The Hungry Ghost Festival is celebrated by Buddhists and Taoists in numerous Asian countries. On Ghost Day, the spirits of deceased ancestors come out from the hell realm in order to visit the living and be venerated or appeased. Some are spirits without descendants who thus have received no tributes from the living after death, leaving them in a desperately hungry, thirsty and restless state.

Ritualistic food offerings are prepared at tables with empty seats for the spirits. Relatives burn special “hell banknotes” (non-legal tender especially printed for this purpose) and other forms of joss or incense paper in the shape of houses or cars in order to please the ghosts and give them support in the other world.

The hungry ghosts being appeased are those spirits who are driven by intense emotional and physical needs in an animalistic way. They are often depicted in Buddhist art with big bellies and needle-thin necks to signify their suffering. One category of these nightmarish figures—the ghosts of losses—are always covetous, searching out human filth to eat at night. In life, they sought enjoyment in both clean and unclean things and were thus reborn in this condition.

Another category: the ghosts of flaming mouths, with bodies like a palmyra tree. Their condition shows the karmic results of stinginess.

If I am not stretching a metaphor absurdly far here, I can imagine our society as crowded with hungry ghosts, endlessly craving, always consuming. And like the newly dead in Tibetan Buddhism, some of us Americans suffer torments from karmically generated hallucinations of figures who appear to threaten us.

But no rebirth into a happier state is coming in our case. At least not until we confront our lack of public occasions for lament like the three “Great Chanting Ceremonies” undertaken for the war dead by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2007 in his native Vietnam. (I will describe these in a later post.)

In his impact on American spirituality, I think of Nhat Hanh as a terton, the Tibetan Buddhist term for a “a discover or revealer of (dharma) treasures.” The treasures are scriptures (called termas) that have been deliberately concealed and discovered at appropriate times by realized masters through their enlightened powers.

Some of these tantric scriptures are concealed in rocks, lakes, and temples: they are called Earth Termas. Others appear as mental awakenings and are called Mind Termas. We might consider Nhat Hanh’s teachings as falling into the latter category.

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But let’s begin with some grounding in terms of our situation in the U.S. What follows in this series are sketches drawn from life—or more specifically, our history over the last half-century--and my attempt to think out loud about them, drawing on more than one wisdom tradition.

The common thread throughout is my strong suspicion that almost all of us in American society today share a particular kind of unrecognized condition: the existence of “unprocessed” or buried grief.

Thus I’m not reflecting here on personal grief or its trauma discourse: instead I want to confront our unexamined legacy of communal grief.

Like a pool of contamination awaiting discovery beneath a plot of land, I think of our buried grief as a calamity which must be “remediated.” Remediation would mean, in the jargon, closure, especially the communal closure I want to examine here—the kind that comes from public rituals of lament.

In such rituals, it is the community that mourns, that imposes the mourning upon itself, as we have learned from philosopher Byung Chul Han in his Loss of Rituals. Which leads us to ask: where is our community today? Where and how might it offer and conduct a ritual of mourning?

The condition I’m exploring here is more than a lack of closure. And more than simply our American culture’s well-known avoidance of death and dying.

Hoping not to invoke the malign deities, let’s take up seven historical sources of destabilizing grief, most of which have enfolded over decades, all of them based in common experiences, all of them still quietly contaminating our shared life:

• The grief of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its 1.5 million dead in America (and over 7 million worldwide), when a profound human impulse—to mourn family members in public funeral ceremonies—was often put aside by something very like a state of emergency;

• The grief of the over 700,000 dead from the HIV/AIDS epidemic which started in 1981;

• The grief of the over 176,000 “deaths of despair” between 1999 and 2021 from addiction, suicide and alcohol, due partly to the decline in living standards and social status for a significant part of the American middle class;

• Partly foreshadowing the latter, the slow grief of losing our entire rural culture, some 4 million family farms in this country between 1940 and 2012, representing perhaps 25 million people leaving the land, thus removing from it and themselves, as Wendell Berry reminds us, their “love, care, skill and work”;

• What’s been called America’s racial karma—our 246 years of legalized chattel slavery, followed by a century or apartheid, as well as the destruction of our Native peoples and their cultures;

• The grief of those affected by the toll of America’s perpetual wars over the last two decades (over 7,000 deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan), as well as the annual average of 250 self-inflicted deaths by U.S. service members;

• Our shared grief over our burning planet and its wildfires, 500-year storms, dying oceans, lost species, heat waves, desertification, sea rise, displaced communities, climate refugees, and what may become a sixth mass extinction.

Our collective reaction to these losses resembles the often-noted silence and erasure around the flu epidemic of 1919 which killed over 50 million people worldwide. In the U.S., none of these shared catastrophes of the last half-century—all of them enormous in scope--have led us to mount occasions of public mourning on a national scale.

What then does it mean to live in a society which has allowed its social practices to degrade into merely instrumental and economic relations?

Simply that we now lack the grief communities and the rituals of lament which could bring us social healing in the form of forgiveness and reconciliation.

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                                                    Grief as a spiritual enzyme

One of the most insightful writers on these topics is Martin Prechtel whose work teaches that grief is not simply disappointment: it is as natural as singing or dreaming or eating.

Nor is grief simply sorrow—in fact it refuses to remain in sorrow. It is an obligation to the life we have each been awarded—an obligation to make more life. It should not be a mere preference. “Choosing not to have grief,” he writes, “burdens someone else and makes the world a sick place.”

And this: “Only nations capable of the true art of grief, grieving their mistakes and the deeply felt losses they endured, can say they are not pools of economic stagnation dressed up in the spoils of ungrieved wars disguised as good business.”

Another of the most powerful insights in Prechtel’s writing is his connection of grief with praise. Grief is “the best friend of Praise because Praise is a grandiose griever. Without grief and praise, life is only hate and mediocrity.”

In essence, if we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love—“we are ourselves in some way dead.”

Echoing philosopher Byung Chul Han, Prechtel argues that living communities are necessary for people to grieve in a real way. “Grief, even for an individual’s loss, is a thing for which a lot of people are necessary.”

Tragically we have gradually lost the culture in which we could grieve together as a society. Worse, we defer the grief of a previous generation onto the next generation, creating a dangerous and inhuman condition. All the people and places lost, Prechtel suggests, “are buried in a shallow mental mass grave of temporary amnesia in the collective mind.”

What we lack is the process by which grief, defined as a “spiritual enzyme”, metabolizes our losses. If we do not allow this to occur in some communal fashion, the grief almost always goes to a form of accusatory violence and the destruction of our common life. Thus the adoption of revenge works as a way of freezing grief and, in Prechtel’s phrase, “making a shrine to someone’s losses.”

Reading Prechtel, a terrible realization gradually comes over us: that we are all living on top of a buried continent of unprocessed communal grief.

No matter how well we may be dissolving our personal sufferings with the enzymes of grief, we have chosen collectively—and over generations—to live inside a history of great losses, human and natural.

Grieving, he explains, is not a form of depression—which is a condition that comes from not being able to grieve, in which we convert our losses, our “frozen sorrow”, into violence. But what if grief is not sorrow and refuses to remain in sorrow?

Might Prechtel be correct that we possess an ancient way to revive an entire culture, if we truly and freely grieve? Might the practice of grief—itself a sacred art—be the foundation of all our work toward peace and reconciliation?

I welcome your comments and I’ll be posting another piece in this series soon.

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Let’s imagine something new has arrived in the neighborhood—a community incubator. It’s a little like a free health club, if you take health in the broadest sense—i.e., including social and economic health.

You could think of the incubator as working like a golden funnel turned on its side. It’s wide-open at one end (which most business incubators are not really) but it channels and directs the flow to particular places—like toward a good job. Or even a new business you co-own.

The logical home for a program like this is a community hub. You probably know this kind of place. It’s not a community center with yoga classes and senior swimming groups.

An authentic community hub feels grassroots-y and kinda political. It’s a space where people can meet up to organize campaigns, hold meetings, and maybe co-work. Three good examples are ReCity in Durham, the Festival Center in Washington DC, and the new Baltimore Community Commons in that city.

Community hubs are good at incubating organizations—i.e., non-profits. But rarely are they places where businesses are incubated.

A community incubator is a hybrid, a cross between a support group and a startup program. Actually, the former (the group) creates a process which leads to the latter (the launch of a new business). These two ideas—recovery (in the broadest sense) and collective entrepreneurship—are rarely tied together—in the U.S., at least.

So what does a community incubator do?

It invites any and all adult individuals, especially those who are in recovery from various conditions (incarceration, addiction, or just long periods of joblessness), to join a “workout” program—for free.

We know many in our communities justifiably feel they are unable to get back in “the game”. Here I’m proposing an open-access path to not only participating again but becoming a champion—i.e., someone with a strong sense of wellbeing.

Once you become a member of the incubator, you are no longer a random invidual—you’re part of a team (i.e., a cohort) which meets on a weekly or biweekly basis. This is where we all discuss what it can mean to get “back in shape”—i.e., ready to participate in the world, including the economy. (For individuals needing specialized recovery serivces, the incubator coordinates with other area programs.)

Here’s my crude representation of the phased approach of the incubator (it looks like a sideways funnel):

But you don’t participate here solo—the rest of your team is involved in supporting your wellness. And we’re all getting to know each other better.

For example, while incubator membership would be free, there’s one qualification: you have to participate in an ongoing offers and needs market process. This is a highly effective tool used by small groups to explore and then match up their talents and needs It offers a quick way to build solidarity among people who don’t know each other. (One group of skilled OANM practitioners is the highly innovative Kola Nut Collaborative in Chicago.)

Not Just Jobs: Let’s Talk about Co-creating Good Work!

Possibly the most visionary aspect of the community incubator is its potential to create dignified, meaningful jobs in democratic workplaces co-owned by team members. In places like northern Italy, Quebec, and South Korea, these liberatory workplaces already exist in the tens of thousands. For most Americans at this moment, the very term “liberatory workplaces” sounds either bitterly ironic or downright visionary.

To successfully imitate these non-U.S. models, we need to practice what community advocate Sam Pressler calls “civic alignment”—that equilibium reached when our enterprises keep in balance the forces of membership (the glue of commitment), revenue (the fuel of independence and innovation), and governance (the structure for good decision-making).

All of which means: with the right partner organizations, an incubator can turn a community hub into something new and potentially transformative—a site of quality job creation, by and for the community.

Here are some examples of partner organizations in these multistakeholder enterprises:

• Beyond sourcing philanthropy and donors, aim to create a dedicated community investment fund to support the incubator and invest in its businesses;

• And you’ll want to build a shared services platform (to connect with other incubators), developed by a team which practices “small software”—i.e., vision coding and relational tech;

• And as a multistakeholder enterprise, you’ll want to find other community partners (churches, civic groups) which subscribe to ideas such as “neighborhood economics”.

Equally importantly, these are jobs in enterprises which have been co-created by their worker-owners—an idea which many marginalized individuals might not imagine to be possible. (It’s a bit like applying Asset-Based Community Development principles to a small business model.)

This bottom-up process of quality job creation (the general term for it is cooperativism) has been used in most of the countries of the world for many generations—which surely testifies to the “constructive genius of ordinary men and women” referred to in the quote above from Roberto Unger.

This idea is not merely utopian. One inspiration for the incubator model I’ve described here is the methods used by Mondragon founder Fr. Josemaria Arizmendi—i.e., a mix of study groups and then a workplace-as-school of human development strategy.

While examples of this type of community-led economic development are scarce in the U.S., here is one good example in a large city (Denver) and here is another in rural North Carolina.

More to come on all these matters, y’all. And let me know if any of this resonates!

See you next time—peace.

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In a recent call, my friend and colleague in solidarity economy work Julia Martins Rodrigues mentioned the MacArthur Foundation’s “100&Change” program. Here’s a description:

“A competition for a $100 million grant [my emphasis] to fund a single proposal that promises real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time.”

I’d not heard of the program but the size of the award made my eyes water. Julia then asked a fascinating question: “What would we (meaning not just us but practically everybody we know) do with a $100 million?”

The answer, disappointingly, is: we have no idea—or most of us don’t, anyway. In our small universe of worker co-ops, land trusts, CSAs and peoples’ assemblies, only a few of our projects come anywhere near a $1 million budget.

Consider: After more than a century of agitation and some success with worker co-ops, we still have fewer than 1,000 in operation in this country today. The average worker co-op generates less than $500,000 in annual revenue. As a very rough guess, the entire capitalization of the 700-800 worker co-ops in business today is less than $500 million.

Thus for every example of several million dollars in assets represented in a Boston Impact Initiative or East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, there are thousands of small projects locked in a day-to-day struggle for economic survival.

Back in 2020-2022, I co-edited a newsletter with Julia called Ownership Matters sponsored by Felipe Witchger. By allowing us to do dozens of interviews with practitioners, we got an informal overview of the economic landscape. And I had a number of surprising revelations.

One of them was that, contrary to what I might have imagined, the funding issue for most of our solidarity economy (SE) projects isn’t really due to a lack of interested capital providers. On the contrary, quite a number of the impact investing folks—especially the ones trying to “deploy” what they call catalytic capital—want to support SE work, as I heard on numerous occasions.

The problem is largely about making a fit. Given the amounts of capital these funders work with—i.e., millions of dollars at a time—they need to find SE enterprises that can take in cash amounts at that scale. Looking at an SE project which barely generates $500,000 in annual revenue, they feel it’s impractical to spend time on it.

Here’s an analogy: It’s as though we SE people are all eager to have the big jumbo jets set down at our airports but unfortunately our landing strips are still way too small.

We do have a magical power we can use to change this situation—the same one used in places like Italy or Quebec or South Korea to streamline investment into their SE work.

Quite simply, we can use the power of association and collaboration in order to build ecosystems of support around our enterprises. Across our landscape of “many small utopias”, this is what we sorely lack.

This missing infrastructure can only become real if we plan for it, especially by drawing up our million-dollar dream blueprints and having them ready at short notice.

It’s exactly like the beneficial effects of creating a simple business plan. Just the process of sketching out a vision of transformative change brings it closer to being realized.

If we begin to think on a bigger scale, much could change for us. Instead living like cargo cults wishing and waiting for the big planes to land bringing us trinkets, we can create our own national air freight company, making stops all over the country.

See you next time—peace.

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In 2022, my friend J. Howard (“Jim”) Kucher wrote a book with co-author Stephanie Raible called Social Entrepreneurship. I want to say a few things about the book but I should first explain how I learned why we (meaning especially, we people who hang out in the non-profit world) need more social enterprises.

About a year ago, Jim invited me to a group conversation and open house at a place called DC Central Kitchen in southwest DC. I really knew nothing about the place beyond the fact that they had found a great way to recycle waste food from area restaurants into a meals program for the homeless.

I figured we would be meeting in a cramped little room next to a noisy commercial kitchen at an area church.

But as we used to say in my Texas hometown, au contraire. In 2023, DC Central Kitchen relocated to the Klein Center for Jobs and Justice where its team found themselves with a 36,000 sq. ft. bi-level space hosting a large community kitchen, a training facility, and an urban food hub.

After having launched in 1989, DCCK has grown to $40 million in annual revenue, offering over 300 living wage jobs, and supported by 11,355 volunteers. The 2,200 graduates of their culinary training program have an 89% success rate in area job placements. With some 36 millions pound of food recovered so far, it’s not surprising their model has inspired 60 similar organizations around the U.S.

There’s another big factor in DCCK’s success—it’s not a conventional non-profit but a social enterprise. That means it is able to generate independent revenue (which is discretionary income, not tied to any grant guidelines, etc.) as a way of counter-balancing the revenue from local donors and foundations.

Here’s the DCCK’s revenue breakdown for 2024:

You’ll note that 42% of DCCK’s revenue last year was from programming—tbeir 3 cafe locations, catering services and contracted food services.

Jim Kucher has been preaching the need for non-profits to realize they are a uniquely American failed experiment in many respects. For all the good work they do, most nonprofits remain in a precarious financial condition because they do not choose to offer paid services, whether through misplaced fears of the IRS or a lack of familiarity with basic business practices.

Determined to understand this situation better, I picked up a paperback copy of Kucher and Raible’s Social Entrepreneurship. Its dull-looking cover screams “college textbook” but the well-written contents were quite a surprise.

The book is a small encyclopedia of both aspects of social enterprise, combining a history of social work with a short primer on business fundamentals. The authors discuss the history and special characteristics of social enterprises (the term arose in the 1980s), along with guidance on various kinds of tools (iteration, test markets, pivoting, etc.).

But their focus is on helping the reader understand we’re talking here about measuring outcomes rather than outputs. Thus the language and the business models for social enterprises differs from that of for-profit entities. We speak of “social ROI”, “social return”, “psychic income”, and stakeholders (rather than shareholders).

Kucher and Raible also offer insights into frameworks such as asset based community development and the social business model canvas.

Not that in these times the authors are the only proponents of moving beyond non-profits. Michael Shuman, editor and publisher of the Main Street Journal, recently posted on the topic “Non-Profits: the Least Effective Vehicles for Social Change.”

With the usual sources of nonprofit funding going away, time to get creative—and even become the good kind of entrepreneur—social entrepreneurs.

See you next time—peace.

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A priest working in a war-town, impoverished Spanish village, he collaborated with local working people to eventually become perhaps the most successful social entrepreneur of the twentieth century. From its modest start in the early 1950s, Mondragon today is an interlocking ecosystem of 95 autonomous worker-owned cooperatives, with annual sales of €11 billion ($12.5 billion).

To get at the roots of this organization’s rise, let’s read and discuss together Arizmendi’s little 120-page book called Reflections, an inspirational “management text” like no other you’ve ever read.

We’ll meet over four Tuesday Zoom sessions: May 27, June 3, June 10, and June 17. All sessions will be at 1 PM EST.

To register for the Arizmendi reading group, please use this doc in order to receive a Zoom link before each session.

A quote from the Introduction by Nathan Schneider: “Arizmendi inherits the Basque people’s long practice of democracy and their struggles for independence. He was a journalist during the Spanish Civil War, when entire regions of the country operated under a well-organized anarchism of workers’ assemblies, which were highly anti-clerical. His cooperative spirituality depends upon no particular religious or national identity, while it draws from many.”

And a quote from the book’s “Afterword: Cooperation and Liberation"“, by historian Jessica Gordon Nembhard: “Both the Basques of northern Spain and African Americans experience contradictory relationships in their societies as national minorities—citizens without full citizenship rights, experiencing long histories of exploitation, inequality, and social ostracisim. Father Arizimendi taught that subaltern people do not have to live subaltern lives. They can take charge of their own lives, be warriors for change…Not many people understand economics as a project of human liberation. Fr. Arizmendi showed many that it is—or can be.”

A free PDF of the English translation of the book, published in 2022 by Solidarity Hall, will be provided to everyone who registers (donations appreciated).

If you’d like to purchase a print paperback copy of the text, it’s available here.

See you next time—peace.

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