A friend of mine likes to say, "serious business requires serious people."
The consequences of failure are serious. The suicide of 25 year old Andrew Viel at the World Trade Center brings home for all of us what we all have at stake in this confrontation. I am certain that I am not the only one who has strongly contemplated following his decisive leadership.
I cannot get the image out of my mind of the scene from Ghandi where hundreds of Hindus resolutely line up at the gates of the British Empire to have their skills split open by their mercinary Sikh countryman.
We in the United States will never attain the discipline of nonviolent protest that emmanates from the highest chakra. But we should aspire to it.
Ressentiment wants to help serious (possibly too shy) thinkers communicate value-added analysis of the crisis we face and long term viable strategy. My friend "Liberal Dude" is putting his electronic pen to work, along with his painstakingly catelogued electronic archive of the most important writing and thinking in our time. We are working to obtain reprint permission for the most significant work from publishers who maintain the original material via subsription services. In the mean time Liberal Dude is committed to publishing selected content and analysis via his personal email list.
I cannot even attempt to credential my friend as a thinker and a scholar. His most tangible accomplishments lie in the quiet science of spiritual cartography, mapping the topology of our entire problem space, and posting clear markers which guide fellow travellers to peaceful enclaves of reason and reflection where they may take refuge from the bustle and bluster.
If you would like to subscribe to his email list, please leave word at the email address published at Ressentiment. The blog will mirror as much of the content markers as possible, but the email list will be the primary means of communication.
I am not trying to distract from the fantastic work that is done here at DailyKos. But I am trying to create a quiet eddie in a tributary where serious people can share thoughts that I find profoundly valuable in navigating my own inner space -- which is the only thing that keeps me from following Andrew Viel.
Please be respectful of our monkish nature. The quiet, meditative environment we try to maintain is deliberate.
Thank you.
Excerpt:
The Atlantic Monthly / October 2002
The Next Christianity
by Philip Jenkins
There is increasing tension between what one might call a liberal Northern Reformation and the surging Southern religious revolution, which one might equate with the Counter-Reformation, the internal Catholic reforms that took place at the same time as the Reformation - although in references to the past and the present the term "Counter-Reformation" misleadingly implies a simple reaction instead of a social and spiritual explosion. No matter what the terminology, however, an enormous rift seems inevitable.
Although Northern governments are still struggling to come to terms with the notion that Islam might provide a powerful and threatening supranational ideology, few seem to realize the potential political role of ascendant Southern Christianity.
For a quarter of a century social scientists analyzing the decline of the nation-state have drawn parallels between the world today and the politically fragmented yet cosmopolitan world of the Middle Ages. Some scholars have even predicted the emergence of some secular movement or ideology that would command loyalty across nations like the Christendom of old. Yet the more we look at the Southern Hemisphere, the more we see that although supranational ideas are flourishing, they are not in the least secular. The parallels to the Middle Ages may be closer than anyone has guessed.
Perhaps the most remarkable point about these potential conflicts is that the trends pointing toward them have registered so little on the consciousness of even well-informed Northern observers.
We are living in revolutionary times. But we aren't participating in them. By any reasonable assessment of numbers, the most significant transformation of Christianity in the world today is not the liberal Reformation that is so much desired in the North. It is the Counter-Reformation coming from the global South. And it's very likely that in a decade or two neither component of global Christianity will recognize its counterpart as fully or authentically Christian.
[http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200210/jenkins]