G'day friends I remember "the immediacy of the eschaton" as a phrase used by William Buckley Jnr in an interview from the mid-70s. I think it was for Playboy - if so it's available for download, as is the interview they did with Jimmy Carter. Buckley was talking about one aspect of "the Left" of his time. "It's all coming apart, it's all crumbling, and we'll have a nuclear war tomorrow, or we will be on the end of the flight of an ICBM, so if it doesn't get fixed tomorrow we might as well give up and go live in the desert/forest/air raid shelter. Or maybe we might as well get angry, and violent." And the "solution" had better be perfect. If it's not, we'll withdraw our support for creative activity. The solution? Maybe many, many, small creative actions. Maybe coordinated but not too tightly. By people keeping in touch with each other. Etc etc. "Creative actions"? I remember reading Arthur Haley's "The Money Changers" (I think that was the title), which included some very creative community actions. And replicable. Wasn't Gandhi's salt march another example? I could point to a dozen or more creative actions in Australia - quiet, behind the scenes, often dismissed - but they're chipping away (and I'm not talking about a Gene McDaniels song there). Cheers Frank Bremner
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 08:06:06 -0500 To: oe@lists.wedgeblade.net; dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net Subject: [Oe List ...] Breakfast News Conversations... From: oe@lists.wedgeblade.net
Also called scripture/news conversations
You remember them right? random bits of recalled news and then a piece of scriptural wisdom what to do about it?
These days news like trying to "drink from a fire hose" My experience now living in the USfA now rather than Costa Rica and listening to USA media is curious.
Feels to me like a case of news culture ADHD where nothing is connected to anything except by more and more crisis news events, more passionate & positional thinking more economic political and cultural and more and more "news journalists" driving to their bank on the stream of news.
My friend Jack Gilles, if I quote him right, says ORID conversations no longer have a "D" now because it it is all interpretation, everyone has an opinion, everyone is a spectator stuck in the stands watching an unplayable game.
Now in conversations is no "D" in ORID, no one knows how to Decide or what Do. "D" stands for Dumpster or "Don't decide" or "Despair" or just "Done".
Joe Mathews had a paper, I believe, which he called the liberal heresy - aybe it was the conservative heresy or the reactionary heresy. He used some fancy theological terminology like "the immediacy of the eschaton" which I never did understand,exactly. Anyone remember this paper?
Wondering where IS the scripture part, the wisdom part of the breakfast news conversation?
The Christian Science Monitor says THEY are doing two things...As days and weeks pass, the media move on to new stories, often neglecting to tell the “what’s possible?” stories about how the people and communities affected by these tragedies are coping and what they’re learning. We hear these types of stories on one-year anniversaries, but they’re not an ongoing part of the media’s coverage the way that the “what happened?” stories are. A growing body of research is confirming what many have long suspected — that a steady diet of trauma and disaster triggers stress, fear and trauma in those consuming the stories.
What if the news media covered stories of recovery and resilience as much as they cover stories about devastation and despair? http://ivoh.org/restorativenarrative/
Steve
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