June 2009
Preaching in a Vacuum
Chris Chatteris argues for more feedback to preaching and preachers. See the article in the US Jesuit magazine, America at http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11679
Book Review: Enough: breaking free from the world of excess, by John Naish
How to live the good life in an age of consumerism and excess? It struck me as hopeful that a book that asks the age-old philosophical question for our own time should be available at CNA.
British journalist John Naish's answer is what he calls 'enoughism'. He hopes that if enough people adopt it, we will avert an eco-catastrophe and find a modest personal contentment in the process.
Mindwalk
When two old friends, one an unsuccessful US presidential hopeful, and the other a poet and speechwriter, decide to meet at the historic site of Mont St Michel in Normandy to discuss the possibility of a second stab at the presidency, they are in for an unexpected ‘mindwalk’ thanks to a chance encounter with a feminist ex-scientist.
Mindwalk is the film version of Fritjof Kapra’s paradigm-shattering works Turning Point and The Tao of Physics, both penned over twenty years ago.
Lotto: the State as Croupier?
The Lotto is in trouble again apparently. It now stands accused of hoarding monies it should have disbursed to the charities it likes to remind its critics that it supports. But what is a lottery in reality?
John Ralston Saul labels lotteries ‘stealth taxes’.
"It can't happen here."
So says Doremus Jessup, liberal editor of a small-town Vermont newspaper, and his friends at the beginning of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel of the same title. What can’t happen in the United States is fascism and tyranny along the lines of Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin – even in a time of great economic difficulty. But…
In 1936, ‘Buzz’ Windrip, a populist senator from the US Midwest gets elected president of the United States on a radical ticket – tight control over capitalism, funds to help all citizens (almost a Basic Income Grant), national reconstruction, etc. Within a few months the US Congress has been silenced, the authority of the Supreme Court hobbled.
