![]() ![]() But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition,” she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, starting now, in which prisons and policing as we do them now become unnecessary, unthinkable. ![]() She’s a visionary of “abolition,” and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. She’s a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time - even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara’s Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined. ![]() I might even use a religious word - it feels like a “blessing.” And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being “spiritual but not religious.” We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. She’s written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church - about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she’s written, “alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.” And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. It’s fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. “I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ - to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real. If you’re in the U.S., find some of them here. There are many resources for mental health support. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity - and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. And for years, he’s been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition. He’s a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we’ve been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. In the UK, Greg Hands spends weeks telling everyone that his party will lose hundreds of seats.We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. In the US, they say during the presidential campaign: “please welcome the next president of the United States”. It’s why both parties have spent months underplaying the number of seats they’ll win. (For why that should change, read this post from John Oxley).īefore the media coverage of the data-id=”” data-type=”URL” href=”” rel=”noreferrer noopener” target=”_blank”>coronation takes over, watch out for how the narrative develops. Whether that depresses you or not – given how important local government is in its own right – it’s the reality of a political system where most of the power is handed out every five years or so, and the political media revolves around Westminster. The fact remains, however, that the local elections will be judged through the prism of Westminster. The PM’s grip on the parliamentary party has tightened as Tory MPs have realised that this close to a general election, Sunak is their best bet to hold onto their seats. Last December, today’s local elections were being viewed as a potential fuse for a revolt against Rishi Sunak. ![]()
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