catapult magazine

vol. 12, num. 9 :: 2013.04.26 — 2013.05.09

Responding to our issue on the Enbridge oil pipeline, this issue asks whether we need to rethink progress. Today, we are confronted with accelerated movement toward cheaper, faster, newer, hipper, bigger. Progress is synonymous with production, and financial gain is understood as forward movement. But, if there is one thing that we learn from Christ's sacrifice and weakness, it is that progress is not always a forward, linear movement.

Feature

The equation for education

by Lois Maassen

What have we gained and what have we lost in our progress beyond the one-room school?

Editorial

Progress defamed

by Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma

On art’s capacity to illuminate the stories we tell about ourselves and the myths of progress.

Articles

Meditation on circular patterns

by Grant Elgersma

Meditation on circular patterns

A seed sprouts

by Deborah Haak

A letter to the Lorax, who speaks for the trees.

What’s the real issue here?

by jim Schmotzer

Questioning both the wholesale acceptance and critique of progress.

Midnight Oil’s progress apocalypse

by Richard Leo

Recalling the enduring relevance of the Australian band’s warning cry.

A time to lament

by Jessica Groen

The back story and a liturgy for a series of services of lament held by Peace Christian Reformed Church in South Holland, Illinois.

16 thoughts for 16 stanzas

by Tamara Murphy

Holding up Wendell Berry’s mad farmer manifesto to the paradigm of progress.

And then he disappeared

by Neil E. Das

Reflecting on the trajectory of a life attached to social networks and technological devices.

I’m becoming obsolete

by Jamie Janosz

Is technology moving faster than the speed of humans?

A complicated gift

by Brenda Kronemeijer-Heyink

On the benefits and challenges of technology.

Backward reactions

by Laura Menze

How others responded when I gave up my computer for Lent.

Between the Rock and a hard place

by Terrilynn Quillen

When everyday appliances challenge our sense of self and truth.

Reviews

Finding real life on The Loneliest Planet

by Eric Kuiper

A review of Julia Loktev’s 2012 film about the journey of an engaged couple.

What should I have asked for?

by Angela Reitsma Bick

A review of the book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker.

Gallery

Beatitudes Poem

by Meredith Kathryn-Case Gipson Hoogendam

1/8

by Hal Moran

In case you missed it the first time

Consuming toward exile

by Christopher R. Smit

On claiming culpability in the case of the star everyone loves to hate.

What I’ve learned from planning UnLearn Week

by Jacque Rhodes

The principles behind and origins of one institution's efforts to dismantle racism.

Weaving the web

The myth of progress

Patheos

Karen Spears Zacharias criticizes the myth of progress and the falsity of the health and wealth gospel.

The myth of human progress

Nation of Change

“The number of people in dire poverty today -- about 2 billion -- is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress”, says Chris Hedges.

daily asterisk

Even in a country you know by heart
its hard to go the same way twice
the life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

Wendell Berry
“Traveling at Home” from Traveling at Home

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