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.
What have we gained and what have we lost in our progress beyond the one-room school?
On art’s capacity to illuminate the stories we tell about ourselves and the myths of progress.
Meditation on circular patterns
A letter to the Lorax, who speaks for the trees.
Questioning both the wholesale acceptance and critique of progress.
Recalling the enduring relevance of the Australian band’s warning cry.
The back story and a liturgy for a series of services of lament held by Peace Christian Reformed Church in South Holland, Illinois.
Holding up Wendell Berry’s mad farmer manifesto to the paradigm of progress.
Reflecting on the trajectory of a life attached to social networks and technological devices.
Is technology moving faster than the speed of humans?
On the benefits and challenges of technology.
How others responded when I gave up my computer for Lent.
When everyday appliances challenge our sense of self and truth.
A review of Julia Loktev’s 2012 film about the journey of an engaged couple.
A review of the book 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker.
On claiming culpability in the case of the star everyone loves to hate.
The principles behind and origins of one institution's efforts to dismantle racism.
Karen Spears Zacharias criticizes the myth of progress and the falsity of the health and wealth gospel.
“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.
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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