For more on Francis, don’t miss my latest column for America magazine on the idea of the commons in the pope’s thought, as well as a controversial blog post about the ecology encyclical and an interview about just how far the Vatican has come on environmental issues.

Higher ground

As much as I still love getting invited to awesome things friends are doing in New York (I do), it turns out that I don’t live there anymore. A few weeks ago my family arrived in Boulder, Colorado, where I am now serving as a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado’s new College of Communication, Media, and Information.

And what’s that book in the way of the mountains? Well, just in time for hauling my books halfway across the country, my dear God in Proof has been released in a lighter, convenient paperback edition—the perfect companion for adventuresome bike rides. Get your copy today!

Debts worth having

We’ve lost our language for talking about debt—for knowing the usurious from the upbuilding, the good from the bad. That’s why you should be sure to pick up Yes! Magazine‘s current “debt issue”, full of stories and wisdom from people like Charles Eisenstein, Laura Gottesdiener, and Raj Patel. I’ve got an essay in there too on the question of what debts are actually worth having. Pick up the issue from newsstands today, and look for my essay online starting September 15.

People’s platforms

You might have noticed that a lot of my articles over the past year have dealt with efforts to build a more democratic Internet. Those efforts are now building toward a first-of-its-kind event at the New School on November 13-14: Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership Democracy. Featuring co-op developers alongside tech CEOs, venture capitalists alongside domestic workers, my co-organizer Trebor Scholz and I are trying to throw an historic coming-out party for the cooperative Internet. Register now.

To learn more about what we’re up to, see my new manifesto in Pacific Standard‘s “future of work” series, “Owning What We Share.”

Moneyless elf

One last thing I’d like to share with you is a story that appeared recently at Killing the Buddha, an oral history I recorded last year while working on an article for The Nation about a group of hackers modeling their commune in Italy on a medieval monastery. One evening when the others were gone, one of those hackers, elf Pavlik, recited a detailed account of living for the past five years without money or government documents. Read what he told me here.

Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it:

[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together.

As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said.

She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her.

With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”

Read the rest (and see William Wedmer’s moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.

Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme Instrument, a four-story, right-triangular sundial surrounded by semi-circular wings. The complex reflects the style of politics practiced by its autocratic creator — one based on charting the positions of the sun and planets across the zodiac with maximum pomp and precision.

The road named after the Jantar Mantar, however, better reflects the aspirations of India’s past few decades as the world’s most populous democracy. In the space of several hundred yards between two sets of hand-painted red-and-yellow police barricades, an assortment of political and religious outfits have set up tents, encampments and shrines each dedicated to some particular cause — for the prosecution of a high-placed rapist, for the rights of migrant workers, for various flavors of spiritual-social awakening. Several tents contain men on hunger strikes, each reclining on a couch and nursed by supporters, on behalf of a petition like airline employee pensions or voting rights for Indians living abroad. Despite the amplified speeches and droning chants, Jantar Mantar Road is a respite from Delhi’s non-stop hustle; people slowly mill through to listen, strike up conversations and eat deep-fried snacks.

Read the rest at Waging Nonviolence or openDemocracy.

Well, it sort of is now. Read a (slightly edited) portion of what’s below the fold at Occupy Writers, or a blown-up pdf here. I’ll also be giving a talk—which was gracefully entitled for me “The Ballerina and the Charging Bull”—at Maryhouse (55 East 3rd St., New York) on January 13 at 7:45 p.m.

In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

Occupy Wall Street has had its share of celebrity visits and they haven’t always gone very well either. The example that comes to mind concerns another prominent black leader, Russell Simmons, who was allowed to speak during a General Assembly meeting. He interrupted the discussion at hand and gave his two cents about what, in general, the movement should do, concerning the by-then-tabled question of “demands.” He received applause and thanks. But a few minutes later, after the scheduled discussion continued about how white, male-bodied people on the plaza needed to “check their privilege,” a white, male-bodied young man got up and said something like, “Perhaps celebrities should check their privilege, too.”?That got applause as well. A lot, as I recall.

It’s really unfortunate that this has become a racial issue, especially when the occupiers have problems with outreach to some racial groups already. As one black left-wing journalist suggested in a conversation I took part in recently, it may be better understood as a problem of communication styles among different communities rather than active, albeit subtle, racism.

But I do think this represents a really interesting effort on the part of occupiers to—so to speak—kill the Buddhas of power and hierarchy in our society. And celebrity really is a huge Buddha.?Even well-earned celebrity. I’ve witnessed other—including white—notable people getting essentially no attention during visits to the plaza. I think it’s really telling that Lewis chose not to hold a grudge. From his remarks, I don’t get the sense that he understands the movement in a deep way, but he does clearly understand—from experience—that creating a new world can get messy sometimes.

The occupiers’ obsession with process—the General Assembly meeting, in this instance—is one really important case of the role of ritual in what they’re doing. The ritual of process comes before all else because it is the vehicle of the future, and the bulwark against compromises with the past.

Read the rest, including Anthea Butler’s discussion of the Lewis incident,?at?Religion Dispatches.

The gods—and, of course, I include under this title that whole ‘hemisphere of magic fiction’ which flows indirectly from them—the gods were not to paganism what they are to us. In classical poetry we hear plenty of them as objects of worship, of fear, of hatred; even comic characters. But pure aesthetic contemplation of their eternity, their remoteness, and their peace, for its own sake, is curiously rare. There is, I think, only the one passage in all Homer; and it is echoed only by Lucretius [Odyssey, vi, 41 & Lucretius?De Rerum Nat. iii, 18]. But Lucretius was an atheist; and that is precisely why he sees the beauty of the gods. For he himself, in another place, has laid his finger on the secret: it is?religio that hides them. No religion, so long as it believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry?of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.

The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1958 [1936]), p. 82.

My passage concludes a particularly confounding chapter in the book—chapter 8—where he goes back and forth between whether there is one mover or many, a process which requires some weird resorting to prime numbers and the momentary conclusion that there are either 47 or 55 movers, only then to determine that there can be only one. Irrespective of that, however, he is quite satisfied to accept that the stars which these movers move are themselves eternal, and indeed are actually eternal gods. It’s obvious to his astronomy and his reason. And that’s where we begin:

We should also consider tradition. From old—and indeed extremely ancient—times there has been handed down to our later age intimations of a mythical character to the effect that the stars are gods and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The further details were subsequently added in the manner of myth. Their purpose was the persuasion of the masses and general legislative and political expediency. For instance, the myths tell us that these gods are anthropomorphic or resemble some of the other animals and give us other, comparable extrapolations of the basic picture. If, then, we discard these accretions and consider the central feature, that they held the primary substances to be gods, we might well believe the claim to have been directly inspired. We might also conclude that, while it is highly probable that all possible arts and doctrines have been many times discovered and lost, these ancient cosmologies have been preserved, like holy relics, right up to the present day. It is these, and these alone, that we can know clearly of the ancestral—indeed primordial—beliefs. (Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred; Penguin, 1998.)

Why does this strike me so eerily? However much scholars today would like to forget it, the modern study of religion was founded on just this impulse. It was the hope of figures like Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell to take the myths and ritual of the “primitive” imagination and, by comparing and contrasting, synthesize for ourselves the truth buried under all the fluff, the essential archetypes that are real beneath, as Aristotle puts it, the “extrapolations” and “accretions.” There’s a noble ambition in such historical phenomenology, even though, as in the case of Aristotle’s eternal stars, it can be as mistaken as the mythologies themselves: to rescue the absurdities of one’s ancestors from themselves and find in them the truth that couldn’t be adequately appreciated earlier. Well, says Aristotle, now we can. This is what gods actually are and always have been: stars. Those wild mythologies are messengers, carrier pigeons whose messages now we can finally open. We need not declare war against our traditions, though they be false, for we can distill the truths hidden in them.

Speaking of war—as Alexander the Great traipsed across the Mediterranean and the steppes and the deserts building his great empire, he kept two things under his pillow: a dagger, and a copy of the Iliad that his teacher Aristotle had given him. Now Alexander wasn’t such a great student; born conquerors like him know early on that they won’t have much need for syllogisms. Gathering as much, the teacher didn’t bother giving his student any of his subtle philosophy, like the Ethics or the Organon, for the road. He gave him a good story. A mythology, about battle and glory and love and gods, and Alexander loved it enough to take it along.

Alexander conquered everything he saw, but of course after his death at age 32, the empire he built crumbled in the rivalries of his generals. It was fleeting, though its legacy was not. Those conquests spread Greek culture around the known world. As Alexander was clinging to his knife and his war stories, he was making way for scholars from Egypt to Persia to study his teacher’s delicate arguments, though they hadn’t stuck with Alexander himself. He, whether he knew it or not, with mythology under his pillow, was the carrier pigeon.

Ever since the Israeli strike on the Gaza Freedom Movement’s Freedom Flotilla on Monday, I and the rest of us at Waging Nonviolence have been exploring ways of understanding what happened. My first essay, “Nonviolence and the Gaza Freedom Movement,” simply raises some questions that we might be asking as new information about the incident slowly trickles out. “Were the activists really acting nonviolently?” “How are the mission’s success and failure being measured?” “Whose suffering is the media considering grievable?” “What laws were violated, and why?” —and more. I’ve been glad to see that piece gaining some traction around the web; it has been picked up at Common Dreams, In These Times, and Sojourners.

Today, I added a further discussion of that first question and its consequences: “Gaza, the Mavi Marmara, and the Prospects of Fighting Back.” There, though the facts of the case are still far from clear, I address the reasons and ramifications of activists attempting to fight back against Israeli soldiers—particularly for the fledgling nonviolence movement in the Palestinian territories.

See also our initial post about the events, a wrap-up of early news coverage, and a report about a solidarity march in New York.

The future of the cause for justice in Palestine-Israel is very much riding on how the story of what happened that night in the Mediterranean is told. If there is to be a future, really, it means thinking through the problems in ways that get beyond the familiar intransigence.

Raised up by parents and teachers of the 1960s, and grandparents who brushed against World War II, I always wondered what crisis and heroism would define my generation after its childhood in the in-between simmer of the ’90s. When my answer came, I was 17, at the start of my last year in high school, and close enough to the Pentagon to see the smoke towering out from it.

What my friends and I did that night, more quiet and focused than ever, was play our usual game of tag in the dark, on the comfortable fields around our school. That night, as on others, a police car came down into the parking lot. I won’t ever forget the image of us standing under a light, talking with the officer in stunted phrases, hushed in deference to the state of exception that had come and left the ordinary rules in question.

He didn’t make us leave, as the cops normally did. He drove away. Perhaps he recognized the mystery at work in us, which we ourselves couldn’t be sure of, by which we were somehow, in playing, planning our next move as a generation, planning the future of the world, and we should not be bothered.

I leave out what has happened since. Too much. So far, my generation has allowed our youth to be defined by two endless wars with little obvious effect at home and spiraling greed unto economic collapse; we have not raised our voices significantly, except for the occasional pop star, aided by microphones. We’ve spent a lot of time on the internet. Maybe my friends and I shouldn’t have been playing that night. Maybe we should have been, really, planning.

Read the other essays over at Happy Days.