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About two years ago, I attended a conference with the intriguing title “Neighborhood Economics.” The event turned out to be a national meetup of practitioners, funders, and advocates, among them the three folks I interviewed for this conversation.
Best of all, over the three days, I met three of the most innovative thinker-activists in the solidarity movement. I’ve brought them together here for a conversation about where their work is going lately.
Michael Shuman is the publisher of the Main Street Journal and a well-known advocate for investing in local economies, Stephanie Swepson Twitty is the president and CEO of Eagle Market Streets Community Development Corporation in Ashville NC, and Kevin Jones is a co-founder of SOCAP and Neighborhood Economics.
They share a passion for democratizing an area many activists tend to ignore as a power source: finance and investing. In our conversation, you’ll hear about this great work of devising ways to bring catalytic capital down to the grassroots level in order to build racial equity and regenerate neighborhoods.
For more interviews with Michael, Stephanie, and Kevin, you can also visit The Mindful Marketplace’s YouTube show, which has partnered with the Main Street Journal, Impact Alpha, and Neighborhood Economics.
See you next time—peace.
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For well over a decade, Nathan Schneider has been as perceptive a journalist-observer of the intersections between politics, digital life and media culture as you could hope to find.
At just under 200 pages, his new book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life, is brief but packed with insights into authors from Tocqueville to Cadwell Turnbull, Johan Huizinga to Mariame Kaba, Allen Ginsberg to Lani Grenier. If you weren’t aware of the “Californian ideology,” he’s got a great analysis of where it came from how it (still) works.
The main thrust of the book is his timely reflections on the very tricky business of designing democratic spaces—i.e., the organizations and groups most of us inhabit most of the time.
The critical thing is to design them so that they’re truly democratic, not just more instances of what Schneider calls the “implicit feudalism” of most digital life.
Mentioned in our conversation, two earlier books by Nathan:
* Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy (2018)— “Since the financial crash of 2008, the cooperative movement has been coming back with renewed vigor. Everything for Everyone chronicles this economic and social revolution—from taxi cooperatives that are keeping Uber and Lyft at bay, to an outspoken mayor transforming his city in the Deep South, to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin, to the rural electric co-op members who are propelling an aging system into the future. As these pioneers show, cooperative enterprise is poised to help us reclaim faith in our capacity for creative, powerful democracy.”
* Thank You, Anarchy (2013)—“This book charts the origins and growth of Occupy Wall Street through the eyes of some of its most determined organizers, who tried to give shape to an uprising always just beyond their control. I try to bring to life the General Assembly meetings, the chaotic marches, the split-second decisions, and the moments of doubt as Occupy swelled from a hashtag online into a global phenomenon. Thank You, Anarchy is a study of the spirit that drove this watershed movement. And, for those not faint of heart, it is also an invitation.”
Finally, Nathan is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado (Boulder), where he heads up the Media Economies Design Lab or MEDLab. You can sign up for their newsletter here.
See you next time—peace.
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Guest host Joe Waters (co-founder and CEO of Capita) joins Elias for a conversation with James R. Price, co-author with Kenneth R. Melchin of a new biography of the founder of the Peace Corps and head of Lyndon Johnson's War of Poverty in the 1960s. The focus is on the way Shriver (1915-2011) brought an instinctive spirituality to public service while avoiding sectarianism of any kind.
Price is the executive director of the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute.
Copies are available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/spiritualizing-politics-without-politicizing-religion-the-example-of-sargent-shriver-james-r-price/17522834.
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Pete and I talk to D.L. Mayfield, author of Unruly Saint, Dorothy Day's Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times.
This new biography puts a special focus on Dorothy as a mother and on the Depression-era launch of the Catholic Worker newspaper. Mayfield captures the charmed chaos of Catholic Worker houses, along with the enormous suffering that surrounded them in these years.
Mayfield recounts how a copy of Day's The Long Loneliness helped her find her way out of a scrupulous white evangelicalism toward a different kind of Christian witness.
Copies of the book are available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/unruly-saint-dorothy-day-s-radical-vision-and-its-challenge-for-our-times-d-l-mayfield/17308724
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A conversation with our first creative writer on the podcast, Evanston-based Joshua Corey, a poet, novelist, translator and critic. We talk about his remarkable longform poem, Hannah and the Master (a kind of dreamscape reflection on the intertwined lives of Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil and other figures) and his new novel, How Long Is Now.
Josh's personal site is here: http://www.joshua-corey.com/.
His wonderful substack column is here: https://joshuacorey.substack.com/.
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For this conversation, we join Joe Waters (of Capita)to talk to Mario Primicerio, now president of the La Pira Foundation, about his long friendship with fellow Florentine mayor, the late Giorgio La Pira. La Pira is remembered as being a bridge builder, working with Catholics and Communists in his beautiful Italian city in the late 1950s and 1960s. La Pira was also a friend of Thomas Merton and undertook a controversial mission to Hanoi to meet with Ho Chi Minh at the height of the Vietnam War.
The occasion for our conversation is Solidarity Hall's forthcoming release of a biography of La Pira, The Power of Hope. (Ordering info on the Solidarity Hall website: https://solidarityhall.org/.)
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Pete and I talk to Mike Budde about his new book, Foolishness to Gentiles, a collection of powerful essays asking how Christians can justify killing so many other Christians (Ukraine as only the latest instance), whether Dorothy Day is best understood as an anarchist, and how the Church could become an authentic counter-culture.
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Pete describes himself as a capital P pragmatist (and a small D democrat) and offers us his take on this school of thought. In this chat we take a quick tour starting (naturally) with William James before getting to two of Pete's former teachers, both pragmatists: Cornel West and Roberto Mangabeira Unger (the guy in the headshot). Let's hear it for "democratic experimentalism"!
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A conversation about Solidarity Hall's new translation of the Reflections of Fr. Josemaria Arizmendi, the founder of the Mondragon cooperatives. Elias and Pete talk about the nature of Arizmendi's social vision, the power of cooperative culture, and the workplace as a center of social transformation.
To download a free PDF of the new translation, go here: https://solidarityhall.org/in_action/arizmendi-reflections-translation/.
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We talk with Pete about his law school graduation address that went crazy viral and led to his new book about the nature of "long-haul" commitment. And about remarkable people with remarkable accomplishments who show us how to make those choices to stick with a vision.
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Pete and I talk with Bob Elder about his new biography of the infamous John C. Calhoun, the spiritual founder of the Southern Confederacy and its economic foundation in slavery. We explore the range of Calhoun's ideas and why some of them--such as his views on secession--are not (like Calhoun himself) dead and buried but still alive in numerous places today.
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Pete and I talk to Israeli-born Canadian author and activist Daphna Levit about her new book of essays recovering the wide spectrum of dissenting Jewish ideas about Zionism. Beginning with founding figures like Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha'am, she highlights voices and views of Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Noam Chomsky, and Hannah Arendt, among several contemporary writers.
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This country's 3 million Black Catholics in the U.S. recently got the news that Archbishop Wilton Gregory (Washington DC) has become the first African American cardinal. Why then have the U.S. bishops not publicly acknowledged the Black Lives Matters movement? We talk to Black Catholic seminarian and musician Nate Tinner-Williams about this question and his move from evangelical Christianity to Roman Catholicism and how it led him to a discovery of the roots of Black Catholicism in the U.S.
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Pete's back and he joins Elias in interviewing Fred Dewey, author of The School of Public Life and a political/cultural activist. In the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, Fred helped lead a decade-long effort to establish neighborhood councils, now about one hundred, for the City of Los Angeles. Until 2010, he was director of Beyond Baroque, a poetry and cultural center in Venice CA, where projects included bringing segregated neighborhoods into dialogue through poetry. Over the last decade, Dewey has conducted free, public working groups in California and across Europe, at community centers, squats, schools, art spaces, and other sites, using the writings of Hannah Arendt. His Portable Polis, in 2017, met at ten sites across Berlin with Arendt texts on the purposes of each. He is based in LA and Brussels.
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Why has the literature of ancient Greece always cast such a spell over modern readers? I dust off my own rusty skills in Greek with Dan Walden, a member of the classics department at the University of Michigan, as we discuss the Iliad, Sappho's poetry, and Plato’s Symposium—and why we share an enthusiasm for them in the original Greek.
Along the way, we somehow manage to talk about St. Gregory of Nyssa, Tom Stoppard’s play, The Invention of Love, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”.
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A conversation about Cadwell's debut novel, The Lesson, a post-colonial vision of an alien invasion of the U.S. Virgin Islands (in a blue-white seashell-shaped craft) with a series of wonderfully bizarre twists. We also talk about growing up in the islands, the importance of creating a culture of cooperatives and cooperation, and a future fiction project.
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The subtitle of the latest book from the wonderfully literate Scott Beauchamp is "Reunderstanding My Military Experience as a Critique of Modern Culture." In this conversation, Scott and I talk about boredom, ritual, community, honor, and the symbolism of cigarettes. Other topics are the war poetry of David Jones, the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han, and his new book about dead malls and the sublime.
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A conversation about Andres' friendship with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his experiences as part of her winning 2018 campaign, the Green New Deal initiative, and (with Pete's help) how to deconstruct "The Lion King."
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Chicago not only has a new mayor but new politics, including grassroots initiatives such as the Kola Nut Collaborative, a hybrid of timebanking and community organizing. Pete and I get a read on all these things from Mike Strode, the founder of the KNC, about his path to the cooperative movement and four of his creative inspirations: Steve Biko, Ralph Ellison, Hoyt Fuller, and Hubert Harrison.
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Pete and I talk to Eric Miller of Geneva College about why Christopher Lasch still matters and what we saw at the recent Front Porch Republic conference featuring Wendell Berry.
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