Hospitality for the Coming Age

The Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren is truly sharing in the midst of scarcity! Especially in a city, land for graveyards is hard to come by (and even if it’s available, it may not be appropriately used as such). So the Highland Avenue CoB is sharing a beautiful garden for the classiest communal grave!
Read [...]

2. Amount of food grown for the meat industry
Does this even need to be mentioned? 1 pound of beef requires 8 pounds of grain (and tons of water, and leaves a bunch of pollution, but I’ll get to that later). Eating the grain would have saved everyone a lot of time, money and been gentler [...]

I get a lot of blank and bemused stares when I talk about food insecurity. Perhaps people are picturing a silo full of corn saying, “Please don’t make me go out there, I’m SO shy….” Now that WOULD be ridiculous. But the image of bountiful food not leaving storage is one accurate piece of food [...]

We look at monarchy and divine rule and communism and think that those people were duped by the ones in power.
We look at our society and government and pride ourselves on our enlightenment and freewill and liberty.
In truth, we have been duped as well, by weapons manufacturers telling us we need military to be safe, [...]

Eating locally may feel like an enormous challenge - and doing so 100% of the time really is! I hadn’t realized how well I was raised until I started doing my own grocery shopping and learned how expensive vegetables are at the grocery (especially salad in December, which is still my weakness). So if it’s [...]

Krista Tippett’s interviews with Majora Carter and Calvin DeWitt offer hope and wisdom for those in the “environmental” movement. Listen to the whole thing, or check out gems on:
the role of academic experts in the environmental movement
How did we trick ourselves into thinking that we would NOT know (or be able to learn) how to [...]

I can’t draw, so I’ll plug a visual representation of hosting important conversations on Dave Pollard’s blog. This is only a part of the image, so visit the site for the full sketchbook!

Dan Ulrich’s October sermon “Faith, Fear and Finances” has already gotten plenty of attention in the blogosphere. I’m posting about it anyway, to highlight something that Dan added for his second preaching of this great sermon, at the Richmond Church of the Brethren.
“We need more than frugality - we need generosity,” said Dan on Sunday. [...]

18 October 2008
Chris, my mom Rachel, and I went to Earlham alum Stephani Danyi’s presentation about transition towns during Earlham’s homecoming festivities.
Transition towns are towns/cities/rural areas that are relocalizing in preparation for energy descent. With oil, gas, water use and other resources peaking, we know energy descent is around the corner! We get to decide [...]

23 October 2008
Today Melissa Hill spoke at Bethany/ESR Peace Forum about third party politics.
Three-and-a-half years ago, Bill Kristol spoke at Earlham College.
Melissa is a volunteer coordinator for Ralph Nader/Matt Gonzalez in Indiana, and Florida, 2000 was bound to come up. When it did, tension filled the room and the decibels jumped. Quickly, the energy focused [...]