Reading influenced the journey that brought us to St. Francis Farm. We brought our questions and concerns to our reading and found further questions as well as clear statements of truths we had been groping toward. We found more helpful books at the farm when we arrived and guests have recommended and given others to us. These writings provide a context for our work and show us ways in which we need to grow. We always welcome reading suggestions.
Below are some books that we found especially helpful. Further down this page are quotations that we found thought-provoking--those from last year’s reading come first, followed by links to pages of topically grouped quotes that have been with us longer.
BOOKS
Spiritual Practice:
Deep and Simple: A Spiritual Path for Modern Times by Bo Lozoff
Dark Night Journey: Inward Re-patterning Toward a Life Centered in God by Sandra Cronk
A Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly
Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster
Reaching Out and The Road to Daybreak by Henri Nouwen
Sabbath by Wayne Muller
Simplicity: The Art of Living by Richard Rohr
Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity by Catherine Whitmire
There Is A Season by Joan Chittister
Ordinary Graces (anthology of short reading ed. by Lorraine Kisly)
Catholic Worker:
The Long Loneliness and Loaves and Fishes by Dorothy Day
Peter Maurin: Apostle to the World by Dorothy Day and Francis J. Sicius
Voices from the Catholic Worker ed. Rosalie Riegel Troester
Living an Alternative:
Plain and Simple by Sue Bender
Living More with Less by Doris Janzen Longacre
Following Christ in a Consumer Culture by J. F. Kavanaugh
Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann and Thomas Naylor
When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough by Rabbi Harold Kushner
The Shelter of Each Other by Mary Pipher (focused on families)
Ivan Illich’s books, especially Toward a History of Needs
Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers
Economics/Work:
The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich
Wendell Berry’s essay collections, perhaps especially The Gift of Good Land and Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community and Citizenship Papers
The Case Against the Global Economy, anthology edited by Jerry Mander and Oliver Goldsmith
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben
Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh by Helena Norberg-Hodges (case study
of a tribal culture’s collision with the global economy)
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
On Economics and Ethics and Poverty and Famines by Amartya Sen
Community:
Community and Growth by Jean Vanier
Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen
Returning to the Teachings by Rupert Ross (description of Native healing/restorative
justice processes for dealing with trauma and offenses)
Education/Raising Children:
What Kids Really Want That Money Can’t Buy: Tips for Parenting in a Commercial World by Betsy Taylor
Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood by Susan Linn
The Shelter of Each Other by Mary Pipher (focused on families)
And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment and Emotional Violence by James Garbarino and Ellen deLara
To Know As We Are Known by Parker Palmer
Other:
Goatwalking by Jim Corbett (about economics, community, ecology, Scripture, goat care, survival in the wild, and the Sanctuary movement)
Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools by Greg Mortenson (stories of his work partnering with villagers in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan to build coeducational schools)
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
Links to Quotes pages:
Living an alternative
There is a big difference between having many choices and making a choice. Making a choice—declaring what is essential—creates a framework for a life that eliminates many choices but gives meaning to the things that remain. --Plain and Simple by Sue Bender
Community
Community is a place where people can live truly as human beings, where they can be healed and strengthened in their deepest emotions, and where they can walk towards unity and inner freedom. As fears and prejudices diminish and trust in God and others grows, the community can radiate and witness to a style and quality of life which will bring a solution to the troubles of our world. The response to war is to live like brothers and sisters. The response to injustice is to share. The response to prejudice and hatred is forgiveness. To work for community is to work for humanity.
--Community and Growth by Jean Vanier
Economics
The primary cause of our crises is [not] human nature...but rather a relentlessly expanding economic system that is steamrolling both people and the planet. Unfortunately, this system has grown so large that it has become difficult to recognize it as human-made.--From the Afterword to the 2nd edition of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh by Helena Norberg-Hodges
Education/ Raising Children
The most valuable form of activism in this day and age may be to explore a lifestyle based around simple living and simple joy. It make take toning down our materialistic demands and figuring out how to live on less income, but that process itself will begin to save some of the world’s resources and thereby address many of the world’s pressing problems, as well as give us more time with our families and communities....
It is activism to explain to our kids the hype and deceit involved with the endless ads which incite them to buy something new or get in on the latest craze. Our kids may be deeper if we treat them with depth. Our kids may be deeper if we are. No guarantees, but they’ll certainly have a better chance. --Deep and Simple by Bo Lozoff
Work/Service
Self-righteous service is impressed with the ‘big deal’...True service finds it almost impossible to distinguish the small from the large service...Self-righteous service is temporary...True service acts from ingrained patterns of living. It springs spontaneously to meet human need. Self-righteous service puts others into its debt and becomes one of the most subtle and destructive forms of manipulation. True service builds community. -- The Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster
The moral challenge is...to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an economically unequal world real work, labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world, tends to vanish from sight.--Barbara Ehrenreich in Global Woman
Spiritual Practice
The presence of God can be practiced anywhere, anytime, because nothing is excluded. Look around you right now. You’re on hallowed ground. God is here. Our spiritual journey is not to make anything more holy, but only to drop every barrier, every addiction, every bit of pettiness, gossip, greed, pride, and delusion, which blocks us from seeing how holy everything already is. --Deep and Simple by Bo Lozoff
Queries
Contemporary Christians find that they face many of the same questions as the early hermits. How does one find one’s true self? How can we learn to see what is illusory and what is real? How do certain elements in our society’s value structure block our ability to hear God’s call? What does it mean to live a life of prayer? How can we find a firm foundation on which to build our lives? -- Dark Night Journey by Sandra Cronk
![Recent Reading
from Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers
Will pursuing more and more digital connectedness make us smarter and more creative? Will it help us understand one another better? When we’re all hyper-connected, will our families and communities be stronger? Will we build better organizations and lead more prosperous lives?
Does your screen time help you think and work better? Does it deepen ties to friends? Do you come away in a better state of mind than you were to begin with?
What are the best uses of this device? How is this device affecting me and my experience? Is it altering how I think or feel, changing the rhythm of my days? Are the effects good or bad?
The only way to cultivate a happy inner life is to spend time there, and that’s impossible when you’re constantly attending to the latest distraction.
The point isn’t that the screen is bad . . . The point is lack of proportion, the abandonment of all else and the strange absent-present state of mind this compulsion produces.
from The Consumer Society anthology, edited by Neva Goodwin, Frank Ackerman and David Kiron
Everyone cannot simultaneously succeed in getting ahead.
The rich damage the environment through high consumption levels, and the poor damage the environment by being forced to utilize marginal and fragile ecosystems.
As yesterday’s novel pleasures become today’s habits and tomorrow’s socially defined necessities, maintaining the same level of pleasure requires new levels of consumption.
from What Matters? by Wendell Berry
We are involved in an economic disaster in which the production of monetary wealth involves the destruction of necessary goods.
The advantage of diverse local land-based economics is not luxury and extravagance for a few but a modest, decent, sustainable prosperity for many.
From the point of view of community it is not an improvement when the number of employed workers is reduced by the introduction of labor-saving machinery. . . By using more people to do better work, the economic need is met, but so are other needs that are social, ecological and cultural.
the difference between a competent poverty and abject poverty . . . A home landscape enables personal subsistence but also generosity. It enables community to exist and function.
from Toward a History of Needs by Ivan Illich
[Crisis] can mean the instant of choice, that moment when people become aware of their self-imposed cages and of the possibility of a different life.
What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.
Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture . . . and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich.
To grow up one needs access to things, to places, and to processes, to events and records. One needs to see, to touch, to tinker with, to grasp whatever there is in a meaningful setting. This access is now largely denied. . . Access to reality constitutes a fundamental alternative in education to a system that only purports to teach about it.
from The Road to Daybreak by Henri Nouwen
I have to keep a careful eye on the difference between urgent things and important things. If I allow the urgent things to dominate my day, I will never do what is truly important and will always feel dissatisfied.
Being poor is what Jesus invites us to, and that is much harder than serving the poor. The unnoticed, unspectacular, unpraised life in solidarity with people who cannot give anything that makes us feel important is far from attractive. It is the way to poverty. Not an easy way, but God’s way, the way of the cross.
I realize that islands of anger, bitterness and resentment still lie hidden in my heart. . . I divide [people] between those who are for me and those who are against me, those whom I like and those whom I do not like. . . My inner life is so filled with opinions, judgments, and prejudices about my “brothers and sisters” that real peace is far away.
We know what we most need, but we just don’t get around to it since we are so busy playing with our toys. There is so much to play with! No real time to grow up and do the necessary thing: love God and each other.](Readings_files/shapeimage_2.png)
