Reading influenced the journey that brought us to St. Francis Farm, answering some of our questions, raising more, and giving clear shape to ideas and concerns that we’d only begun to grasp. We found other helpful books at the farm when we arrived; 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.
Below is a list of some books that we found especially helpful, followed by some of our favorite quotations and questions on a wide variety of subjects.
We always welcome reading suggestions–please send yours!
BOOK LIST:
Spiritual Practice:
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World by Wangari Maathai
Made for Goodness by Desmond and Mpho Tutu
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, The Road to Daybreak, and The Way of the Heart 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:
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Seeds of Destruction and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
Laudato Si’ (On Care for our Common Home) and Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All) by Pope Francis
Engaging the Powers by Walter Wink
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
Oil and Honey by Bill McKibben
Economics/Work:
Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) by Pope Francis
Thieves of State by Sarah Chayes (looks at political and economic injustice and the relationship between corruption and terrorism)
Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert (examines the rise of capitalism, wage labor, globalization etc)
Wendell Berry’s essay collections, perhaps especially The Gift of Good Land and Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community andCitizenship Papers
The Consumer Society, anthology, edited by Neva Goodwin, Frank Ackerman and David Kiron
The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich
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
What Money Can’t Buy by Michael J. Sandel
Community/Service:
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)
The Green Boat by Mary Pipher
Search for Silence by Elizabeth O’Connor
Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown (on how our wish to belong and fit with like-minded folks drives our polarized politics and keeps us lonely, and how we could build real community instead)
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman (arguing that there is more goodness in us than we usually admit, and considering how this knowledge might help us bring out the best in each other)
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
The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well by Madeline Levine (clinical psychologist)
Other:
Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis
Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Unbowed by Wangari Maathai (memoir of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist, tree-planter and educator, dealing with religion, ecology, economics, colonialism, human rights and more)
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu (memoir describing how and why the grandson of a Mexican immigrant joined, and then left, the Border Patrol; also describing his later civilian advocacy for a detainee)
Goatwalking by Jim Corbett (about economics, community, ecology, Scripture, goat care, survival in the wild, and the Sanctuary movement)
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
You Are Not Your Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding (suggestions for understanding the stories we tell ourselves and the habits we form, and making both clearer and more constructive)
Quotes from our recent reading, updated January 2021):
From Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass:
If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.
My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide.
Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.
If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer. . . All of our flourishing is mutual.
In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undercuts an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The [Onondaga] Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need.
From Pope Francis’ Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All):
I offer this social Encyclical as a modest contribution to continued reflection, in the hope that in the face of present-day attempts to eliminate or ignore others, we may prove capable of responding with a new vision of fraternity and social friendship that will not remain at the level of words. Although I have written it from the Christian convictions that inspire and sustain me, I have sought to make this reflection an invitation to dialogue among all people of good will.
Nowadays, what do certain words like democracy, freedom, justice or unity really mean? They have been bent and shaped to serve as tools for domination, as meaningless tags that can be used to justify any action.
Amid the fray of conflicting interests, where victory consists in eliminating one’s opponents, how is it possible to raise our sights to recognize our neighbours or to help those who have fallen along the way? …. We are growing ever more distant from one another…
To care for the world in which we live means to care for ourselves. Yet we need to think of ourselves more and more as a single family dwelling in a common home. Such care does not interest those economic powers that demand quick profits… In this shallow, short-sighted culture that we have created, bereft of a shared vision, “it is foreseeable that, once certain resources have been depleted, the scene will be set for new wars, albeit under the guise of noble claims”.
Today too, outside the ancient town walls lies the abyss, the territory of the unknown, the wilderness. Whatever comes from there cannot be trusted, for it is unknown, unfamiliar, not part of the village. It is the territory of the “barbarian”, from whom we must defend ourselves at all costs. As a result, new walls are erected for self-preservation, the outside world ceases to exist and leaves only “my” world, to the point that others, no longer considered human beings possessed of an inalienable dignity, become only “them”. Once more, we encounter “the temptation to build a culture of walls, to raise walls, walls in the heart, walls on the land, in order to prevent this encounter with other cultures, with other people. And those who raise walls will end up as slaves within the very walls they have built. They are left without horizons, for they lack this interchange with others.
…Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of “them” and “those”, but only “us”…If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might rediscover once for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human family can experience a rebirth, with all its faces, all its hands and all its voices, beyond the walls that we have erected.
For Christians, the words of Jesus have an even deeper meaning. They compel us to recognize Christ himself in each of our abandoned or excluded brothers and sisters (cf. Mt 25:40.45)….
I sometimes wonder why, in light of this, it took so long for the Church unequivocally to condemn slavery and various forms of violence. Today, with our developed spirituality and theology, we have no excuses. Still, there are those who appear to feel encouraged or at least permitted by their faith to support varieties of narrow and violent nationalism, xenophobia and contempt, and even the mistreatment of those who are different. Faith, and the humanism it inspires, must maintain a critical sense in the face of these tendencies, and prompt an immediate response whenever they rear their head.
We need to develop the awareness that nowadays we are either all saved together or no one is saved. Poverty, decadence and suffering in one part of the earth are a silent breeding ground for problems that will end up affecting the entire planet. If we are troubled by the extinction of certain species, we should be all the more troubled that in some parts of our world individuals or peoples are prevented from developing their potential and beauty by poverty or other structural limitations. In the end, this will impoverish us all.
From Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Destruction:
If God has become man, then no Christian is ever allowed to be indifferent to man’s fate. Whoever believes that Christ is the Word made flesh believes that every man must be in some sense regarded as Christ…
We have to remember the terrible danger of projecting onto others all the evil we find in ourselves, so that we justify our own hatred and destructiveness by directing them against a projected evil.
…[Gandhi] recognized the impossibility of being peaceful and nonviolent if one submits passively to the insatiable requirements of a society maddened by overstimulation and obsessed with the demons of noise, voyeurism, and speed.
“Jesus died in vain,” said Gandhi, “if he did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love.”
The race question cannot be settled without a profound change of heart, a real shake-up… on the part of white America. It is not just a question of a little more good will and generosity: it is a question of waking up to crying injustices and deep-seated problems which are ingrained in the present setup and which, instead of getting better, are going to get worse.
“Crisis” means “judgment,” and the present is always being judged as it gives way to what was, yesterday, the future. . . true hope is that which finds motives for confidence precisely in the “crisis” which seems to threaten that which is dearest to us: for it is here above all that the power of God will break through the meaningless impasse of prejudices and cruelties in which we always tend to become entrapped.
It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are.
The Light in which we are one does not change.
From Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
Only he who loves can be sure that he is still in contact with the truth, which is in fact too absolute to be grasped by his mind.
Auschwitz was built and managed by dutiful, obedient men who loved their country, and who proved to themselves they were good citizens by hating their country’s enemies.
…In the long run, no one can show another the error that is within him, unless the other is convinced that his critic first sees and loves the good that is within him. So whole we are perfectly willing to tell our adversary he is wrong, we will never be able to do so effectively until we can ourselves appreciate where he is right. And we can never accept his judgment on our errors until he gives evidence that he really appreciates our own peculiar truth. Love, love only, love of our deluded fellow man as he actually is, in his delusion and in his sin: this alone can open the door to truth.
A society built on Christian principles is one in which every man has the right and opportunity to live in peace, to support himself by meaningful, decent, and productive work, work in which he has a considerable share of responsibility, work which is his contribution to the balance and order of a society in which a reasonable happiness is not impossible.
If we are fools enough to remain at the mercy of the people who want to sell us happiness, it will be impossible for us ever to be content with anything. How would they profit if we became content? We would no longer need their new product.
You can see the beauty of Christ in each individual person, in that which is most his, most human, most personal to him…
The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open.
From Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents:
“Whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection for the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”
“…amid talk of Muslim bans, nasty women and shithole nations, it was common to hear in certain circles the disbelieving cries of ‘This is not America,’ or ‘I don’t recognize my country,’ or ‘This is not who we are.’ Except that this was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not.”
“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy… Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that has been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things. ..many people—including those we might see as good and kind people—could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classic sense, not openly hateful of this or that group.”
“Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.”
“Dehumanization is a standard component in the manufacture of an out-group against which to pit an in-group, and it is a monumental task. It is a war against truth, against what the eye can see and what the heart could feel if allowed to do so on its own… …Dehumanize a group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it….Dehumanization distances not only the out-group from the in-group, but those in the in-group from their own humanity.”
“…the price we pay for our caste system: In places with a different history and hierarchy, it is not necessarily seen as taking away from one’s own prosperity if the system looks out for the needs of everyone.
People show a greater sense of joint responsibility to one another when they see their fellow citizens as like themselves… Societies can be more magnanimous when people perceive themselves as having an equal stake in the lives of their fellow citizens. There are thriving, prosperous nations where people do not have to sell their Nobel Prizes to get medical care, where families don’t go broke taking care of elderly loved ones, where children exceed the educational achievements of American children, where drug addicts are in treatment rather than in prison, where perhaps the greatest measure of human happiness—happiness and a long life—exists in greater measure because they value their shared commonality…
..A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy toward one’s fellows. The result is that the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the major countries of the world.”
“A world without caste would set everyone free.”
We also post quotes and photos weekly on our Facebook page
A few of our all-time favorite quotes, grouped by category:
On spiritual practice:
The practices of goodness–noticing, savoring, thinking, enjoying and being thankful–are not hard disciplines to learn. But they are disciplines, and they take practice. The habits that allow wrong to become entrenched–mindlessness, or tuning out, inattentiveness, the busyness of doing to distraction, and the ungrateful heart–can take hold so easily. Each habit that allows wrong to become entrenched feeds from the others. —Made for Goodness by Desmond and Mpho Tutu
Religion is not a nagging parent, nor is it a report card keeping track of our achievements and failures and grading our performance. Religion is a refining fire, helping us get rid of everything that is not us, everything that disturbs, dilutes or compromises the person we really want to be, until only our authentic selves remain —When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough by Rabbi Harold Kushner
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On 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
…if we just let the culture happen to us we end up rushed, stressed, addicted, unhealthy, and broke —The Green Boat by Mary Pipher
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On 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
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On 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
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. —What Matters by Wendell Berry
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On solidarity and scapegoating:
If God has become man, then no Christian is ever allowed to be indifferent to man’s fate. Whoever believes that Christ is the Word made flesh believes that every man must be in some sense regarded as Christ —Seeds of Destruction by Thomas Merton
We have to remember the terrible danger of projecting onto others all the evil we find in ourselves, so that we justify our own hatred and destructiveness by directing them against a projected evil–Ibid.
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On work:
Manual labor is physical, repetitive, never finished, always needing more attention, and something I can do while my mind is recollected. The most suitable work for a contemplative is hidden and necessary.–Humility Matters by M. Funk
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
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On 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
All genuine instruction ends in a kind of silence, for when I live it, it is no longer necessary for my speaking to be audible. –Sören Kierkegaard
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On 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
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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
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