Creating the Future one Mustard Seed at a Time
habits of the heart - leadership for the common good
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who spoke to the assembled Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference this summer - on Covenant, has a couple of books worth looking at together: The Dignity of Difference, and more recently, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (Continuum, 2007). He argues for a third model, beyond multiculturalism - which can become a new tribalism: he argues for integration without assimilation. He is thinking of Britain, and how Britain needs to form a new identity as a society.
"We need to think in terms of covenant, not just contract. Contract is about what the individual gets from the state in return for laws and taxes. Covenant is about the values we share and the identity we construct together. Freedom needs a society as well as a state." (234)
"Identity, community, society - these abstractions become real in the doing. We are what we make, and when we make something together we become something together." (230)
I've been thinking about the congregations with whom I worship on Sunday - and how (as one former lay leader put it) we need some thing to do together to focus us as a community - and that needs to be something beyond our own self-maintenance.
A friend has been nudging me toward a junction of some of her long-term interests - community gardens, cultural heritage centers - to which I'd add revival of home arts (see, I was taking notes at the recession preparedness dinner) ... they work together.
Who knew? Paul Lee, Alan Chadwick, folk music & traditional woodworking skills all on the same page...
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"We need to think in terms of covenant, not just contract. Contract is about what the individual gets from the state in return for laws and taxes. Covenant is about the values we share and the identity we construct together. Freedom needs a society as well as a state." (234)
"Identity, community, society - these abstractions become real in the doing. We are what we make, and when we make something together we become something together." (230)
I've been thinking about the congregations with whom I worship on Sunday - and how (as one former lay leader put it) we need some thing to do together to focus us as a community - and that needs to be something beyond our own self-maintenance.
A friend has been nudging me toward a junction of some of her long-term interests - community gardens, cultural heritage centers - to which I'd add revival of home arts (see, I was taking notes at the recession preparedness dinner) ... they work together.
Who knew? Paul Lee, Alan Chadwick, folk music & traditional woodworking skills all on the same page...
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Eliacin Rosario-Cruz (Community Host) on -
John,
These are very interesting topics. Becoming is a word is that is, well becoming, very important to me. The process of molting and organically (while very intentionally) becoming.
Some of us with more of radical christian anarchist views, see the local church as something of a collective and co-ops- in which people are part of exactly those "values we share and the identity we construct together." More of a place to belong and become that a text to subscribe to.
Paz,
Eliacin
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Permalink Reply by John Leech on
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a place to belong and become - and a community to celebrate with
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