Sometimes I read something that both makes my editor’s heart go pitter-pat and feeds my spirit. Doug Muder, a writer I’m glad to be getting to know better, has posted The Go(o)d Crutch at his blog Free and Responsible Search. I heartily recommend it.
Blog
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Positive freedoms
Read an interesting interview with Francis Fukuyama about the difference between “negative freedoms” (freedom from) and “positive freedoms” (freedom to), and the challenges faced by modern liberal societies.
The practical problem is whether you can generate a set of values that will politically serve the integrating liberal purposes you want. This is complicated because you want those values to be positive and mean something, but you also can’t use them as the basis for exclusion of certain groups in society.
It is possible that we could succeed at doing one without the other. For example, the grounds of success of the American political experiment is that it has created a set of “positive” values that served as the basis for national identity but were also accessible to people who were not white and Christian or in some way “blood and soil” related to Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders of the country.
These values are the content of the American Creed—belief in individualism, belief in work as a value, belief in the freedom of mobility and popular sovereignty.
Samuel Huntington calls these “Anglo-Protestant values,” but at this point they have become de-racinated from these roots. You can believe them no matter who you are or where you came from.
As kind of a practical solution to the positive value problem, it works pretty well.
As someone “ ‘blood and soil’ related to Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders of the country,” I can’t really comment on whether the values he lists have become de-racinated, but I think he has captured the core “positive freedoms” of America.
(From NPQ—New Perspectives Quarterly—via A&LD)
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Home again
Whew! The annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association was rewarding (who knew so many people like the magazine?), spending Monday doing tourist things was fantastic (I’d like to be able to visit the classical Chinese garden on a regular basis), but the flight home was absolutely terrible (American through Dallas-Fort Worth, with a night on a cot in the airport).
But at least I’m home, in the familiar heat and humidity of summertime Boston!
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Article on Quakers in Second Life
My article on Quakers in Second Life has been published in the June issue of 2Life Magazine (pdf download).
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Ten Commandments of Monthly Meetings for Business
Fantastic post by Johan Maurer at Can You Believe? on Ten Commandments of Monthly Meetings for Business
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A book review to dream about
As an editor who receives many unsolicited books for review, I sometimes dream of writing a book review like this one from the New York Times: An Assault on Hawaii. On Grammar Too.
On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.â€
And you would be spectacularly wrong.
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Survey of new food criticism
The Columbia Journalism review has an article about recent books that look at modern food production:
Organic food presently accounts for only 2.5 percent of all food sold in the United States–and that counts all the “industrial organic†food Pollan scorns. Are, then, these debates about the ethics and politics of food largely a pastime of a tiny elite–grist for editors’ dinner parties but of tiny relevance to most consumers, who rush to the nearest market and grab what they need?
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
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First farmers’ market purchases
The farmers market at Boston City Hall resumed this week, and today I bought a loaf of whole wheat bread and a dozen beautiful, large, brown, free-range, local eggs. Woot!