For this year’s list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now. Then there’s secretary of defense robert gates, who wants to win wars, not just prep for them. Risky? Sure. But this is no time to play it safe.

The inspiration for the gathering began last year when Cindy Scroggins suggested it. The synergy began to build when Deron took up the cause and began to formulate a strategy for a gathering here in the countryside of rural Texas. It was clear to me as I watched folk arrive from across the U.S. that this was a microcosm of sorts, and watching that microcosmic community form I came away with some lasting impressions of its overall anatomy. 

The first was that each person arrived carrying into the setting their own fundamental goodness—that same goodness which is shared by every human being on the planet but which was fully mirrored in this collection of singular individuals. 

Second, as they came to know each other more directly and personally they did so with great care, recognizing the need for (and importance of) every age and type of human there as essential to the community. Over the course of the weekend, they practiced deep respect for one another through hours of intense listening and sharing enveloped in a cloud of good will and humor. 

Third, the sheer joy of human community was profoundly evident but only possible when something that could only be identified as “loving-kindness, care, and compassion” became the glue that bound the whole together. Love, in some fashion “showed up,” and the Flocker community jelled. 

Fourth, for the weekend to work, there had to exist a prior “constructed universe,” an open space available to allow the possibilities to emerge. You might think of it in terms of a kind of “embedded hierarchy of higher-order realities.” The first and foremost of those realities was nature itself without which we would never be—but which held us all so powerfully. Then there was the forethought of a decades-long tradition of co-housing and experimental living in intentional community which built the retreat space and made it available, and finally there were those of us committed to hospitality and the need to “get out of the way” long enough for something new to arrive and happen. It was a grand synergy that worked thanks to many minds, heads, hearts and hands. I am grateful for each person who came, for their care of each other, the land, and the human community. Each one now is very dear to me.

Nearly 20 years ago, Art Bell created the wildly popular radio program Coast to Coast, a wee-hour forum for weird science. We asked him why the show entertains, even encourages, the crazies.

In an interesting review of British critic, Terry Eagleton’s new book Faith, Reason and Revolution, on NYT’s Opinion page, Stanley Fish asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” After an exploration of answers from many perspectives, one conclusion reached is that faith in modern liberalism and science may have suppressed the possibility of a good-faith effort to understand the perennial religious quest and its possibilities, and suddenly modern men and women are awakening to larger questions.  ]]> http://www.clusterflock.org/2009/05/thoughts-on-god-talk.html/feed 4 http://www.clusterflock.org/2009/04/dolphins-and-the-pirates.html http://www.clusterflock.org/2009/04/dolphins-and-the-pirates.html#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:52:32 +0000 Lynn Bauman http://www.clusterflock.org/?p=22414

Thousands of dolphins blocked the suspected Somali pirate ships when they were trying to attack Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden, the China Radio International reported on Monday.

A child prodigy who became one of the founders of the controversial string theory (one that, in essence, picks up where Einstein left off) and one of the world’s leading cosmologists, is interviewed on his new book, The Physics of the Impossible.