Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

These sentences are from a three-page personal letter written in 1966 by Thomas Merton to peace activist and Catholic Worker Jim Forest. Merton is responding to Forest’s despair at the mounting toll of deaths in the Vietnam War.

Near the end of the letter, Merton writes, “The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in the process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand…”

Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the Trappist monk, theologian, mystic poet and social activist, “teaches us how to live a life of conscience in difficult times,” as critic Robert Inchausti once put it. As popular with readers today as in his own lifetime, Merton is considered by many the most important Catholic writer in English of the 20th century.

Merton also possessed a sparkling intellect which combined the rigor of the New York intellectuals with the probity of the Desert Fathers. He speaks directly to our solitude through a rigorous examination of his own.

He was a professed member of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky, living there from 1941 until his death. Somehow he managed to write more than 50 books in a period of 27 years, along with many essays and reviews.

Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding, both within the tradition of Christianity and also between Eastern and Western faiths.

Some key takeaways from our conversation:

• Born in France, orphaned at 15, and educated in England, Merton was a quintessential “outsider” in American mid-century culture and the harbinger of a still-to-be-realized contemplative counterculture.

• We must grasp the distinction between our true and false selves, between the pseudo-identities we possess as conditioned members of society and the person we truly are, known only by God. (A key theme of his New Seeds of Contemplation.)

• In 1948, Merton published the book for which he is most famous: The Seven Storey Mountain, a memoir of his path to entering Gethsemani monastery at age 26. The book remained at the top of nonfiction bestseller lists for two years and made Merton the most famous monk in the world. Although he expressed misgivings in later years over the book’s zealous tone, it was (and still is) responsible for many conversions to Catholicism, the religious life, and faiths of all kinds.

• Connections to others of our Lost Prophets: His interest in what is now called eco-spirituality is seen in his correspondence with Rachel Carson. He was also a close collaborator with and friend to Daniel and Phil Berrigan, although they sometimes differed on the limits of radical witness.

• His association with Catholic Workers and his pacifism got Merton silenced for a time in the 1960s. He began privately publishing what came to be known as the Cold War Letters.

• His interest in Asian religions began in his teenage reading about Gandhi. He met Zen writer D.T. Suzuki in New York in 1964 which sparked his interest in the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, whose classic sayings he translated in 1965.

• He did not seek to convert to Buddhism nor did he wish for a syncretistic blend of world religions—only a deepening of true ecumenism.

Our guest, Nick Scrimenti, is a dialogue facilitator, spiritual director and educator. He studied theology at Georgetown and Harvard Divinity School — and lived and worked at the Bonnevaux Centre for Peace, a lay-monastic retreat center in rural France. He wrote the introduction to the Merton Annual’s publication of a 1976 letter written at Gethsemani by Fr. John Main, who with Merton helped revive the Christian contemplative tradition in the twentieth century.

Timestamps:

[00:03:30] — Pete & Elias on Merton’s place in the “web” of Lost Prophets and his counterculture contemporaries

[00:06:45] — Merton’s origins: born in wartime France, artist parents, orphaned young, perpetual wanderer across Europe and America

[00:17:00] — Columbia University, Mark Van Doren, the Great Books scene, Robert Lax, and the seeds of conversion

[00:37:00] — The conversion arc: Cambridge disgrace, a night on the floor in Rappahannock, the Cuba epiphany, Friendship House vs. Gethsemane, and choosing the Trappists

[00:48:00] — Entering Gethsemane; The Seven Storey Mountain, the monastic counterculture it sparked, and why it became the surprise bestseller of 1948

[01:22:00] — The false self vs. the true self; solitude as new birth; the Fourth & Walnut revelation; monasticism as counterculture

[01:36:00] — Engagement with the world: the peace movement, civil rights, Cold War Letters, correspondence with hundreds of people

[01:59:00] — The final years: a nurse named M, the Asia pilgrimage, Buddhist dialogue, meeting the Dalai Lama, and Merton’s mysterious death

[02:19:00] — Interview with Nick Scrimenti on Merton’s legacy, Fr. John Main, contemplation vs. the attention economy, and monasticism for today

Recommended:

• The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)—an autobiography of a mind which has encountered writers like William Blake, Etienne Gilson, and Aldous Huxley amidst world war and cultural upheaval.

• Wisdom of the Desert (1960)—Reflections on the lives and spirituality of ancient Christianity’s Desert Fathers of Egypt, Arabia, and Palestine.

• New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)—Considered a classic text on Christian practices of meditation and contemplation.

• Way of Chuang Tzu (1965)—Merton’s translation and interpretation of this sage of early Taoism.

• Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)—Notes, opinions, experiences, and reflections on political, social, racial and culture topics of all kinds.

• Mystics and Zen Masters (1967)—Reflections on early monasticism, Russian Orthodox spirituality, the Shakers, and Zen Buddhism seen as different ways of pursuing The Way.

• Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968)—Essays exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen.

• Asian Journal (1968)—Notes on his travels across Bangkok, India and Ceylon in the last year of his life, including the address he gave only hours before his untimely death.

• “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother”—Merton’s short 1966 essay, originally published in Jubilee magazine, declaring his solidarity with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and making the case for a brotherhood that transcends nationality, religion, and politics.

• Raids on the Unspeakable (1966)—A collection of essays, meditations, and prose poems, including “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Merton’s celebrated reflection on solitude, nature, and resistance to the consuming logic of modern life.

• When Prophecy Still Had a Voice: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax (2001)—All 346 known letters between Merton and his closest friend, spanning thirty years from Columbia to Bangkok.

• The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (1984)—Michael Mott’s biography of Merton, drawing on private journals and interviews to tell the full story of his life.

• “Thomas Merton: The Monk Who Became a Prophet”—Alan Jacobs’s essay in The New Yorker, written on the 50th anniversary of Merton’s death, tracing his spiritual and artistic development from turbulent youth to contemplative prophet.

• Meditation en Masse—an article by Erik Braun on the colonial roots of the mindfulness boom.

• From Deus in Adiutorium to Maranatha: Colonialism and Reform in John Main’s Hindu Encounter (2021)—an article by our guest Nick Scrimenti on John Main’s hybrid method of Christian contemplation, drawing on meditation techniques of Swami Satyananda and the “prayer formula” of 4th century Christian theologian John Cassian.

• No Man Is an Island — an essay by Nick Scrimenti in Commonweal about the relationship between therapy, spirituality, and asceticism

• Fr. Matthew Kelty has a homily on “Desolation Row” in this collection

Part I – Encountering Illich: Personal Journey & Prophetic Voices

“Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils, nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software in the classroom, nor even the attempt to expand the teacher’s responsibility until it engulfs students’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs, which heighten the opportunity for each person to transform each moment of living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” —Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

I first encountered Ivan Illich when I was young, reading beyond my comprehension but not beyond my intuition. His writing cut against the triumphalism of modern Western institutions. He spoke less like a social theorist than a prophet—naming the ways systems designed to serve human flourishing could slowly invert and dominate it. I return to Illich now with decades of experience inside the institutions he critiqued—schools, bureaucracies, programs that both empower and suffocate. Time has not dulled his relevance. If anything, technological acceleration and institutional decay have made his questions sharper.

What drew me most to Illich was his image of “educational webs.” Not funnels, not pipelines, but networks of human connection—relationships that allow each moment of life to become one of learning, sharing, and caring. The metaphor is simple, but radical. It shifts the locus of education from institutions to relationships, from credentialing to loving encounter.

Illich stands alongside figures such as Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, who gave language to liberation in an age of industrial expansion. Together they formed a mid-20th-century chorus warning that progress, if detached from humility and community, would erode the very humanity it claimed to advance. Illich’s words are not artifacts stuck in the past. They remain a living invitation to reimagine how we learn, how we build, and how we live together.

Part II – Antichrist, Institutions, and Integrity

In his Lost Prophets interview, David Cayley describes Illich’s critique as striking at the sacred cows of modern life—education, medicine, transportation, development—institutions that had become, in Illich’s phrase, “terminally counter-productive.” They began as expressions of care. Over time, they hardened into systems that displaced human agency.

Illich was not a reactionary or a Luddite. He was a radical Catholic and a cultural critic who understood how institutions born of love could become idols. Cayley names Illich’s most unsettling claim: when institutions claim to embody love and compassion, yet become compulsory and self-perpetuating, they begin to resemble the Antichrist. Not because they are evil in origin, but because they substitute mechanisms for mercy and administration for relationships.

The language is jarring. Yet it cuts across contemporary ideological lines. On the right, figures such as Peter Thiel warn of stagnation and cast climate activism or government regulation as civilizational threats to technological progress. On the left, professionalized social change leaders speak the language of justice while presiding over multimillion-dollar nonprofits that can become as self-protective as the corporations they critique. Both camps risk externalizing the danger. The enemy is always “out there”: the state, the market, the other tribe.

Illich’s warning runs deeper. The Antichrist is not merely an opposing ideology or political adversary. It is the moment when power disguises itself as salvation.

It is the temptation—present in founders, executives, activists, technologists—to believe that one’s own system, scaled sufficiently, can redeem the world. The most dangerous person in the world is not the declared villain, but the one who mistakes a half-truth for the whole, and with reckless certainty lives that lie as if it were truth itself.

This conviction shaped Illich’s most radical act: shutting down CIDOC, the Center for Intercultural Documentation he founded in Cuernavaca. CIDOC had become a seedbed for liberation theology and a magnet for thinkers from around the world. It was influential, well-funded, and growing. Most founders would have scaled and institutionalized. Illich shut it down. What looked like madness was, for him, integrity. He sensed the gravitational pull toward bureaucracy, the subtle shift from conversation to program, from encounter to institution. What looked like madness, even self-sabotage, was for him an act of integrity.

Real prophets are dangerous. They refuse co-optation. They stand outside the system’s logic, even at the cost of their own survival. Unlike today’s professionalized social change sector, Illich lived closer to the prophetic edge.

But history shifted in the 1970s. Counterculture was absorbed into capitalism. Steve Jobs traveled to India, lived in a commune, returned to California, and transformed that ethos into a trillion-dollar company. “Think Different” became the slogan of the new establishment. The outsider became the operator.

Illich was different. He was not an operator. He was a founder. A prophet. He would rather dismantle what he built than watch it calcify into the very structure he opposed.

Part III – Purity, Paradox, and the Invitation

Illich’s critique leaves us with a tension: the purity of the prophet versus the compromised reality of life inside institutions. It is one thing to stand outside and critique, another to live within the mess of the world. Institutions are flawed because we are flawed—our insecurities, our hunger for power, our tendency toward hierarchy are etched into them.

It is tempting to imagine a society of outsiders, a community of prophets. But there is no such thing. In my faith, Christ is the only sinless figure. The rest of us must live in history, choosing again and again between pride and humility, domination and service.

This is where I part ways with those who critique from a distance. We cannot escape the world. We all have to get our hands dirty. There is no life outside of time, no humanity outside of society.

Thich Nhat Hanh once described ideology as blindness; systems of thought that calcify into prisons. The Buddha taught that the way forward is direct experience: breathing, meditating, walking. Yet even Buddhism became an ideology. Even the sutras hardened into doctrine.

The same is true of Deschooling Society. Illich’s vision of webs of learning, mutual aid, and direct encounters is compelling. But once turned into dogma, even deschooling risks becoming another ideology. The scale of the modern world complicates the question. Eight billion people. Hundreds of trillions of dollars circulating through capital markets. The challenge is not whether small communities can flourish; they can. The question is how freedom and dignity endure at scale.

Today, some of Illich’s arguments are weaponized by free-market advocates. Compulsory schooling is being deconstructed through vouchers and “school choice” rooted in Milton Friedman’s economics. Microschools and learning pods proliferate, while public schools fragment further. Public education fails in many ways, yet for all its flaws, it remains one of our last civic commons. To abandon it entirely is to concede another public square to privatization and tribalism. The task is not escape, but reinvention.

This is Illich’s paradox. His critique cut to the roots of the Church, the State, the School, the Hospital. But his free associations never hardened into an alternative system. He was not a policymaker, nor did he try to be. Critiques without solutions leave the door open for domination to persist—first by the state, and then, in its absence, by the private market. Neither serves human freedom, nor aligns with our highest purpose and deepest love: to be creators in the image of God. By refusing to engage capital markets, Illich and other prophets left the field open for neoliberals to seize the global economy. Power does not disappear; it relocates. And yet this was his role: not to build institutions, but to bear witness to their corruption.

Which brings me back to his gift: the ability to hold paradoxes, and to trust in God. We cannot live from fixed truths or rigid ideologies. We must stay open to relationships, open to surprise, open to the Spirit’s whisper in the midst of confusion.

Universal education, for Illich, was never a destination. It was an invitation to transform each moment of life into one of learning, sharing, and caring; to see and be seen.

That invitation is still with us. It asks us not to withdraw from institutions nor to worship them, but to inhabit them with humility and courage. It is intergenerational. It is fragile and demanding. But it is also simple: love God, love your neighbor, and keep making the world anew, even in the ruins of our institutions.

Alfredo Mathew III is an educator, entrepreneur, and systems builder with more than 25 years of experience at the intersection of teaching, entrepreneurship, and community wealth building. His work has taken him from classrooms in the South Bronx and Oakland to launching hundreds of Black- and Brown-owned businesses and designing the first Shared Prosperity Community Corporation. Across each chapter, he has pursued a single question: how to build an economy where work leads to ownership, dignity, and agency. Follow his writing at his Shared Prosperity substack and personal substack.

If you would like to join Alfredo in submitting a reflection to the Lost Prophets community, please email LostProphetsPodcast@gmail.com. And if you would like to record an audio message or question we might play on the show, call our new voicemail line at ‪703-662-3046‬.

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“If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.”

Gloria Jean Watkins, born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1952, once said she chose her public name—bell hooks—as a way of honoring a woman who had gone before her: her maternal great-grandmother, who was known for her sharp tongue. She also wanted to step away from her parents’ choice of Gloria Jean, which she thought “a southern belle’s name.” Her preference for using the lower case may derive from the 1960s fashion of making your own ego secondary to the cause.

The author of over 40 books of essays, poetry, children’s literature, and scholarly articles, hooks’ subjects were love, race, class, gender, art, mass media, sexuality, and feminism.

Some key takeaways from our conversation:

• Born a half century after civil rights pioneer Ella Baker, her feminism picks up the struggle for Black women to be heard.

• She saw the creeping nihilism damaging much of Black life (and American life generally) as stemming from her four-headed ideological enemy: "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy"

• Her intersectionality is about the interconnectedness of issues, similar to the way King realized at one point that the Vietnam War was not a separate issue from civil rights.

• She liked to say her goal was not to become an elite intellectual but “to produce theory people could use.”

• Her small town Kentucky origins strongly shaped her later life as she explored both her unhappiness as a child and the warmth of her agrarian community. She also developed a warm friendship with fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry.

• She identified with (and embodied) Cornel West’s idea of an “organic intellectual” who never forgot her roots.

• She used the reach of popular culture—especially film—as a way of connecting more directly with her students.

• Her spirituality, which began in her Stanford years in an encounter with Gary Snyder’s Buddhism, grew as she aged and became a driving passion of her life.

Timestamps:

[00:10:00] Spiritual Influences: Discussion of how the dialogues between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan helped hooks unite spiritual quest with radical activism.

[00:14:00] Ain’t I a Woman?: Background on hooks’ 1982 foundational third-wave feminist text that addressed the unique oppression of black women.

[00:31:30] Intellectual Discipline: A look at hooks’ daily routine, which included waking early to read one non-fiction book a day and limiting internet and cell phone use.

[00:42:30] “Homeplace” as Resistance: Analysis of hooks’ argument that the private home serves as a radical site of resistance and a sanctuary from public oppression.

[00:51:30] The Love Trilogy: Exploration of hooks’ best-selling books on love, where she defines love as a “verb” and an active practice within community.

[01:05:30] Connection to Wendell Berry: Discussion of hooks’ 2009 book Belonging and her shared vision with Berry regarding land, rural life, and Kentucky roots.

[01:20:30] Interview with Nadra Nittle: A conversation with the author of bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision.

Recommended:

• Ain’t I A Woman (1982)—her breakout first book, looking at the condition of Black women from the time of slavery through 1980

• Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)

• Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991)—conversations with her friend Cornel West

• Teaching to Transgress (1994)—strongly influenced by Paulo Freire

• Outlaw Culture (1994)—essays on culture, including pop star Madonna, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy, and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X

• Bone Black (1996)—hooks’ luminous memoir of her girlhood in rural Kentucky

• All About Love: New Visions (1999)—the first of three books on love

• Salvation: Black People and Love (2001)

• Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002)

• Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism (2006)—conversations with the Latina artist and scholar Amalia Mesa-Bains

• Belonging: A Culture of Place (2008)—reflections on her rediscovery of her native region, including an interview with her friend Wendell Berry

• bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle (2023)

Who was Holly Whyte? Richard K. Rein’s excellent 2022 biography, American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life, attempts to list his many personae: “magazine editor, author, urbanist, urban anthropologist, filmmaker, pundit, public intellectual, politician (unelected and behind the scenes), consultant, teacher, mentor (to, seemingly, hundreds), as well as husband and father.”

Born in 1917, he served in the Second World War at Guadalcanal. After the war, he joined Fortune magazine, where he coined the term “groupthink,” a fitting phrase for his big assignment of 1955-6: writing a book-length profile of American corporate culture in hopes of capturing its future direction.

That meant: rising suburbia, the gray flannel suit, the steno pool, bridge clubs, and the importance of being “well adjusted.” (“To what?” he asked. “Nobody really knows.”)

In his many interviews with CEOs as well as “middle managers” for The Organization Man, Whyte caught the shift away from the individualistic Protestant ethic toward a new conformity—really an idolatry (in his words) of the system, along with the misuse of science. (By the latter, he meant the tools of social science like personality tests.)

The other great subject for Whyte was the life of cities, especially their street life, a topic on which he served as mentor to urbanist Jane Jacobs. (See our conversation about her here.) His The Last Landscape has been seen as the Silent Spring of urban sprawl and the loss of urban open space — and his Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is a bible for placemakers to this day.

Our guest, Alexandra Whyte, is the daughter of Holly Whyte.

Key takeaways from our conversation:

• Whyte was one of the chroniclers of the Age of Conformity, as the 1950s are often thought of. On the model of the Cold War’s “containment” policy, there was a political economy of containment, as Eugene McCarraher suggests. Whyte is partly acquiescent, partly critical—almost “Beat.”

• His elite origins, a descendant of politicians, growing up in a mansion, attending St. Andrews boys’ prep school (inspiration for the film Dead Poets Society). His full name: W. Hollingsworth White III.

• His talent for writing prose with a literary flair. Becomes part of a scene of “connected critics” of society, along with James Agee, Dwight MacDonald, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others.

• His Organization Man can be seen as part of a post-war concern about the direction of the new business culture and its potential capture by various kinds of experts. It is also filled with very funny quotes.

• His vivid descriptions of the new suburban culture and its “packaged villages” that have become the dormitories of the Organization Men.

• A huge fan of cities his entire life. When asked to name his three favorite, he replied: “New York City, New York City, New York City.”

• His intellectual practice (like that of so many of our Lost Prophets!) was intense observation, whether in his interviews of corporate executives or in his way of learning about cities by walking the streets and watching the interactions in public spaces. The brilliance of his “amateur sociology.”

• His fascination with townscape: the physical outlines of the downtown, the city center, the main street. (He wrote “The street is the river of life of the city, the place where we come together, the pathway to the center.”)

• His love of street life and even street people—he considered them an index of the health of a place and defended their legal rights to gather, play music, etc.

• In The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, he develops the key concepts of what becomes the art of placemaking.

• Whereas his more famous student, urbanist Jane Jacobs, tended toward lyrical, qualitative observations, Whyte loved data gathering (which could include hiding behind trash cans in order to watch the pedestrian traffic in a particular plaza).

Timestamps:

0:03:30 — Introduction: The Counterculture in a Suit

00:11:00 — Early Life: From Vicks VapoRub to the Marine Corps

00:14:30 — Fortune Magazine and the Invention of “Groupthink”

00:24:00 — Deep Dive: The Organization Man

00:41:00 — The “New Suburbia”

00:47:30 — The Pivot to Urbanism: The Exploding Metropolis

00:55:00 — Discovering Jane Jacobs

00:59:00 — Conservation Easements and the 1969 NYC Plan

01:04:30 — The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

01:15:30 — Interview with Alexandra White

Recommended:

• The Organization Man (1956)

• The Exploding Metropolis (1958)

• Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980)

• City: Rediscovering the Center (1988)

• American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life, Richard K. Rein (2022)

• Social Life of Small Urban Spaces—documentary film (1980)

• James Howard Kunstler on “How Bad Architecture Wrecked Cities”

“Devout and Dangerous” is the title—irony intended—of an excellent documentary film about the life and times of Fr. Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip, and their circle of Catholic activists for peace.

The priest brothers were indeed publicly devout in their antiwar actions but “dangerous”? Certainly FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced of the great harm the group posed to his reputation and to that of his unaccountable agency.

In reality, during the years of the Vietnam War and afterward for two decades, what these militantly nonviolent activists “endangered” was the continuing, mostly unquestioned operations of the U.S. military-industrial complex, whether in the offices of local draft boards or in the weapons plants manufacturing nuclear warheads.

If only recently, a Jesuit pope was speaking to the world about the need to finally discard doctrines of “just war” in favor of the philosophy and practice of nonviolence, the witness of Dan Berrigan and his circle of fellow resisters spoke prophetically of these things over a half century ago.

As the anguish around the Vietnam War grew to a white heat in the 1960s, American Catholics were just getting comfortable with their arrival in middle-class society, symbolized by the Kennedy election at the beginning of the decade. Nothing could have been more shocking than the spectacle of a Catholic priest being arrested and going to jail for an act of civil disobedience (at a massive antiwar protest at the Pentagon). Such a thing had simply never happened before. (Actually it had, when Daniel’s brother, Father Philip Berrigan, was first arrested for a civil rights demonstration in 1962.)

Nor were any Americans prepared to read of two priests and several laypeople entering a draft board center in Catonsville MD, taking out draft records to cover with blood, and then burning with homemade napalm in a parking lot before joining hands in prayer as they awaited arrest.

Were these useless, symbolic efforts? The Berrigans’ actions inspired over 200 draft board raids before the Vietnam war ended, and convinced Daniel Ellsberg to copy and disseminate the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers. Numerous voices later attributed a major role to the Berrigans in turning world public opinion against the war. But even if that didn’t happen, Berrigan wouldn’t have seen his work as a failure: “ Good work is its own justification,” he would say. “The outcome is in other hands besides ours.”

Dan Berrigan published over 50 books of essays, poetry and theology, and was nominated numerous times for the Nobel Peace Prize, notably for his work in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Our guest for this episode, Fr. John Dear, was a close collaborator with Dan Berrigan for several decades. He is an internationally known author, activist and teacher of peace and nonviolence. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Senator Barbara Mikulski, and several others.

Some key takeaways from our conversation:

• Daniel Berrigan’s gift for creating memorable language about justice. As he and his fellow resisters stood burning draft files at Catonsville, Maryland in 1967, Berrigan famously said to the small crowd (and to the world), “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, for the burning of paper instead of children, for the angering of the orderlies in in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”

• He moved away from some aspects of his Jesuit culture but he never failed to acknowledge what his training gave him: a deep sense of God in the world, and most especially in the human community.

• His faithfulness to the Word of Scripture as liberation: “We go to this Word in fear and trembling, knowing that the World itself is a judgement, a two-edged sword, as Paul declares.”

• His wonderful ability to perform, to act, to transform prosaic events into theater and poetry, as in the case of his Broadway play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine

• His humor (usually with a point): “Don’t just do something, stand there”, he liked to say. (A way of making the point that most “doing something” is less valuable than taking a stand for something.)

• He came to believe and teach that the nonviolent way of life should be the normal way for a human being to live, something that in fact neither of his great inspirations—Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.—had ever quite said.

• As for our motivations, he taught: “Do the good because it’s good; speak the truth because it’s the truth. Don’t worry about your influence or the outcome—leave it to God, it’s in better hands than ours.”

• Berrigan was once asked, “How many times have you been arrested?” He replied, “Apparently not enough.”

Timestamps:

• (0:00) Intro discussion

• (6:00) Childhood and early years as a priest, experiences in Europe, first writings, founding of Catholic Peace Fellowship, exile to Mexico

• (20:00) Travels in Latin America, returns to the U.S. (Cornell U.)

• (23:30) Hanoi trip, the Catonsville MD draft card burning, repercussions and reactions, trial of the Catonsville Nine

• (38:30) Goes underground, arrested and imprisoned

• (49:30) New activism around nuclear weapons, just war theory, nonviolence, friendship and book with Thich Nhat Hanh

• (52:30) Peace action at G.E. plant in King of Prussia PA, trial and later film about the trial

• (59:30) Acts in The Mission movie, teaching, writing, final interview

• (1:06:00) Interview with Father John Dear

• (2:01:30) Final reflections

Recommended:

• Daniel Berrigan, Essential Writings, ed. by John Dear (2009)

• At Play in the Lion’s Den, biography of Berrigan by a good friend and collaborator, Jim Forest (2017)

• No Bars to Manhood, Daniel Berrigan (2007)

• Disarmed And Dangerous: The Radical Life And Times Of Daniel And Philip Berrigan, Brothers In Religious Faith And Civil Disobedience, Murray Polner, Jim O’Grady (1998)

• In the King of Prussia, Emile de Antonio’s filmed re-enactment of the Plowshares trial, 1982 (YouTube)

• The Holy Outlaw, 1970 doc film by Lee Lockwood for NET.

• Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion, Gary Wills (1972)

• Jeremy Scahill on Daniel Berrigan, Democracy Now (2016)

The above is a short video clip from our interview with the late Marc H. Ellis. A transcript is at the bottom of this post.

The prophets — as my co-host Pete Davis and I learned from the subject of our very first episode, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — are enemies of indifference and callousness. They are highly sensitive to suffering. More than that, they can be disturbing, sometimes very annoying, people.

But we were simply podcast hosts: we did not imagine this little project somehow implicated us in anything truly prophetic. That is, until we met Jewish theologian and scholar of prophecy Marc H. Ellis, a friend of Bishop Desmond Tutu, Cornel West, Dorothy Day, Fr. Daniel Berrigan and many more such “light bearers”, as Marc referred to them. (Listen to Marc’s interview — Lost Prophets #7. Marc Ellis on the Prophetic Diaspora — here.)

About halfway through our conversation with Marc, I sensed a kind of horrified realization coming over us both. In these conversations about practitioners of radical justice, we were not merely outsiders looking in. Especially in this conversation about the crisis in Marc’s own tradition, we felt ourselves being drawn into an invisible community we could scarcely imagine.

We’re speaking of the community of people who side with the prophets, those who express outrage and lament about events such as the genocidal destruction of Gaza. As Marc calmly asserted, indeed speaking from his own personal experience of rejection, the lovers of righteousness will find themselves rewarded with the condition of self-exile from their own traditions and communities.

Marc spoke of ‘Constantinianism’ — religious traditions becoming too compromised with modernity and state power. There is even, Marc explained, an ecumunical Constantinianism: a mutual power agenda across traditions which works to stifle critics of empire.

The necessary response? To Marc, we need more people to embrace and embody the “indigenous Jewish prophetic.” Those who have done so have had a profound effect on what he called the global prophetic—a hidden circle of which Buber and others have spoken. Prophets in this time, Marc told us, are part of a New Diaspora in which we are all “practicing exile” together—not solely as part of some inter-faith solidarity but in order to gather the fragments of our traditions that have been abused and squandered.

What does it mean, we wondered, to practice exile? Marc’s definition: It’s a condition of all who seek authentic covenantal existence in a justice-loving community which is in resistance. Each of our faith communities—my Christianity included—have reached some kind of end point, he argued. Our sharing of exile is defined mostly by “sharing what is left.” And there must be a recognition on the part of exiles that “there is no return, only a journey forward with others who share a common fate—which creates a New Diaspora.”

As we spoke with Marc about prophetic figures like Buber, Heschel, Gandhi, King, Simone Weil, Peter Maurin—even Bob Dylan—he was unsparing in his candor. To be a prophet is to take on a perilous vocation—and your community probably can’t protect you. There’s no reward, not even from God. There’s only a solitude and yes, a solidarity.

Near the end, Marc mentioned his Parkinson’s diagnosis almost casually, just in passing. He had been told he might have ten more years—in fact, he had only two.

In this conversation that shook us both, Marc not only reminded us of what time it is on the clock of the world, in Grace Lee Boggs’ phrase.

Unexpectedly and movingly, he revealed to us something about what we are to do and who else will be with us.

May his memory be a blessing.

Transcript of clip above

Elias: I'm just thinking, Marc—we're taping this conversation, as I know we're all very aware, at a very dramatic moment [in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel].

In reading your work, I discovered what the phrase “After Auschwitz” refers to, and the theology and reflection on that. And then you introduced a second term, which I'd never heard of: “After Israel”. I just wondered if you could say a little bit about this moment and what your thoughts are around what an expression like “After Israel” might mean?

Marc: Right, I'm writing on that now. It's After October 7th too — [and] the Gaza assault. After Israel — and what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinian people.

We go from empowerment—which we needed—to abusing that power and displacing another people. So we had the formative event of Holocaust, the formative event of Israel — suffering and empowerment, and the abuse of that empowerment, which has now reached new levels.

So we can't do theology or religiosity or ritual by just saying: We suffered—or we enjoy the promise of Israel. We have to deal with the cost of our empowerment. This is central to a Jewish theology of liberation.

And where that leads us: Has our empowerment liberated us or enslaved us to our empowerment?

So a Jewish theology of liberation is not about God being among the poor, because the question for us was: Was God in the Holocaust? And, you know, no theologian would say that. But God isn't in our power either, and in our abuse of power.

What are we doing? For God's sakes, we're squandering our entire tradition.

“If we could get every billionaire in the world to move here, that would be a godsend.” —former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg

Somewhat short of the former mayor’s hopes, it seems that exactly 123 billionaires—the most in the country—now make New York City their home, according to the 2025 Forbes list. Perhaps they have been a political godsend for the campaign of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, whose meteoric rise has been partly fueled by street-level policy proposals aimed at restoring affordability for the city’s non-billionaires.

It’s enough to make you think Zohran had a pre-publication copy of historian Daniel Wortel-London’s wonderfully heterodox and well-written new book on the economic history of the city of New York— The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981. (You can pre-order here — and a Google Play audiobook preview is here.)

How on earth, some readers will wonder, could prosperity ever be a menace? But that’s the story Wortel-London tells (with appearances by Lost Prophets Jane Jacobs, Paul Goodman, Lewis Mumford, and others) as he recounts over a century of struggles about which form of prosperity the city should aspire to — one that distributes ownership widely…or centralizes power; one that cultivates civic virtue…or rewards profiteering speculation; one that builds wealth locally…or hitches local prosperity to the task of attracting outside corporations and billionaires (and occasionally redistributing some of their wealth)?

It seems undeniable that capitalism tends to move from crisis to crisis, at least if you look at the three periods under scrutiny here. The first crisis stemmed from the Panic of 1873, when the city’s post-Civil War real estate boom from public spending ends in the Wall Street-railroad bubble bursting. The 1930s were the next crisis years as Fiorello LaGuardia and the City Planning Commission struggled with fiscal stabilization, possibly undermined, as the author interestingly explains, by federal assistance, which only accelerated the problems. Manhattan’s land values did not fully return to their pre-Depression values until 1977, by which time a shift in focus from land values to white collar income as the real source for taxes was well underway. The striking thesis offered here is that the fiscal crises were due to a “bankruptcy of economic thought and policy”, a poverty of ideas and “a dogma of powerlessness.”

Wortel-London turns around the usual shibboleths about the city’s welfare services being a driver of crisis in order to see them as a downstream product of the private sector’s irresponsibility and power: power to pay lower wages, charge high rents, and deny investment to needy communities. The culprit—one rarely mentioned in conversations about urban development—is unsustainable elite-driven development with its attendant social costs.

As we review this history with Daniel, we find the book to be a storehouse of urban policy alternatives. Mayor Bloomberg is only one of the more recent proponents of the comforting notion that “the rich take care of everybody else” with what Wortel-London calls their “poisoned largesse.” Many years ago, the urban policy mix included worker cooperatives, public housing, land value taxes, neighborhood finance, and community-owned enterprises. As a stroll around many parts of New York today will reveal, cities today mostly utilize tax incentives for corporations, real estate speculation, and financialized development.

Wortel-London’s narrative stops in 1981, with the arrival of Reaganomics, austerity and the first wave of the billionaires. It would be a further contribution to expanding what he calls our “fiscal imaginations”—badly shrunken as they are—if his next book could pick up the story at that point. Unless he decides to take a job in the new Mamdani administration, of course.

[Note: This episode was recorded before the New York City mayoral primary.]

Recommended

• The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981 — pre-order here

• “(We’re) Back in the USSR” from Daniel’s great substack, The Economy of Community

• Daniel on Zohran’s primary victory in New York Daily News

• Daniel on Zohran and Community Wealth-Building in the Democracy Collaborative’s blog

• Paul and Percival Goodman’s Communitas

Many thanks to the great band NOBLE DUST, who provides the music for Lost Prophets. Their latest album, A Picture for a Frame, is here.

LOST PROPHETS is a podcast about the mid-century voices of solidarity we need to hear again. To listen on your podcast player, our Spotify link is here, Apple Podcasts link is here, and RSS link is here.

In 1962, the American public’s faith in science was very high. After all, science was credited with helping us win World War II (Spam rations, nylons, the bomb) and was giving an emerging middle-class ever more conveniences and choices.

It was also a time when the answer to many questions was simply: more chemicals.

Certain things had gone unnoticed in this triumphal story, however. The synthetic pesticide DDT had been rushed into battle zones in 1940 in the hopes of defeating the spread of typhus via lice or malaria. Over one million people—thousands in the city of Naples and whole islands in the South Pacific, for example—were “deloused” by DDT dusting.

By 1951, DDT was being deployed by crop dusting planes after it had been cleared for civilian use, eliminating malaria from U.S. households after extensive house-spraying efforts. The Department of Agriculture advocated vigorously for farm use.

When the USDA’s fire ant eradication (not just control) program was rolled out in the Deep South, 20 million acres were sprayed, killing various kinds of wildlife. In these years, consumers had some 6,000 different pesticide products available, with little testing, nor restrictions on use. Meanwhile, more reports of dead birds and fish kept appearing.

Rachel Carson, the author of the iconic report Silent Spring, resembled her near contemporary Jane Jacobs in being something of a reluctant prophet—but one who was unafraid to question authority (or corporate power), once the time of testing came.

Her first love was the ocean which, as she later noted, came to teach her everything about “the connectedness of the world.” Between 1941 and 1955, she wrote three lyrical books about the sea, at a time when there was little popular knowledge about the subject. Serialized first in the New Yorker, her The Sea Around Us became one of the best-selling science books of all time, translated into 30 languages.

In one of her warm letters to her friend Dorothy Freeman, she explained what was compelling her to write a new—and darker—kind of book: “Everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened and nothing I could do would be more important.” After books about beauty, she had to write one about death and its causes.

Scientists in this Cold War period were not advocates. But Carson became a crusader, all while fighting the cancer that would take her life shortly after Silent Spring’s publication. She was not against the prudent use of pesticides but against the indiscriminate use of poisons of any kind—including nuclear radiation—which had unanticipated consequences.

Her legacy can be traced in the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Safe Water Drinking Act (1974), and the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), to say nothing of the global environmental movement generally.

Her writings influenced figures like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, James Watson, Jane Goodall, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Our conversation about Carson is with her grandnephew and adopted son, Roger Christie, who spent his early years growing up with Carson and learning from her. He is today the chairman of the board of the Rachael Carson Council.

Key takeaways:

• A poet of the ocean and in many ways a reluctant prophet—until she felt she had no choice.

• While not religious per se, she eventually becomes a social crusader—through her love of the natural world, her humility in the face of beauty.

• Her early life resembled Gary Snyder’s: rustic rural with a mother who loved reading.

• After years of longing to see the ocean, she gets a job at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts—her first sight of the sea. She begins to perceive the interconnectedness of all life.

• Her financial struggles: in the Depression years, she becomes her family’s sole breadwinner just as she was about to embark on a PhD at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

• Her oceanographic work at the Bureau of Fisheries gives her the idea for the first book in what will become her sea trilogy, Under the Sea Wind.

• After reading other nature writers, she discovers she has a gift for making the natural world vivid and interesting to readers.

• The experience of the Second World War, with its naval ships and submarines, spurred a greater curiosity about understanding the oceans, still little studied or known about at the time.

• The wartime success with DDT in defeating malaria boosts its civilian applications, despite its deadly effects on animal and plant populations.

• Her literary success finally enabled her to buy a seaside home in Maine where she writes The Sea Around Us and falls in love with a neighbor, Dorothy Freeman. She has also adopted her grandnephew Roger Christie after the death of his mother, her niece.

• Her observations about the impact of a chemical barrage destroying habitat and natural ecosystems is part of the first ecological thinking in American public life.

• The 1954 H-bomb test over Bikini Atoll puts the phrase “nuclear fallout” into common use—Carson sees it as part of our unwitting self-destruction. Ironically she develops a cancerous condition herself.

• Like several other of our Lost Prophets, she resists the technocratic dream of mastering nature instead of simply living within it. This stance brings her under fierce criticism, especially from corporate interests. If Jane Jacobs was an urban naturalist pushing back on the self-appointed experts, Carson is her ecological cousin.

• Her heroic final years of illness while completing and speaking about Silent Spring were a race against time.

Timestamps:

00:00—We open the episode with thoughts on Carson's foundational insight: that nature’s balance cannot be overridden without consequence.

05:00–On a Pennsylvania farm, Rachel’s mother instills in her a dual love of nature and writing — the two passions that define her life.

08:00—Forced to take a science requirement in college, Carson falls in love with biology and shifts from aspiring writer to poet scientist.

14:00—Working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, she publishes a lyrical essay about the ocean in The Atlantic, launching her writing career.

22:00—The Sea Around Us, her second book, becomes a surprise bestseller, bringing national fame and allowing her to leave government work.

26:00—The postwar spread of DDT—once hailed as a miracle chemical—plants the seeds of Carson’s concern as the record of ecological damage grows ever higher.

38:00—Spurred by the alarming data, she begins writing Silent Spring, the book that will make her both famous and controversial.

54:00—Silent Spring is published, followed by a powerful CBS special on Carson and her work. The public rallies to her cause and JFK publicly supports her.

1:00:00—Secretly fighting terminal cancer, she testifies before Congress and inspires the wave of environmental legislation that follows over the next decade and beyond.

1:07:00—Written in 1956 but her final published work, The Sense of Wonder, is an essay written to inspire parents to show their children the wonder of nature.

1:11:00—We interview Roger Christie, Rachel’s grandnephew and adopted son, who offers insights on her work as well as memories of her warmth, humor, and devotion.

1:17:00—Roger describes Carson’s silent suffering with terminal cancer as she was raising him and completing Silent Spring—her final act of service.

1:26:00—We reflect with Roger on how Carson’s ecological worldview applies to today’s crises—from climate change to technocracy.

1:36:00—Final thoughts connecting Carson’s message to those of Jane Jacobs, Wendell Berry, and Abraham Joshua Heschel: start with love, stay rooted in wonder, and resist abstraction.

Recommended:

• Under the Sea Wind (1941)

• The Sea Around Us (1951)

• The Edge of the Sea (1955)

• Silent Spring (1962)

• The Sense of Wonder (1965)

• Rachel Carson (2017)—PBS documentary biography

• The Power of One Voice (2014)—documentary on Carson’s legacy

• Maria Popova on Rachel Carson

His Buddhist community called him simply “Thay,” the Vietnamese word for teacher.

Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh died at age 95 in his native Vietnam, having endured 39 years of exile between 1966 and 2005. In his lifetime he became a global spokesperson for non-violence and peace, beginning with his missions to the U.S. in the early 1960s that aimed to halt the destruction of his country as the war in Vietnam continued to escalate.

Born in 1926, Nhat Hanh grew up in a time of French colonialism followed by American occupation and war. Thomas Merton, meeting him at his Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky, said he felt as though he had met Vietnam itself. He asked his gentle guest, “What is the war like?” Nhat Hanh replied, “Everything is destroyed,” the answer of a monk, as Merton later noted: no words wasted.

The Buddhist monk and the Cistercian monk: they seemed to embody, each in his own tradition, the interplay of action and contemplation, even the possibility that the taking up of new religious practices need not mean giving up the old ones.

Nhat Hanh’s engaged Buddhism resembled Merton’s later spirituality in its three components: contemplative practice, social action, and inter-religious dialogue. With his Order of Interbeing, established in 1966, he showed a path of non-attachment to all ideologies and real connection to the earth.

In addition to his writing and activism, Nhat Hanh established monasteries in Southern California, New York, Vietnam, Mississippi, Paris, Germany and Australia. His global ethic, including his mindfulness trainings, were highlighted by the United Nations for its non-sectarian ethical path for humanity.

Later in the episode, we are joined by Brother Phap Luu of the Deer Park Monastery, who received the Lamp Transmission from Nhat Hanh to become a Dharma Teacher in 2011 — and has been active in the Wake Up movement, which shares mindfulness practice with young people around the world.

Key Takeaways from our Conversation:

• Nhat Hanh’s similarities to Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr.

• His several connections to the “web” of the Beloved Community of our Lost Prophets

• Early training as a monk and his ideas on a new form of “engaged” Buddhism which always saw Vietnam as one country

• The Buddhist pagoda culture of good work and merit

• He introduces himself to Martin Luther King Jr. in a letter attempting to explain the real meaning of the widely publicized self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in Saigon—i.e., it should be seen as an act of deliberate martyrdom over religious repression rather than a mere act of suicide.

• In the 1960s, he was a leader in the difficult struggle between non-Communist nationalism and anti-Communist ideology, taking a non-dualistic approach.

• “His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.” (Martin Luther King Jr., nominating Thay for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.)

• The Beloved Community: a concept going back to Josiah Royce, then to A.J. Muste and Howard Thurman (King’s inspiration), it describes a society characterized by peace, justice, equality, and love, where all persons are valued and have the opportunity to thrive. Just as Nhat Hanh influenced King to speak out about the Vietnam War, King shared his understanding of the Beloved Community when they met in Geneva in 1967. Nhat Hanh then extends the vision by suggesting that not only deities but all beings might attain the status of boddhisattvas (enlightened beings who awaken others).

• “Sitting is only one part of Zen…” (Fragrant Palm Leaves)

• In 1970, with the help of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Nhat Hanh founds Dai Dong, a Buddhist movement for the health of the earth. Its founding statement is signed by thousands of scientists and policy professionals. Several meetings between Nhat Hanh and U.N Secretary General U Thant lead to the first U.N. Climate Summit in Stockholm (1972).

• “In order to save the world, each of us has to build a pagoda, a sanctuary where you have a chance to be alone and to face yourself, the reality of yourself.” (The Raft Is Not the Shore)

• “If you have to choose between Buddhism and peace, then you must choose peace. Because if you choose Buddhism, you sacrifice peace—and Buddhism does not accept that.” (The Raft Is Not the Shore)

• “…If you are not transformed on the way, you remain at the point of departure all the time; you never arrive at the destination. So the way must be in you; the destination must also be in you and not somewhere else in space or time.” (The Raft Is Not the Shore)

• Mindfulness: In Buddhism, it is closely intertwined with interbeing. The energy of being aware and awake of the present moment. A better term, perhaps: remindfulness, emphasizing the root meaning of sati, closer to remembrance. It is at the same time a means and an end, the seed and the fruit. It is not merely a tool but a path.

• Practice smiling—especially the Buddha’s half-smile.

• In Buddhism, at least four persons practicing together are needed to be called a sangha (community). “Without a sangha, you will be lost.” (Living Buddha, Living Christ)

Recommended:

• “A Cloud Never Dies” (documentary film)

• Fragrant Palm Leaves, Journals 1962-1966, Thich Nhat Hanh

• Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967), Thich Nhat Hanh

• Brothers in the Beloved Community: The Friendship of Thich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King Jr. (2021), Marc Andrus

• The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation (1975), Thich Nhat Hanh

• The Raft Is Not the Shore (2001), Thich Nhat Hanh, Fr. Daniel Berrigan

• Living Buddha, Living Christ (1995, 2007), Thich Nhat Hanh

• Eyes of Compassion: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh (2021), Jim Forest

• Walk With Me (documentary film, 2017)

  ---

  Many thanks to the great band NOBLE DUST, who provides the music for Lost Prophets. Their latest album, A Picture for a Frame, is here.

  Many thanks to the great Dan Thorn, who helped edit this episode.

  LOST PROPHETS is a podcast about the mid-century voices of solidarity we need to hear again. To listen on your podcast player, our Spotify link is here, Apple Podcasts link is here, and RSS link is here.

We co-hosts at Lost Prophets each have a slightly different story about encountering Pope Francis, to use a word which he gave a particular meaning. (Elias’ reflection on the Pope of the Peripheries is here and Pete’s reflection on Francis and The God of Surprises is here.) Theologically speaking, the encuentro refers to an understanding of the Catholic faith, not as a set of doctrines, but as an experience of meeting a person (or more precisely, a Person).

In the wake of his passing last week, we reflect in this episode on Pope Francis as a Lost Prophet himself, emerging out of the same era and spirit that so many featured in our series also did. But unlike the others, Francis reached the peak of his influence half a century later and, in doing so, was much less “lost” to our time—in fact, he may have been the largest countercultural voice of our day.

Discussed in the episode:

• Francis as a symbol of the arrival of Catholicism as a world church whose center of gravity is now the Global South.

• Pete’s story of Francis rescuing him in 2013 from a turn toward millennial-style cynicism.

• Francis’ personal history, starting with his labor activist grandmother, his Salesian high school, his Jesuit training, his experience of Peronism.

• Vatican II and the Pact of the Catacombs, a document which will later influence Francis.

• His role as the Jesuit provincial of Argentina during the Dirty Wars of the 1970s and his authoritarian style at the time.

• His studies with Romano Guardini and a time of interior crisis before being appointed an auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires, then Archbishop.

• We speculate: Was he, like Romero, a “conservative” who whose life experience broke him open to the world?

• The 2007 Aparecida meeting of the Latin American bishops: Francis emerges as a transformative leader.

• His anti-ideological views and his “revision” of liberation theology toward a theology of the people (teologia del pueblo)—and the beauty of mestizo culture.

• An alternative kind of development: integral ecology.

• Evangelii Gaudium (2013) and the evangelical importance of encounter.

• Time over space, realities over ideas, and the whole over the parts (the polyhedron).

• Laudato Si’ (2015) and hearing “the cry of the poor, the cry of the earth”

• Elias talks about his invitation to Rio for World Youth Day in 2013 and his experience of seeing Francis in person, the beginning of his personal encounter with Francis.

• Francis’ vision of the Church as a “field hospital”.

• Fratelli Tutti and the need to become a people, a culture.

• The Synod on the Amazon and the engagement with the indigenous concept of buen vivir.

• Pete’s reflection on his late father’s anthropological work in the Amazon and on behalf the rights of its indigenous peoples.

• Concluding thoughts on the movie Conclave and on Francis’ legacy.

Further reading:

• The Aparecida Document

• Evangelii Gaudium

• Laudato Si’

• Fratelli Tutti

• Austin Ivereigh’s biography of Francis, Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church

• Charles Taylor on Fratelli Tutti

• Andrew Sullivan on the “Untier of Knots”

• Bergoglio in 1991 on Corruption and Sin

Many thanks to the great band NOBLE DUST, who provides the music for Lost Prophets. Their latest album, A Picture for a Frame, is here.

LOST PROPHETS is a podcast about the mid-century voices of solidarity we need to hear again. To listen on your podcast player, our Spotify link is here, Apple Podcasts link is here, and RSS link is here.

We now have an even dozen episodes of Lost Prophets under our belts. Time to stop, we thought, sit down by the side of the road, and look back down the mountain at the distance we’ve come.

Some key points that came up:

• We want to do archaeology of the future, not just forecasts of the past (Russell Jacoby).

• The counterculture at its most serious was a protest against nuclear weapons, technocracy’s essential criminality. (Theodore Roszak)

• The lost revolutions of these lost prophets didn't end because they were irrelevant — they ended because they were either beaten down or went quiet for some other reason. They're still very, very relevant. (Pete)

• Nazi resister Franz Jägerstätter's dream of the silver train. (Elias)

• The importance of having a sangha (spiritual community) if you want to stay strong. (Elias)

• Most of our prophets came from “thick communities” that give them the stability and confidence to be counterculture. (Pete)

• One common thread here: A deep faith in ordinary people. (Elias)

• Gandhi’s notion of soul force. (Elias)

• Love is the most important form of revolutionary labor — and growing our souls is a revolutionary act, a kind of freedom project (Grace Lee Boggs).

• Our need to recover communal—not just individual—spirituality (Gustavo Gutierrez).

• “My name is Pete Davis and I was addicted to blueprints and plans!”

• “Find the others.” (Douglass Rushkoff)

• Door knocking for peace and often hearing: “I’m secretly with you—just don’t tell my neighbors.” (Gar Alperovitz, retold here)

• Writing something about reality forces you towards being empirical, getting out in the world to see for yourself. (Pete, channeling Ralph Nader.)

• Ending with W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”: “as the clever hopes expire/
  Of a low dishonest decade.” (Taken as a title of a George Scialabba essay collection.)

More Lost Prophets coming shortly: Thích Nhất Hạnh, Daniel Berrigan, and more!

Many thanks to the great band NOBLE DUST, who provides the music for Lost Prophets. Their latest album, A Picture for a Frame, is here.

Many thanks to our editor, the great Dan Thorn.

LOST PROPHETS is a podcast about the mid-century voices of solidarity we need to hear again. To listen on your podcast player, our Spotify link is here, Apple Podcasts link is here, and RSS link is here.

To understand the accumulating fractures of our time, it’s important to look back at key earlier periods and try to discern: What were we thinking?

Colette Shade — who has written for The New Republic, The Baffler, Interview Magazine, The Nation, and Gawker — reminds us that during the “dream state,” the years between 1997 and 2008, we were thinking things like the following:

• It’s the end of history—there’s no longer a need for politics!

• The internet has arrived—we’re about to enjoy life without limits!

• Gotta love butterfly clips, Lindsay Lohan, The Sopranos, bling, Smash Mouth, and the Hummer H2

In sparkling prose, Shade digs through pop anthropology to offer a quite serious sociopolitical critique of the deadly undercurrents of this time, such as the triumph of neoliberalism, the full arrival of the California ideology (tech bros ascendant), and the substitution of nostalgia for genuine politics.

Demonstrating that our podcast is not hung up on the 1960s, fellow millennials Colette and Pete have a great time comparing their childhood journeys as the world descends from the maximalist futurism of iMacs and body glitter to the reality check of the Great Recession.

Timestamps

• Introducing guest Colette Shade and how her book happily connects with our midcentury "Lost Prophets" theme: How the 2000s fit into the broader narrative of modernity, technology, and social change.

• 03:06 Looking back at 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union: The shift in political and economic ideology shaping the Y2K era

• 06:19 The "Long 2000s": Defining this era’s influence as actually from 1997 to the 2008 financial crisis.

• 09:54 The culture of excess: Dot-com wealth, no limits pop culture, and the promise of an ever-expanding future.

• 12:34 The anti-politics of the 2000s: How post-Cold War confidence led to cultural shallowness and reactionary media

• 18:30 The triumph of the California Ideology, a fusion of countercultural freedom and libertarian tech capitalism.

• 29:40 The limits of the ideology: How Silicon Valley’s utopian vision overlooked systemic labor and social issues.

• 31:55 Gen X vs. Millennial left: How 1999 activism (WTO protests, anti-globalization) evolved into post-2008 political movements.

• 40:35 Certain 1999 movies as prophecy: The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty—all revealing the underlying cracks in the system.

Recommended

• Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything by Colette Shade (Colette’s new book)

• Elon Musk Has Always Been Like This. So Has Silicon Valley (Colette’s article on Musk and where he came from ideologically.)

• When the Clock Broke: Confronting the Limits of the American Left by John Ganz (discussion of early 1990s political malaise)

• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner (History of the tech movement’s countercultural roots)

• Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris (Silicon Valley’s ideological and economic evolution)

• The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (Economic and political history of globalization)

• The California Ideology by Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron (1995 essay defining Silicon Valley’s libertarian-tech utopianism)

• No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein (Anti-consumerist and corporate critique of the late 1990s)

Many thanks to the great band NOBLE DUST, who provides the music for Lost Prophets. Their latest album, A Picture for a Frame, is here.

Many thanks to our editor, the great Dan Thorn.

LOST PROPHETS is a podcast about the mid-century voices of solidarity we need to hear again. To listen on your podcast player, our Spotify link is here, Apple Podcasts link is here, and RSS link is here.

It is slightly jarring to find the radically-minded Paul Goodman a welcome guest on the September 12, 1966 episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line television show. The topic was “Are Public Schools Necessary?”, to which Goodman responds in the negative—or at least with an alternative vision of small, decentralized schools that emphasized experience in the real life of the neighborhood over stultifying curricula in quarantined classrooms.

By this time, Goodman was at the height of his fame as an oracle of the New Left and the 60s student movement, a speaker so popular that students at San Francisco State raised a year’s salary for him to come teach there. He was also in his mid-fifties.

Beginning in the Depression years, Goodman had poured forth novels, short stories, poetry and essays with great elan, despite a peripatetic existence caused by periodic sexual indiscretions. (Some of these incidents were just the result of the era’s bigotry, as Goodman was an unapologetic bisexual; other incidents would still be considered quite problematic today.)

A radical Freudian at first, Goodman became increasingly interested in the work of Fritz and Laura Perls, even co-authoring with them the first text on Gestalt therapy in 1951. His unpopular pacifist stance during the Second World War complicated his career and by the late 1950s, Goodman was continuously struggling to support a wife and two small children.

Then came an offer to write a book giving his solutions to the issue of the day, juvenile delinquency, as it was then quaintly called. His Growing Up Absurd (1960) was a cultural phenomenon, not least because Goodman blamed society itself, not young people, for the latter’s widespread sense of alienation. Published early in a moment of growing social upheaval—the rising Civil Rights movement, deepening involvement in Vietnam, the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley—the book became an omnipresent bible of student rebellion, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

And despite the famous catchphrase of the times, “never trust anyone over thirty” (which Goodman certainly was), the more radical students on campuses across the country not only trusted him—practically alone among adults in these years—but flocked to hear his every word.

One of those students—who actually met and spoke with Goodman—was our guest for this episode, Gregory W. Knapp, now a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.

Greg received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in Mathematics and Economics, and his PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin. His research has focused on themes in cultural and regional geography. We were intrigued by Greg’s article, “Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Goodman: Poets, Writers, Anarchists and Political Ecologists” which inspired us to invite him on the show.

Some key takeaways from our conversation:

• A jack of all trades, Susan Sontag compared Goodman to Emerson, describing him as “a connoisseur of freedom.” A novelist, poet, lay psychiatrist, social scientist, urbanist, and practitioner of the now-lost art of being a “man of letters”

• Goodman was perhaps the best writer on the theme that launched the 1960s counterculture: our social world in its current arrangements is not worth “adjusting” yourself to. (This made Goodman a “reverse Don Quixote”, as one of his reviewers remarked, the only sane man amidst a crazy world.)

• He was an exponent of a kind of “revolutionary hope” which all but vanished after the Vietnam War.

• Goodman knew conforming was madness but that fully dropping out was also mad—he wanted a sane alternative. As critic George Steiner put it, Goodman was “trying to hack out elbow room for the imagination”—our lost genius for imagining bold solutions to problems.

• Life over theory and any ideas that reify Society: Against the jargon-ridden state of most academic writing, Goodman deliberately wrote to reach the largest possible educated audience.

• Goodman was an early reader of Peter Kropotkin, which led to a lifelong love affair with community anarchism in an anti-Marxist frame—but he cared about “citizenliness.”

• Like his good friend Ivan Illich, Goodman was a deep critic of education as merely “learning the code,” a way of keeping the young safely out of the labor market for 16 years.

• Goodman told Studs Terkel: “I might seem to have a number of divergent interests…but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist.”

• In his 1967 Massey Lectures, he said: “The question is whether or not our beautiful libertarian, pluralist, and populist experiment is viable in modern conditions. If it’s not, I don’t know any other acceptable politics, and I’m a man without a country.”

Timestamps:

• [02:30] Pete describes discovering Goodman, a true public intellectual who worked across multiple disciplines, through the documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life.

• [11:00] Discussion of Goodman's early life in New York City and how the city itself strongly influenced his worldview

• [14:00] Goodmans’s time at City College of New York, where he developed his commitment to community anarchism through reading Kropotkin; his early career as a writer and intellectual

• [31:30] Goodman’s anarchist philosophy, which focused on drawing lines to keep society's conforming impulses at bay and create free spaces for natural instincts and authentic living

• [41:00] Reflections on Goodman’s breakthrough book Growing Up Absurd (1960) and its critique of how modern society fails to provide meaningful opportunities and worthwhile goals for young people to grow into

• [52:30] Goodman’s work in psychology and as a co-founder of Gestalt therapy, which focused on helping people live authentically rather than adjusting to society's demands

• [1:14:30] How Goodman became alienated from the militant radicals of the late 1960s as he critiqued their growing cynicism while maintaining his faith in humanism

• [1:41:00] Interview with Gregory W. Knapp, who met Goodman at Berkeley in the 1960s and provides firsthand accounts of Goodman's interactions with students and his impact on the counterculture

• [2:19:00] Final reflections on Goodman's legacy: how some of his ideas about authenticity and personal freedom became mainstream while his vision of participatory democracy and community remains unfulfilled

Recommended:

• Paul Goodman Changed My Life (2011 documentary)

• Communitas (1947)

• The Empire City (1959)

• Growing Up Absurd (1960)

• Compulsory Miseducation (1964)

• “Are Public Schools Necessary?”, Goodman as guest on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line (Sept. 12, 1966)

• Like a Conquered Province—Massey Lectures (1967)

• New Reformation (1970)

• Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Goodman: Poets, Writers, Anarchists and Political Ecologists, Gregory W. Knapp (2021)

• On Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag in The New York Review (1972)

Many thanks to the great band NOBLE DUST, who provides the music for Lost Prophets. Their latest album, A Picture for a Frame, is here.

Many thanks to our editor, the great Dan Thorn.

LOST PROPHETS is a podcast about the mid-century voices of solidarity we need to hear again. To listen on your podcast player, our Spotify link is here, Apple Podcasts link is here, and RSS link is here.

Just over one year after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear brinksmanship gone wrong was slated to premiere for a New York audience on November 22, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy meant a delay of several weeks before the film opened in late January.

The critics loved the dark sendup of the American military and its euphemistic jargon for nuclear war planning (with its matter-of-fact projections of “megadeaths”) but some viewers were shocked by its irreverence and bubbling sexual innuendo throughout.

Pete and I picked this classic movie—considered one of the greatest comedies of all time—partly as a way of introducing a key theme in our Lost Prophets conversation: the Cold War.

In addition to talking about the film’s plot, actors, and sets, we also touch on the real-world figures and institutions behind the scenes, including the new generation of “defense intellectuals” and habitues of the Rand Corporation (referred to in the movie as the Bland Corporation). Mutually assured destruction, strategic deterrence, overkill, missile gaps!

Additionally, we discuss on what the film can teach us about a common Lost Prophet theme: the dangers of techno-utopianism — and, near the end, we take a quick look at the recent film which offers an historical background to Strangelove, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

Timecodes:

• [00:00:09] Introduction to our discussion of Dr. Strangelove, which one reviewer called "the most courageous movie ever made" and "a nightmare farce."

• [02:30] The hosts share their first experiences watching the film.

• [05:00] Discussion of the film's opening sequence featuring B-52 bombers refueling mid-air while playing "Try a Little Tenderness," setting up the movie's irreverent tone and innuendo.

• [08:00] Analysis of General Jack D. Ripper's character and his conspiracy theory about fluoridation, which drives the plot by leading him to order a nuclear strike on the USSR.

• [14:00] Description of the iconic War Room set design, which was so convincing that Ronald Reagan supposedly asked to see it when he became president, only to learn it didn't exist.

• [27:30] Examination of Dr. Strangelove's character, played by Peter Sellers, and the various theories about which real-life figure he was based on, from Werner von Braun to Henry Kissinger.

• [31:00] Discussion of the film's initial reception.

• [41:00] Analysis of the film's critique of technological bureaucracy, showing how technical jargon and processes obscure the human reality of nuclear warfare.

• [50:30] Comparison between Dr. Strangelove and Oppenheimer, discussing how comedy versus drama affects their impact in addressing nuclear weapons.

• [58:30] Final thoughts on the film's underlying themes about masculinity and power, highlighting the male psychosis driving nuclear policy.

Recommended:

• Eric Schlosser, “Almost Everything In Dr. Strangelove Was True” (New Yorker)

• “Dr. Strangelove at 60” (BBC)

• “Dr. Strangelove: Behind the Scenes” (14:54)--YouTube

• “Dr. Strangelove: What Makes This Movie Great?” (10:29)--YouTube

• Robert Brustein, “Out of This World” (New York Review of Books, Feb. 6, 1964)

Many thanks to the great Noble Dust for providing our music (their latest single, a cover of Sleeping Lessons by The Shins is here), and to the great Dan Thorn of Pink Noise Studios for editing support.

We first encountered Dougald Hine about a year ago through the wide mycelium-like network of Ivan Illich fans—and we were glad we did. His new book was just out and we heard he was doing a book tour of the U.S. quite a few years after his first visit here. Our meetup in D.C. for Dougald a few weeks ago was a rich and delightful occasion — a time when we learned what T.S. Eliot might have meant when he wrote: “wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”

One of the U.K.’s most influential voices in the climate debate, Dougald is the co-founder (with Paul Kingsnorth) of the Dark Mountain Project (an effort to “walk away from the stories that our societies like to tell themselves, the stories that prevent us seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway”) and the founder of the School of Everything (a startup inspired “by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and the educational experiments of the 1960s”). His early career included a stint working for the BBC. He lives today in a small town in central Sweden where he and his partner, Anna Bjorkman, are creating “a school called HOME”—“a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture”. He has worked with the Riksteatern, Sweden’s national theatre, and is an associate of the Center for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University.

His ideas, as he explains in the book and in our conversation, come out of the question he asked himself some years ago: what if our ways of talking about climate change (and the world in general)—in technocratic terms and with an overreliance on a scientific lens—is making everything worse.

In a time of despair, Dougald suggests, we can talk about how we might take up (or continue) the work that is worth doing in the ruins. This work means: (1) salvaging the good that may be taken with us, (2) mourning the good that cannot be taken with us, (3) discerning those things that were never as good as we told ourselves they were, and (4) looking for the dropped threads—the lost moments earlier in the story that might have something to tell us now.

Timestamps:

• Introducing Dougald and two of his provocative claims: "The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world" and "The end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world."

• 3:00 Dougald discusses his experiences at Oxford, describing them as "one half of a shamanic initiation" where students' existing knowledge was deconstructed without guidance on reconstruction.

• 6:00 Dougald’s time at BBC as a radio journalist, describing news as an "extractive industry" mining people's painful experiences

• 8:00 We talk about the origins of the Dark Mountain Project, co-founded with Paul Kingsnorth in 2009, emerging from their shared critiques of environmental journalism and activism

• 17:30 Dark Mountain as a "journey to the far side of despair" and its role in providing space for people whose existing stories no longer made sense

• 21:00 Exploration of how Dark Mountain connected to decolonial thinking and theological perspectives on "uncivilization"

• 34:30 The experience of joining Ivan Illich's circle of collaborators five years after his death — and the hospitable tradition of keeping an extra seat at the table for strangers

• 43:30 Illich's Jewish background and its influence on his thinking about modernity and Christianity.

• 52:30 Dougald talks about his recent book tour in North America, including observations on America's "lost literacy of lament".

• 57:00 Experiences at Sand River Community Farm and the gift economy vs. modern economic frameworks

Further Reading:

• Dark Mountain Project

• At Work in the Ruins, Dougald Hine

• Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, Vanessa Machada de Oliveira

• Bayo Akomolafe

• Gustavo Esteva

• In the Vineyard of the Text, Ivan Illich

• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

• First Reformed, Paul Shrader

• Soil and Soul, Alistair McIntosh

• The Gift, Lewis Hyde

• Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram

• Rivers North of the Future, David Cayley

• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland

• Gender, Ivan Illich

He’s been called a poet of quiet revolution: a revolution staged to heal the rift between humanity and the natural world around us. Gary Snyder’s distinctive spirituality combines Eastern traditions like Zen Buddhism, Western concerns with deep ecology, and Native American wisdom.

Over his 94 years, Snyder’s career ranges from his early friendship with Jack Kerouac and the Beats, through his years in Japan studying Buddhism and Asian culture, followed by his acclaim as a kind of shaman of the counterculture and environmental movement.

Not a primitivist but a thinking poet, Snyder redefines humanism to include the nonhuman. By reconnecting with wilderness and practicing “reinhabitation,” we remember what Snyder notes was the role of the poet/shaman: to sing the voice of corn, the voice of the Pleiades, the voice of bison, the voice of antelope.

Some takeaways from our conversation:

• A statement Snyder once wrote describing his work: “As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

• As the champion of an ethnopoetics which aims to recapture the primitive and give it voice, Gary Snyder models for us solidarity with a bioregion, with (as he put it) the classes Marx overlooked—the animals, rivers, and grasses.

• His emphasis on the Buddhist notion of right livelihood and his appreciation of manual work: “A regular job ties you down and leaves you no time. Better to live simply, be poor, and have the time to wander and write and dig (meaning to penetrate and absorb and enjoy) what was going on in the world.”

• Snyder does not belong to any particular poetic school but he can be said to come out of the modernist tradition of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. This is poetry in a free form but also engaged with culture in a particular way. It was Pound’s translations from the Chinese which Snyder said inspired him to look into these poets.

• His very local sense of bioregionalism: “Stewardship means, for most of us, find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there—the tiresome but tangible work of school boards, county supervisors, local foresters—local politics.”

• On his idea of “the practice of the wild”: “Off the trail is another name for the Way, and sauntering off the trail is the practice of the wild. That is also where—paradoxically—we do our best work. But we need paths and trails and will always be maintaining them. You first must be on the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild.”

Timestamps:

• Intro clip: Gary Snyder reads a short poem about climbing the Sierra Matterhorn with Jack Kerouac.

• 00:45 Introduction of Snyder as a "poet of quiet revolution" bridging Eastern traditions and Western environmentalism

• 2:31 Pete and Elias discuss Gary Snyder as their first artistic prophet.

• 6:34 Early biographical details: Snyder's birth in San Francisco and childhood on a subsistence farm in Washington state

• 13:24 Snyder's early mountaineering experiences and spiritual connection to nature

• 21:24 Snyder’s involvement with the Beat movement and the historic San Francisco poetry renaissance

• 39:00 The relationship between Buddhist teachings and environmental consciousness in Snyder's work

• 42:39 Snyder's travels to Japan and deepening engagement with Zen Buddhism

• 49:00 Emergence of the environmental movement and Snyder's role in deep ecology

• 54:00 A reading of Snyder's influential "Smokey the Bear Sutra"

• 1:14:00 Snyder's concept of "re-inhabitation" and connection to place

• 1:22:00 Pete and Elias’ “field trip” to view one of the Chinese landscape scrolls that inspired Snyder at the Freer Gallery

• 1:35:00 Snyder's concepts of bioregionalism and deep ecology

• 1:42:39 Our guest, actor and author Peter Coyote, joins us to discuss his personal relationship with Snyder.

• 2:14:00 On the counterculture movement's successes and failures

• 2:17:14 Coyote's final thoughts on Snyder's legacy as a disciplined seeker of truth

• 2:25:30 Pete and Elias's final reflections on Snyder's Americanness and the unfinished project of the counterculture

Recommended:

• Earth House Hold (1969)—prose selections, mostly related to “…the coming revolution [which] will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.” (Contains the essay “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution.”)

• Turtle Island (1974)—a collection of poetry and prose which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. Themes of rediscovery of the land and becoming native to it once again.

• Practice of the Wild (1990)—perhaps Snyder’s most important essays on deep ecology and wilderness

• Mountain and Rivers Without End (1996)—a long poem written over four decades, combining many themes from his work through the frame device of a Chinese handscroll

• Distant Neighbors (2014)—Some 240 letters exchanged between Snyder and his friend from the 1960s, Wendell Berry

• Dharma Bums (1958)—Jack Kerouac’s fanboy portrait of the young Gary Snyder, including their climb together up the Matterhorn mountain in the Sierras. The bubbling tone of their friendship, a crazy mix of proto-hippie freedom and Zen/Vedanta lingo, is kept up by Kerouac’s bebop prose style.

• Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle (1998, 2015)—Peter Coyote’s memoir of his epic days with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Diggers and the rising counter-culture

• The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education (2015)—Coyote’s second memoir, a collection of profiles of his mentors, including a Mafia consiglieri and poet Gary Snyder who introduced him to the practice of Zen

• The Practice of the Wild (video of a talk Snyder gave at Colorado College in 2015).

• Balaraswati Music and Dance School benefit reading—1976. Six minutes of Snyder, sitting in a lotus position and wearing beads, reading wonderfully from Regarding Wave and other collections.

• Distant Neighbors, Festival of Faith (2014)—a live conversation between Snyder and Wendell Berry about their published collection of letters and the themes of their long friendship

Many thanks to the great band NOBLE DUST, who provides the music for Lost Prophets. Their latest album, A Picture for a Frame, is here.

Many thanks to our editor, the great Dan Thorn.

LOST PROPHETS is a podcast about the mid-century voices of solidarity we need to hear again. To listen on your podcast player, our Spotify link is here, Apple Podcasts link is here, and RSS link is here.

It was while first reading Jewish theologian Marc Ellis’ writing that we realized the waters of the prophetic ran much deeper than we had first thought.

We excitedly tore through several of his books on the prophetic in anticipation of our Lost Prophets interview with Marc, back in January. When we connected, he seemed a little frail but still ardent and eloquent. (He told us he got a kick out of the title of our podcast.) Near the end of our almost two-hour exchange, he offhandedly mentioned his health struggles. We traded a couple of emails in the weeks following and then saw the notices that Marc had died on June 8th.

The prophetic was surely the great theme of Marc’s work, beginning in 1974, when an encounter with Dorothy Day in Tallahassee convinced him to spend a year living at the main Catholic Worker house in New York. He next moved to graduate school at Marquette University in Milwaukee. For his thesis he chose to write on the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Peter Maurin. Marc was also affiliated for a time with the Maryknoll School of Theology, a home of liberation theology, where he said he discovered the prophetic.

Amidst the catastrophic 20th century, Marc claimed to see a revival of prophecy in figures such as Martin Luther King, Simone Weil, Gandhi, Albert Camus, and others. “It should not surprise us that a century so dark has also given birth to men and women who have had prophetic thoughts and lived prophetic lives,” he wrote. “And so in the century of the dead the question of the prophet is reborn.”

He was struck by the way prophetic figures typically become exiles in their own communities, as Marc himself had done, due to his uncompromising belief that Jewish liberation had to include Palestinian liberation.

In addition to his biography of Peter Maurin, he wrote one of the few books proposing a Jewish liberation theology, with introductions by Gustavo Gutierrez and Desmond Tutu. He wrote several books on Israel and Palestine, as well as essays on notable Jewish thinkers (Wiesel, Buber, Heschel, Arendt, Levinas), Holocaust theology, and the wonderful interfaith reflections in Revolutionary Forgiveness.

Some takeaways from our conversation:

• The prophets do not celebrate progress, despite the way modernity itself has become a religion, enabled partly by the old religions. Everything we enjoy in modernity has a dark side.

• The Catholic Worker experience: spending a year among the poor and their spirituality. “There was something beautiful about it which became foundational in my life.”

• Prophets become closer to each other across traditions than they are to many within their own traditions. The ecumenism of our times is not one of faith and dogma but rather of solidarity. None of us can make it alone or in our particular communities. We have a different community—the prophetic diaspora.

• The New Diaspora of exiles worldwide—the Catholic Worker house in New York had posters of Gandhi, Buber, etc.

• Simone Weil—”she was a one-off.” Her idea of the new saintliness, which both connected to the old traditions while abandoning parts of them. She insisted on the freedom to think and to act. A practical mystic—something like Bob Dylan, the itinerant Jewish prophet (and fan of Marc Ellis’ work!).

• It’s difficult to define the prophetic—it’s a kind of mystical encounter. The prophetic is set apart but we don’t know how or why that happens. It comes from somewhere else.

• And it’s not just political. The prophetic is the embodiment of the possibility, the gamble, of meaning (and God) in history and in our lives. You can see it, feel it—as in the aura several witnesses have asserted MLK possessed.

• The prophetic is a perilous vocation—your own community probably can’t protect you. There’s no reward, even from God. There is, in Marc’s words, a “solitude and a solidarity” in this way of living.

Timestamps

01:30 We introduce Ellis as a Jewish theologian who deeply studied prophecy, noting this was one of their last conversations with him.

02:45 How we discovered Ellis's work while researching prophetic figures.

03:40 We consider how the mid-20th century reawakened prophetic thinking in response to modernity's challenges and failures.

07:35 About Ellis's early background, from his Orthodox Jewish upbringing to his time at Florida State University.

19:30 Ellis’s concept of a "prophetic diaspora" and how prophets often become exiles from their traditions.

22:50 Ellis's writings on how mass death in the 20th century led to a revival of prophetic thinking

30:55 How people like Dorothy Day and Martin Buber found themselves closer to prophetic figures of other faiths than to their own traditions. Prophecy as the “wild card” in the deck—we never know when it will turn up. The “hidden circle” of prophets, the “light gatherers.”

43:30 Guest Marc Ellis joins the discussion, sharing his personal journey discovering the prophetic as indigenous to Jewish tradition and his encounters with Holocaust theologian Richard Rubenstein (“Where is God? We need power”). The promise of modernity amidst the growing “nation of the dead.” The “new diaspora” of prophets.

52:00 Ellis reflects on how the major religions became enablers of modernity, even as they became more traditional in some respects. His time at Maryknoll and his discovery of liberation theology. Meeting Daniel Berrigan in 1974. The impossibility of defining the prophetic, a kind of unpredictable mystical encounter. A story about why Martin Luther King Jr. had an “aura” that set him apart, as do all prophets. The prophetic is about the possibility of meaning in history—“it’s a gamble”. And “a perilous vocation.” Simone Weil—a “one-off” and a mystic “in practical terms like Bob Dylan.”

1:03:45 Ellis's encounter with Bob Dylan. His year at the Catholic Worker with the elderly Dorothy Day. Two deeply opposed views of the Holocaust and the U.S. Holocaust Museum (Richard Rubenstein vs. Elie Wiesel).

1:11:20 Ellis’s understanding of "covenantal vocation" and the heritage of prophecy in Judaism.

1:21:28 The nature of "Revolutionary Forgiveness" and its role in Israeli-Palestinian relations. After many centuries, the Christian embrace of Jewish history.

1:26:00 Ellis's thoughts on the future of prophetic movements and why prophets shouldn't focus too much on outcomes. Despite the famous song’s Christian hope, he suggests “We’re not going to overcome.”

1:31:30 Ellis’s new book “First Light” about his friendship with Edward Said, as well as his current practice of daily journaling and painting during wartime.

1:35:00 The "Ice Age" which has come over prophetic thinking in recent decades. Theologians no longer write and speak to power in the same way they once did.

1:38:38 Ellis’ final reflections on why he continues his work preserving the prophetic tradition, despite its difficulties as a frightening kind of vocational misadventure. He concludes with thoughts on the difference between Christian and Jewish views of prophecy and hope.

Further reading:

• A Year at the Catholic Worker: A Spiritual Journey among the Poor (2000), Marc H. Ellis

• Revolutionary Forgiveness: Essays on Judaism, Christianity and the Future of Religious Life (2000), Marc H. Ellis

• Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation (2007), Marc H. Ellis

• Encountering the Jewish Future: with Wiesel, Buber, Heschel, Arendt and Levinas (2011), Marc H. Ellis

• Future of the Prophetic: Israel’s Ancient Wisdom Re-presented (2014), Marc H. Ellis

• A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (1989), Naim Stifan Ateek

• First Light: Encountering Edward Said and the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic in the New Diaspora (2023), Marc H. Ellis

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Here at Lost Prophets, we are interested not only in the seminal mid-century figures we feature, but also in those contemporaries who have imbibed their ideas and are extending them today. So we were happy to speak recently with one today’s great theorists of technology, L.M. Sacasas.

A few years ago L.M. posted on his blog 41 (!) thoughtful and provocative questions we should ask of the technologies we use — not just our computers and AI and Zoom, but also tables and alarm clocks and ovens. That inspired the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, one of L.M.’s enthusiastic readers, to contact him for an interview, which you can read here.

L.M. extends a tradition of technology’s skeptical questioners, joining figures such as Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, and Neil Postman. In an homage to Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality (1973), L.M. even named his Substack, launched in 2018, the Convivial Society.

In this conversation with L.M., we talk about discovering Illich, the importance of starting from the vision we want (not from the tools), what the Amish have figured out, the “post-human future”, why our embodied condition matters, and where we see signs of hope.

Recommended:

• Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich (1973)

• The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul (1964)

• Technopoly, Neil Postman (1993)

• The Religion of Technology, David Noble (1999)

• American Technological Sublime, David Nye (1996)

• The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking About the Meaning of Technology, L.M. Sacasas (2019)

This episode takes us into the long history of the Civil Rights Movement as we talk about the methods and legacies of two long-distance runners, Ella Baker (1903-1986) and Septima Clark (1898-1987).

Baker was a legendary organizer who espoused a group-centered form of leadership and insisted that deep change required the long-haul “spadework” of community organizing. Clark, known as “the teacher of the Civil Right movement,” built a network of Southern Citizenship Schools, which were crucial to the emergence of Black voting power in the early 1960s.

We also discuss the influence of the famous Highlander Folk School (today the Highlander Research and Education Center) in New Market, TN—and the role of its workshops as a seedbed of activism since the labor struggles over coal mining in the 1930s.

For this conversation, we invited two guests whose work has been inspired by the organizing culture of Highlander and the Civil Rights Movement:

• Stephen Lazar teaches public school students Social Studies and English all over through NYC Public Schools’ Virtual Learning Classroom programs.  He is also a Ph.D. candidate in history at the CUNY Graduate Center working on a dissertation on Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson. His writing on  education policy, practice, and history has been published by the New York Times, Washington Post, Education Week, Chalkbeat, and Albert Shanker Institute.

• Daniel Marshall is the founder and director of the Sand Mountain Cooperative Education Center (in Gunstersville, AL), whose Highlander-inspired mission is to house and support programs that facilitate freedom, community centered-development, and cooperative education in the South.

Takeaways from our conversation:

• Baker and Clark were two leaders, both master teachers, whose work exemplifies how the work of organizing and teaching are often inter-related. They were part of a powerful but mostly invisible network of Black women activists whose achievement are now recognized, no longer in the shadow of charismatic male leaders.

• How these grassroots organizations become strong through identifying and raising up organic leaders—ordinary people who become inspired to do great things they had never imagined before.

• A grand-daughter of slaves, Ella Jo Baker was born into a relatively prosperous family in North Carolina amidst a philosophy of racial “uplift” which she came to question after moving to Harlem in 1927 as the Harlem Renaissance in full swing.

• Baker helps George Schuyler found the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL) in 1930. As national director, she becomes Schuyler’s behind-the-scenes support, a role she played with growing frustration for numerous dominating Black male leaders.

• Baker’s job with the WPA’s Worker Education Project in 1936 gives her the experience of creating and running political education programs. She befriends several Marxists but never toes the party line, always remaining skeptical of all kinds of ideology.

• As field secretary of the NAACP (1940-1946), Baker’s tireless canvassing grows the field membership from 50,000 to almost 450,000. Along the way, she is always aiming to decentralize branch supervision in order to enable grassroots initiatives.

• Baker’s slogan: Give people light and they will find a way.

• The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott is often viewed as a spontaneous event, but Baker saw it as the fruit of organizing and a sign that mass actions were possible and necessary, especially for a community which still lacked the vote.

• Baker warns Civil Rights leaders about “getting hung up” in legal successes, dependent upon the courts and charismatic or professional leadership.

• Like the Montgomery bus boycott, the spontaneous outbreak of lunch counter sit-ins by Black students inspires Baker to harness their potential in a new, student-led organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming their chief advisor for four years (1960-1964).

• She once told the SNCC team members, “I want you all to think about the fact that there’s a direct relationship between us not having money and the fact that we’re doing something real.” Later funding changed the culture, inspiring the criticism: “From SNCC to slick.”

• Baker’s prescient advocacy for a participatory democracy with three emphases: 1) grassroots involvement; 2) minimizing of hierarchy and over-emphasis on expertise in leadership; 3) a call for direct action as an answer to fear and alienation. These themes are taken up later by SDS’s founding Port Huron document, among other adopters.

Septima Clark

• Born in Charleston SC, Clark gets a teaching degree at Avery Institute in 1916 before becoming a public school teacher and joining the NAACP. She participates in a campaign to force the city to hire Black teachers in its segregated public schools.

• Clark’s teaching job in Columbia, SC (1928) draws her into the early circles of influence around the coming New Deal’s proposals for social service infrastructure.

• In 1934, Clark attends a federal conference convened by Harold Ickes on Black educational issues with Eleanor Roosevelt as keynote speaker. The main topic is citizenship education without stating what this training might lead to, given the right to vote.

• Clark becomes involved in voter education and voter registration, attending in 1954 a workshop on school integration at the Highlander Folk School (HFS), one month after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. Impressed by the HFS’s emphasis on raising up organic leaders, she begins working with them to develop the Citizenship Schools, the most successful program in the school’s history. Rosa Parks attends a workshop and then refuses to give up her bus seat only four months later—a sign of HFS’s effectiveness, as Clark noted.

• Clark’s literacy program includes learning to write letters, read the Bible, fill out a catalog order form, do household arithmetic, as well as reading and understanding the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights (posted on the wall) by the end of school. No more taking the white man’s word for what the document says.

• Clark comes to realize how class prejudice also works in Black communities and remains committed to cultivating white allies in interracial coalitions.

• In 1956, Baker invites Clark to a meeting with Coretta Scott King. They agree on the need to focus on grassroots leadership potential and collaborate on the formation of SNCC in 1960.

• Clark’s curriculum combines a focus on literacy with voter rights and citizenship, producing 25,000 plus graduates and a foundation for MLK’s non-violent movement in the South. Its grads also help start a credit union, a nursing home, a kindergarten, and a low-income housing project.

• By 1964, Clark has almost 900 Freedom Schools operating, with tens of thousands of students, on a shoestring budget. The 1965 Voting Rights Act inadvertently undermines the school’s agenda by eliminating literacy tests. The Head Start program, part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, picks up much of the Freedom School’s work.

• As the Civil Rights movement shifted focus in the 1960s, from rural to urban, Clark lamented its tendency to replace genuine education with direct action.

• At her death, King eulogizes her as “the grandmother of the Civil Rights movement.”

Recommended:

• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (2005), Barbara Ransby

• Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2012), Katherine Mellen Charron

• I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007), Charles Payne

• The Long Haul: An Autobiography (1991), Myles Horton, with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl

• Starting with People Where They Are: Ella Baker’s Theory of Political Organizing (2022), Mie Inouye

• Ella Baker and the Origins of “Participatory Democracy” (2004), Carol Mueller

• Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker (1981), documentary about Ella Baker

• You’ve Got To Move: Stories of Change in the South (1985), documentary about the Highlander Folk School

The wonderful essayist George Scialabba once entitled an otherwise generally sympathetic piece on Ivan Illich “Against Everything.” That was surely because Ivan Illich’s critique of modernity runs deeper than that of almost any other thinker of his time. His books attacked the unquestioned sacred cows of the age, including schooling, institutional medicine, cars, and economic development, charging them with “terminal counter-productivity”.

And yet Illich was neither a reactionary nor a Luddite. In the 1960s, his countercultural open seminar in Cuernavaca, Mexico—CIDOC—was partly a seedbed for what became liberation theology (although Illich later found the movement too ideological). His writings about “the war on subsistence,” as he called it, laid the groundwork for today’s global movements around the commons, decentralization, and degrowth.

After his remarkable but controversial Gender appeared in 1982, causing a firestorm around what Illich felt was a misreading of the book by its feminist critics, he pulled back from public speaking and concentrated on less volatile subjects.

In a series of interviews with his friend and biographer David Cayley—who is our guest for this episode—Illich gradually sketched out his somewhat startling theory of modernity as an extension of Church history. The “corruption of Christianity” was the theme he first shared in conversation with Cayley, who went on to transcribe and publish Illich’s account of how so many modern institutions arose out of misplaced ambitions to make Christian charity into permanent institutions of society.

Our conversation in this episode is grounded in Cayley’s Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, a work which not only presents its subject’s ideas but wonderfully extends them, an achievement we surely owe to Cayley’s personal friendship with Illich, especially in his last years.

Some takeaways from our conversation:

• The key modern assumption in Illich’s view: that human beings are made up of needs and society is organized to fulfill them. Moreover, modern institutions, as they grow ever larger, tend to defeat their own purposes: they weaken communal self-reliance by creating needs to be serviced by technical professionals; they threaten our ability to enjoy and bear the human condition; and they undermine the arts of suffering and our ability to die our own deaths.

• Illich’s idea of subsistence (which is not poverty but simply sustainable living) as the way the global South might continue to avoid the tragedies of industrialization and modernity.

• In the mid-1980s, a kind of catastrophic breakdown in the old (tool-based) way of seeing things, replaced by a new dimensionless cybernetic space, discontinuous with the past and the certainties with which people once lived.

• “Risk awareness”: to Illich, this was the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.

• The vocation of the friend: to Illich, our only hope for a new society, through “little acts of foolish renunciation”.

Timestamps

• Introduction to Ivan Illich [00:00:00]

• Illich's background and early life [02:08]

• Illich's time in New York and Puerto Rico [05:00]

• Founding of CIDOC in Cuernavaca, Mexico [10:00]

• Illich's critique of modern notions of “development” [15:00]

• Illich's "Deschooling Society" and radical monopolies [21:30]

• "Tools for Conviviality" and the critique of tools [35:00]

• "Medical Nemesis" and its attack on the medical establishment [43:52]

• "Gender" and its controversial reception [49:56]

• Illich's later works on language and literacy [54:30]

• Illich’s theory of “the corruption of Christianity” in the institutions of modernity [1:00:00]

• Interview with David Cayley begins, his first encounter with Illich [1:15:08]

• Illich's ideas on the incarnation and institutions [1:26:02]

• Illich's influence on social movements including the one for the commons [1:41:48]

• Cayley's reflections on Illich as a teacher and friend [1:57:30]

• The hosts offer final thoughts on Illich's legacy [2:11:15]

Recommended:

• Deschooling Society (1971), Ivan Illich

• Tools for Conviviality (1973), Ivan Illich

• Medical Nemesis (1975), Ivan Illich

• Shadow Work (1981), Ivan Illich

• Gender, (1983), Ivan Illich

• In the Vineyard of the Text (1993), Ivan Illich

• ABC: Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1989), Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders

• Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992), David Cayley

• Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (2005), David Cayley

• Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (2023), David Cayley

Many thanks to the great band NOBLE DUST, who provides the music for Lost Prophets. Their latest album A Picture for a Frame is here.

This is the fourth episode of LOST PROPHETS, a podcast about the mid-century voices of solidarity we need to hear again. To listen on your podcast player, our Spotify link is here, Apple Podcasts link is here, and RSS link is here.

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