A child's view of progress -- The gorgeous chalice of civilizational myth -- My friend Pagus -- Holding the hand of conservative -- Sacred cow crap -- A left-wing odd duck -- What is "religionless Christianity"? -- The aristocracy of consumption -- The kingdom of God is green -- An ethos spawned and nourished -- Servanthood, stewardship, and a restraint on vice -- Clinging to dead ideas -- The engine of disaster -- Voting for Jesus -- The gathering globalization of disaster -- Packed in a comforting mythology -- The superlative proportions of our self-inflation -- Two losers and an icon -- Ending the bogeyman cycle -- The end of something big -- Divine terrorists -- The gendered feminine and twenty centuries of papa -- Age of the daughter -- Stuff -- A broken bone -- An admonition to gore vidal -- The imposition of those glories -- The village of God -- This predator beast game -- The feminine dimensions of God -- Such pureness of heart -- God's lifeboat -- The global cloning of civilized desire -- The gardener from Amenia -- Pushing one hundred -- One last thing -- Civilization, "Civilization," and the kingdom of God: an afterword.
Summary:
"In the early 1970s, living in inner-city St. Louis, Paul Gilk asked his friends to explain why small farms were dying. The answers did not satisfy. Years of study followed. Through the reading of history, Gilk began to grasp the origins of both horticulture and agriculture, their blossoming into Neolithic agrarian village culture, and the impoundment of the agrarian village by bandit "aristocrats" at the formation of what we now call civilization. Getting a grip on the relationship between agriculture and civilization was one thing; but, as a person strongly influenced by Gospel stories, Gilk also wanted to know what the connection might be between the "kingdom of God" proclamation in the canonical Gospels and the peasant world from which Jesus arose. Aided in his thinking by the works of biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, Gilk began to realize that the "kingdom of God" was both a harkening back to the peace and freedom of precivilized agrarian village and a revolutionary anticipation of a postcivilized village-mindedness organized organically on the basis of radical servanthood and radical stewardship. We are, Gilk says, entering the dawn of this Green culture simultaneously with the deepening of civilized world disaster"--P. [4] of cover.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.