About two years ago, I attended a conference with the intriguing title “ Neighborhood Economics .” The event turned out to be a national meetup of practitioners, funders, and advocates, among them the three folks I interviewed for this conversation. Best of all, over the three days, I met three of the most innovative thinker-activists in the solidarity movement. I’ve brought them together here for a conversation about where their work is going lately. Michael Shuman is the publisher of the Main ...
May 21, 2024•38 min
For well over a decade, Nathan Schneider has been as perceptive a journalist-observer of the intersections between politics, digital life and media culture as you could hope to find. At just under 200 pages, his new book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life , is brief but packed with insights into authors from Tocqueville to Cadwell Turnbull, Johan Huizinga to Mariame Kaba, Allen Ginsberg to Lani Grenier. If you weren’t aware of the “Californian ideology,” he’s got a great analy...
Apr 03, 2024•38 min
Guest host Joe Waters (co-founder and CEO of Capita) joins Elias for a conversation with James R. Price, co-author with Kenneth R. Melchin of a new biography of the founder of the Peace Corps and head of Lyndon Johnson's War of Poverty in the 1960s. The focus is on the way Shriver (1915-2011) brought an instinctive spirituality to public service while avoiding sectarianism of any kind. Price is the executive director of the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute. Copies are available here: https://book...
Jan 02, 2023•49 min
Pete and I talk to D.L. Mayfield, author of Unruly Saint, Dorothy Day's Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times. This new biography puts a special focus on Dorothy as a mother and on the Depression-era launch of the Catholic Worker newspaper. Mayfield captures the charmed chaos of Catholic Worker houses, along with the enormous suffering that surrounded them in these years. Mayfield recounts how a copy of Day's The Long Loneliness helped her find her way out of a scrupulous white evangeli...
Nov 28, 2022•58 min
A conversation with our first creative writer on the podcast, Evanston-based Joshua Corey, a poet, novelist, translator and critic. We talk about his remarkable longform poem, Hannah and the Master (a kind of dreamscape reflection on the intertwined lives of Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil and other figures) and his new novel, How Long Is Now. Josh's personal site is here: http://www.joshua-corey.com/ . His wonderful substack column is here: https://joshuacorey.substack.com/ . Get f...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 10 min
For this conversation, we join Joe Waters (of Capita)to talk to Mario Primicerio, now president of the La Pira Foundation, about his long friendship with fellow Florentine mayor, the late Giorgio La Pira. La Pira is remembered as being a bridge builder, working with Catholics and Communists in his beautiful Italian city in the late 1950s and 1960s. La Pira was also a friend of Thomas Merton and undertook a controversial mission to Hanoi to meet with Ho Chi Minh at the height of the Vietnam War. ...
Jun 06, 2022•30 min
Pete and I talk to Mike Budde about his new book, Foolishness to Gentiles, a collection of powerful essays asking how Christians can justify killing so many other Christians (Ukraine as only the latest instance), whether Dorothy Day is best understood as an anarchist, and how the Church could become an authentic counter-culture. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Mar 21, 2022•50 min
Pete describes himself as a capital P pragmatist (and a small D democrat) and offers us his take on this school of thought. In this chat we take a quick tour starting (naturally) with William James before getting to two of Pete's former teachers, both pragmatists: Cornel West and Roberto Mangabeira Unger (the guy in the headshot). Let's hear it for "democratic experimentalism"! Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Sep 27, 2021•32 min
A conversation about Solidarity Hall's new translation of the Reflections of Fr. Josemaria Arizmendi, the founder of the Mondragon cooperatives. Elias and Pete talk about the nature of Arizmendi's social vision, the power of cooperative culture, and the workplace as a center of social transformation. To download a free PDF of the new translation, go here: https://solidarityhall.org/in_action/arizmendi-reflections-translation/ . Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/su...
Aug 10, 2021•54 min
We talk with Pete about his law school graduation address that went crazy viral and led to his new book about the nature of "long-haul" commitment. And about remarkable people with remarkable accomplishments who show us how to make those choices to stick with a vision. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe
Apr 29, 2021•44 min
Pete and I talk with Bob Elder about his new biography of the infamous John C. Calhoun, the spiritual founder of the Southern Confederacy and its economic foundation in slavery. We explore the range of Calhoun's ideas and why some of them--such as his views on secession--are not (like Calhoun himself) dead and buried but still alive in numerous places today. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Mar 10, 2021•58 min
Pete and I talk to Israeli-born Canadian author and activist Daphna Levit about her new book of essays recovering the wide spectrum of dissenting Jewish ideas about Zionism. Beginning with founding figures like Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha'am, she highlights voices and views of Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Noam Chomsky, and Hannah Arendt, among several contemporary writers. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Feb 08, 2021•52 min
This country's 3 million Black Catholics in the U.S. recently got the news that Archbishop Wilton Gregory (Washington DC) has become the first African American cardinal. Why then have the U.S. bishops not publicly acknowledged the Black Lives Matters movement? We talk to Black Catholic seminarian and musician Nate Tinner-Williams about this question and his move from evangelical Christianity to Roman Catholicism and how it led him to a discovery of the roots of Black Catholicism in the U.S. Get ...
Oct 26, 2020•50 min
Pete's back and he joins Elias in interviewing Fred Dewey, author of The School of Public Life and a political/cultural activist. In the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, Fred helped lead a decade-long effort to establish neighborhood councils, now about one hundred, for the City of Los Angeles. Until 2010, he was director of Beyond Baroque, a poetry and cultural center in Venice CA, where projects included bringing segregated neighborhoods into dialogue through poetry. Over the last decade, D...
Aug 03, 2020•1 hr
Why has the literature of ancient Greece always cast such a spell over modern readers? I dust off my own rusty skills in Greek with Dan Walden, a member of the classics department at the University of Michigan, as we discuss the Iliad, Sappho's poetry, and Plato’s Symposium—and why we share an enthusiasm for them in the original Greek. Along the way, we somehow manage to talk about St. Gregory of Nyssa, Tom Stoppard’s play, The Invention of Love, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the musical “Hedwig and...
Jun 04, 2020•57 min
A conversation about Cadwell's debut novel, The Lesson, a post-colonial vision of an alien invasion of the U.S. Virgin Islands (in a blue-white seashell-shaped craft) with a series of wonderfully bizarre twists. We also talk about growing up in the islands, the importance of creating a culture of cooperatives and cooperation, and a future fiction project. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Mar 18, 2020•43 min
The subtitle of the latest book from the wonderfully literate Scott Beauchamp is "Reunderstanding My Military Experience as a Critique of Modern Culture." In this conversation, Scott and I talk about boredom, ritual, community, honor, and the symbolism of cigarettes. Other topics are the war poetry of David Jones, the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han, and his new book about dead malls and the sublime. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Feb 17, 2020•57 min
A conversation about Andres' friendship with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his experiences as part of her winning 2018 campaign, the Green New Deal initiative, and (with Pete's help) how to deconstruct "The Lion King." Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe
Dec 09, 2019•52 min
Chicago not only has a new mayor but new politics, including grassroots initiatives such as the Kola Nut Collaborative, a hybrid of timebanking and community organizing. Pete and I get a read on all these things from Mike Strode, the founder of the KNC, about his path to the cooperative movement and four of his creative inspirations: Steve Biko, Ralph Ellison, Hoyt Fuller, and Hubert Harrison. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Nov 11, 2019•55 min
Pete and I talk to Eric Miller of Geneva College about why Christopher Lasch still matters and what we saw at the recent Front Porch Republic conference featuring Wendell Berry. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe
Oct 14, 2019•50 min
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 brought new readers to Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951). Pete and I talk to Samantha Hill, assistant director of Bard College's Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, about the insights Arendt's thought offers us today. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe
Sep 19, 2019•48 min
Amidst a global culture war between the forces of neoliberal atomization and incorrigible fundamentalists, Adam Webb is proposing the creation of a deep cosmopolis, a global alliance of tradition-minded defenders of the poor. His own international background (UK, Spain, Peru, China)gives Webb fascinating insights into how the local and the global might combine forces. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Sep 09, 2019•57 min
A senior editor with Current Affairs, Brianna Rennix's day job is as an asylum attorney stationed just north of Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. We talk about her recent columns ("This Week in Terrible Immigration News") on topics such as what it's like to interview women with children fleeing violence and hoping the Trump administration will not succeed in separating them from their children. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Aug 27, 2019•44 min
Back on the air, Pete and Elias talk to the founder of Big Car (Indianapolis), Jim Walker, about his group's amazing track record using social practice art in Rust Belt placemaking and (even better) in "placekeeping." Also discussed: ideas of mercy in Fr. James Keenan and Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Sorry about the occasional noise!) Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Jul 25, 2019•55 min
Pete talks about his newly-published critique of the state of the legal profession (Bicentennial Crisis), aimed partly at his own Harvard Law School's practices. We also take up public service anthropology, explain what a stroad is, and ponder the Right to the City. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe
Nov 21, 2017•57 min
What if ordinary citizens stopped thinking of themselves as mere consumers and began acting as co-creators of their communities? Pete and I interview Karol Soltan, one of the founders of the Civic Studies movement, along with some talk about the Boston-based anti-eviction group called Urban Life/Vida Urbana and Jeremy Beer's book on how localized charity became placeless Big Philanthropy. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Oct 16, 2017•1 hr
Pete and I interview Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, a think tank which hopes to avoid corporate capture by using crowd-funding for support. We gab about stuff like universal basic income, social wealth funds, and why libertarianism seems cool when you're in high school. Pete and I also talk about James Keenan's Moral Wisdom and the L.A. Kitchen project. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Sep 18, 2017•52 min
An oral historian in the tradition of Studs Terkel, Rosalie Riegle has written books on the history of the Catholic Worker movement, the non-violence movement and women's history. Before our interview with Rosalie (starting 13:15 mark), Pete and I talk about the organizational lessons of the AA movement and Douglas Rushkoff's terrific book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Aug 31, 2017•55 min
We talk about a wonderful essay collection by localist Bill Kaufmann called Look Homeward, America and the neighborhood microfunding project called Detroit Soup before talking to Nathan Schneider about his days caught up in the middle of the Occupy encampment in NYC, platform cooperativism, and what radical Catholicism has to do with all this. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe...
Jul 26, 2017•1 hr 4 min
A quick chat about the most successful world-changing non-violent movement in modern history. Talk about your solidarity. Get full access to Solidarity Hall at solidarityhall.substack.com/subscribe
Jul 13, 2017•12 min
