Dorothy's Place

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 Street Journal and a well-known advocate for investing in local economies, Stephanie Swepson Twitty is the president and CEO of Eagle Market Streets Community Development Corporation in Ashville NC, and Kevin Jones is a co-founder of SOCAP and Neighborhood Economics.

They share a passion for democratizing an area many activists tend to ignore as a power source: finance and investing. In our conversation, you’ll hear about this great work of devising ways to bring catalytic capital down to the grassroots level in order to build racial equity and regenerate neighborhoods.

For more interviews with Michael, Stephanie, and Kevin, you can also visit The Mindful Marketplace’s YouTube show, which has partnered with the Main Street Journal, Impact Alpha, and Neighborhood Economics.

See you next time—peace.

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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 analysis of where it came from how it (still) works.

The main thrust of the book is his timely reflections on the very tricky business of designing democratic spaces—i.e., the organizations and groups most of us inhabit most of the time.

The critical thing is to design them so that they’re truly democratic, not just more instances of what Schneider calls the “implicit feudalism” of most digital life.

Mentioned in our conversation, two earlier books by Nathan:

* Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy (2018)— “Since the financial crash of 2008, the cooperative movement has been coming back with renewed vigor. Everything for Everyone chronicles this economic and social revolution—from taxi cooperatives that are keeping Uber and Lyft at bay, to an outspoken mayor transforming his city in the Deep South, to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin, to the rural electric co-op members who are propelling an aging system into the future. As these pioneers show, cooperative enterprise is poised to help us reclaim faith in our capacity for creative, powerful democracy.”

* Thank You, Anarchy (2013)—“This book charts the origins and growth of Occupy Wall Street through the eyes of some of its most determined organizers, who tried to give shape to an uprising always just beyond their control. I try to bring to life the General Assembly meetings, the chaotic marches, the split-second decisions, and the moments of doubt as Occupy swelled from a hashtag online into a global phenomenon. Thank You, Anarchy is a study of the spirit that drove this watershed movement. And, for those not faint of heart, it is also an invitation.”

Finally, Nathan is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado (Boulder), where he heads up the Media Economies Design Lab or MEDLab. You can sign up for their newsletter here.

See you next time—peace.

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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://bookshop.org/p/books/spiritualizing-politics-without-politicizing-religion-the-example-of-sargent-shriver-james-r-price/17522834.

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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 evangelicalism toward a different kind of Christian witness.
Copies of the book are available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/unruly-saint-dorothy-day-s-radical-vision-and-its-challenge-for-our-times-d-l-mayfield/17308724

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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/.

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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.
The occasion for our conversation is Solidarity Hall's forthcoming release of a biography of La Pira, The Power of Hope. (Ordering info on the Solidarity Hall website: https://solidarityhall.org/.)

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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.

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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"!

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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/.

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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.

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