Brian Allain

competition turns out to be less central to the history of good ideas

From “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” by Steven Johnson The pattern of “competition” is an excellent case in point. Every economics textbook will tell you that competition between rival firms leads to innovation in their products and services. But when you look at innovation from the long-zoom perspective, competition turns […]

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Life Is With

From “Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner” by Frederick Buechner THE TEMPTATION IS always to reduce life to size. A bowl of cherries. A rat race. Amino acids. Even to call it a mystery smacks of reductionism. It is the mystery. As far as anybody seems to know, the vast majority of

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locked in cycles of endless conflict

From “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life” by Luke Burgis We’ll see in this chapter that mimetic conflict is contagious. It can lead to a social environment in which everyone is reacting mimetically to everyone else. This dynamic keeps people locked in cycles of endless conflict, bound to one another through mimesis,

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Cultivate the Mood to Linger 

By Susan K. Smith             Sometimes, life is so painful that we actually shut God out.              The fact that life can and does throw hardballs that knock us down is something we all know about. We have been there. We have found ourselves trying to get up and regain our footing, and our stability in a

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Let your life speak

From “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation” by Parker J. Palmer My youthful understanding of “Let your life speak” led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them whether they were mine or not. If that sounds like what we

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Makes You Come Alive

From “What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman” by Lerita Coleman Brown “Once, when I was seeking the advice of Howard Thurman and talking to him at some length about what needed to be done in the world, he interrupted me,” writes Gil Bailie in the acknowledgments of his book Violence

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