Brian Allain

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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Innovation

From “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” by Steven Johnson This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments

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