For instance, when a brand like Nike decides to make ads in favor of Colin Kaepernick, we want to push back. I get it. It’s blatant pandering to Black Lives Matter, right? It’s a dilution of the values of the movement. But it’s also an indication that a big company wants to show its support for an important cause.

So when a corporation decides to back Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, economic equality, or climate remediation, it is making a bet that those are sides that are going to win. This is good.

Or when Pepsi and Kendall Jenner do a zillion-dollar advertisement paying homage to some sort of Black Lives Matter rally, I know it’s inane. It reduces social justice activism to some sort of fashion statement. But it’s also a sign that Pepsi wants to be down with whatever this thing is as best they can understand it. It may have been a watered-down, issueless protest they were depicting, but no one could miss that they were trying to side with millennial angst and social justice in general — just as many millennials do. (As social satire, in some ways it reveals how a lot of activism is really a form of cultural fashion. Maybe that’s the real reason activists are so bothered by their hip representation in a Pepsi commercial. They know that — at least in part — they, too, are suckered by the sexy fun of protests and rallies, stopping traffic, and flummoxing cable news commentators and yet often have trouble articulating what about “the system” they actually want to change.)

No matter how superficial or self-congratulatory their efforts, however, what the corporations are trying to do is get on the right side of history. Think of it cynically, and it makes perfect sense: These giant corporations are picking sides in the culture wars. It’s not short-lived pandering; they can’t afford that. Unlike politicians, who often attempt to stroke and gratify different, sometimes opposed constituencies and appeal to a local base, corporations necessarily communicate to everyone at once. Super Bowl advertising is one size fits all.

So when a corporation decides to back Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, economic equality, or climate remediation, it is making a bet that those are sides that are going to win. This is good. It’s not simply a matter of employees or shareholders pushing management to do the right thing. No, it’s future forecasters telling the branding department where things are headed. Companies are realizing that their futures better be tied to whichever side of an issue that’s going to win.

The problem is that the more we attack people for whatever they did before they were woke, the less progress we’re going to make.

Cynical? Maybe. But, despite the way the Supreme Court might rule, corporations are not people; they’re just corporations. They don’t have feelings; they only have power. They’re putting their money and reputations on racial equality and social justice over white nationalism. This alone should serve as a leading indicator of where things are actually going. A sign of hope.

Instead of rejecting such efforts, we should welcome them. Maybe think of corporations as dinosaurs that can be trained. Their help is worth more than the pleasure of perpetual righteous indignation.

I’ve been likewise dismayed by many progressives’ take-no-prisoners approach to people who working for social justice. Bernie Sanders, perhaps the person most responsible for bringing the Democratic Party home from its neoliberal vacation, recently became the object of contempt for having used the word “niggardly” in a speech 30 years ago. Though the discomfort is understandable, the word has nothing to do with race. It means stingy. It was on my SATs in 1979. And yet, we’ve now moved into an era where we don’t use such a word because it sounds like a racial slur. I get that.

The problem is that the more we attack people for whatever they did before they were woke or, in Bernie’s case, before progressive standards changed, the less progress we’re going to make. Why agree that we should move beyond a certain behavior or attitude if doing so simply makes us vulnerable to attack? How can a D.C. politician, for example, push for the Washington Redskins to change their name when they know there’s footage somewhere of them rooting for the team or wearing a jersey with a Native American on it? Even though the politician may agree with the need for a change, they would have to resist or at least slow the wheels of progress lest they get caught under the cart. Intolerance and shaming is not the way to win allies.

Progressives are mad, hurt, and traumatized. But they’ve got to dismantle this circular firing squad and begin to welcome positive change rather than punish those who are trying to get woke. Truth and reconciliation work better than blame and shame.

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Restoration of forests and coasts can tackle ‘existential crises’ but is being overlooked

The restoration of natural forests and coasts can simultaneously tackle climate change and the annihilation of wildlife but is being worryingly overlooked, an international group of campaigners have said.

Animal populations have fallen by 60% since 1970, suggesting a sixth mass extinction of life on Earth is under way, and it is very likely that carbon dioxide will have to be removed from the atmosphere to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. Trees and plants suck carbon dioxide from the air as they grow and also provide vital habitat for animals.

“The world faces two existential crises, developing with terrifying speed: climate breakdown and ecological breakdown,” the group writes in a letter to the Guardian. “Neither is being addressed with the urgency needed to prevent our life-support systems from spiralling into collapse.

“We are championing a thrilling but neglected approach to averting climate chaos while defending the living world: natural climate solutions. Defending the living world and defending the climate are, in many cases, one and the same.”

The signatories include the school strikes activist Greta Thunberg, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, the writers Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein and Philip Pullman and the campaigners Bill McKibben and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, and the musician Brian Eno are also among the signatories of the letter, which was instigated by the Guardian writer George Monbiot.

The group emphasises that natural climate solutions are not an alternative to the rapid decarbonisation of energy, transport and farming. Both are needed, the campaigners say.

The United Nations announced a Decade of Ecosystem Restoration at the start of March. “The degradation of our ecosystems has had a devastating impact on both people and the environment,” said Joyce Msuya, the head of the UN Environment Programme. “Nature is our best bet to tackle climate change and secure the future.”

Recent research indicates that about a third of the greenhouse gas reductions needed by 2030 can be provided by the restoration of natural habitats, but such solutions have attracted just 2.5% of the funding for tackling emissions.

The greatest impact is likely to come from the restoration of forests, particularly areas in the tropics that were razed for cattle ranching, palm oil plantations and timber. But natural climate solutions must not compete with the need to feed the world’s growing population, the letter says, and must be implemented with the consent of local communities.

Effective ways of restoring habitat often overlap with the conservation of wildlife, the group says. Boosting the populations of forest elephants and rhinos in Africa and Asia would help spread the seeds of trees that have a high carbon content, for example, while more wolves would lead to fewer plants being eaten by moose.

The fastest accumulation of carbon occurs in vegetated coastal habitats such as mangroves, saltmarshes and seagrass beds, research shows, which also protect communities from storms. Here, carbon can be sequestered 40 times faster than in tropical forests. Peatlands must also be protected and restored, the group says, as they store one-third of all soil carbon despite covering just 3% of the world’s land.

Other suggested ways of removing carbon dioxide from the air include burning wood to generate electricity and burying the emissions, but to work at scale this would require vast amounts of land.

A website, Natural Climate Solutions, is launched on Wednesday calling on governments to back such measures and “to create a better world for wildlife and a better world for people”.

“Our aim is simple: to catalyse global enthusiasm for drawing down carbon by restoring ecosystems,” said Monbiot, who has written a report for the website. “It is the single most undervalued and underfunded tool for climate mitigation.”

Photo by gideonc

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Sol Trumbo & Nick Buxton: In an age of Trump and trolls, it may be strange to talk about utopia. Not only has a divisive reactionary right-wing privileged minority surged to the fore, but social inequality, militarism and the climate crisis have worsened too. There does seem, however, to be one arena for hope for progressive solutions and that is in the city. Worldwide, mayors are increasingly a progressive and fearless voice advancing bold agendas on climate change, welcoming refugees and trialling new forms of democratic participation.

The question remains: can these cities offer solutions that address multiple systemic crises instead of pursuing, as Greg Sharzer suggests, a “way to avoid, rather than confront capitalism” by focusing on “piecemeal reforms around the edges”? Can a group of cities really offer any fundamental solutions to a crisis created by the immense power of corporate capital?

To try and answer this question, the Transnational Institute in 2017 launched Transformative Cities, asking communities to share their stories of radical transformation, in particular in the areas of water, energy and housing. Our research, particularly in the areas of water and energy had revealed a significant global counter-trend to privatisation, showing that 1,600 municipalities in 45 countries had brought their public services under public control since 2000.

We wanted to explore this more deeply to see whether and how cities could be part of building systemic solutions. American sociologist Erik Olin Wright, in his assessment of strategies for confronting capitalism, says that we need to escape from delusions that we can either overthrow capitalism or tame capitalism – arguing that the answer is to erode capitalism. He argues for the building of “real utopias” which are constructs that have “the potential to contribute to eroding the dominance of capitalism when they expand the economic space within which anti-capitalist emancipatory ideals can operate”. As we argued in a previous piece, cities offer many advantages for pushing forward these kinds of radical emancipatory ideals, that in the language of this initiative we call ‘transformative’.

At the same time, it is clear that what ‘transformative’ looks like will vary radically according to the context, the culture, and the process. Cities may make transformative changes in one area and still be regressive in others. As the Zapatistas have cogently argued and shown in practice, the revolution depends on stepping out and asking questions as we move forwards (Caminando preguntamos). We have a clear analysis that the key crises we face are due to a capitalist system of production that has concentrated economic and political power in the hands of transnational corporations and a small elite while bringing our ecological systems to a dangerous point of collapse. However, we have an open mind regarding what the truly transformative city and politics looks like.

 The Atlas of Utopias. Credit: TNI 2018.

As a result of the call, TNI is today presenting its Atlas of Utopias, telling the stories of 32 communities from 19 countries, ranging from small peri-urban indigenous communities in Bolivia to major urban metropolises such as Paris. Their contexts are starkly different, and their initiatives vary widely in terms of time, scale and impacts. Thirty-two cases are also just a tiny snapshot of the range of exciting transformative initiatives taking place around the world.

Nevertheless, the stories showcased in this Atlas of Utopias are deeply inspiring. Despite the diversity, there are also common threads to radical transformative practice. We would like to share four of them here:

1. Organising locally can take on corporate power and national governments. It would seem that the balance of power between local governments and the national government and multinational corporations would make victories difficult but, in many cases, determined campaigners have defeated both. They have done this by taking advantage of people’s loyalty to their city, their greater control over local policy and by naming and shaming corporations and their failures to run city services effectively. In Berlin, for example, residents took on the federal government as well as the multinationals RWE and Veolia that did everything they could politically and legally to block remunicipalisation of the city’s water. Eventually political pressure – including a referendum in which 98% demanded that the government publish secretive contracts – led to water remunicipalisation in 2014.
2. Organising around access to basic rights such as water, energy, housing can engage many people and be part of a bigger transformation including tackling climate change. The advantage of organising around tangible issues such as energy or housing is that these are essential to everyone’s daily life, which is why these struggles have been so emblematic to the rise of municipalist movements everywhere. They also can be an opening to building a bigger progressive radical agenda. In Richmond, California, initial protests against air pollution by the Chevron refinery has led to a surge of support for the Richmond Progressive Alliance, their election to the council and a sea of change in local policy. This oil company town has subsequently raised its local minimum wage, brought in rent control measures that protect 40% of Richmond tenants, and rolled out successful community policing led by a visionary gay police chief. In Nicaragua, an association of rural development workers not only organised to build a community hydro to provide electricity to a rural population for the first time, it used the income from its surplus electricity to create an additional US $300,000 of revenue for investment in further development projects for the region.
3. Worker engagement is usually critical to transformation. As Hilary Wainwright has argued, workers are not just important for their bargaining power against capital, they are also uniquely positioned because of their knowledge and experience in running services and their pivotal role within community relations. Remunicipalisation and transformative practices work best when they can draw on this knowledge and creativity. In Jamundi, Colombia, the local trade union has not only stopped the privatisation of water, but has also become a fierce defender of the human right to water, developing four community water systems.  In Mumbai, India, former mill workers have succeeded in staying mobilised even after the mills closed and have won the construction of 26,000 homes for workers. They have successfully challenged and defeated real estate developers who sought to build malls and luxury housing.
4. Changes in one city can inspire many others. Many cities report that their actions have led to interest by many others and therefore sparked changes way beyond the community. Grenoble’s bold water remunicipalisation in 2001 – that included high levels of citizen accountability, social tariffs and ecological measures – inspired Paris to do the same. In Mexico, a special school has been set up to encourage lawyers, engineers, accountants, geographers and teachers in 16 states to defend public water for all, helping ensure that good practice becomes viral. The victory of the citizen-movement platform Barcelona en Comú has similarly sparked a new wave of municipalist movements worldwide. This perhaps answers one of Olin Wright’s challenges for establishing real utopias – the need for these networks to expand so that they can be in a position to challenge ‘the dominance of capitalism’.

In the next month, we plan to explore nine cases in more depth, sharing their process of change. Then in mid-April, the public will be invited to vote on their favourites. In addition, we have been working with a number of evaluators to draw out the learning which will be turned into publications in a variety of media formats to inspire and assist other communities involved in the same struggles.

There is a lot to learn about both the individual cases, their durability in terms of transformation, and whether they contain the elements for eventually “challenging the dominance of capitalism”. The latter still seems very far off, and it remains an open question and debate over whether an ever-expanding municipalist movement will ever reach the position of challenging the hegemony of transnational corporations and client neoliberal states.

What is clear already is that the first step for transformation begins when a group of people in a community decide to say no to the corporate takeover of public resources, and when they start to imagine an alternative.

Throughout the atlas, we witness individuals and organisations who have dared to dream and who have trusted that people can make decisions more justly than corporations driven by profit. In the process, they are building the social relationships that can take on corporate capital and most of all creating the imaginary that another world is not only possible but is on the way.

Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance. – Eduardo Galeano

Featured image: Affordable housing for women workers in Solapur, India. Credit: Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).

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You’ve heard it before: Things have to get worse before they can get better. It’s a doctrine many of us learn first from our parents, as children, when they’re trying to teach us the unintuitive notion of delayed gratification. Tighten your belt, build character, learn your lesson the hard way. You’ll be rewarded in the end.

Then you grow up, and you read the newspaper. You live through its contents. You’re told to learn the same lesson again, but this time they call it economics, or creative disruption, or homeland security. This is the way of things; this is reality. “Things have to get worse before they can get better,” the politicians say.

To scratch this kind of talk is to reveal an old heresy beneath the veneer of common sense. And the need has never been more urgent to refute it.

An illustration from “Dispensational Truth or God’s Plan and Purpose in the Ages” by Clarence Larkin, courtesy of preservedwords.com

When I and several hundred thousand people demanding action on climate change marched through Midtown Manhattan on September 21, 2014, apocalypse was on our lips. We were marching to save the world—to change everything, as the propaganda beckoning us to participate had said. Wave after wave of marchers paraded through the city, carrying hand-painted banners and giant puppets, hopeful and joyful despite the likelihood of more political inaction to follow.

After a few hours in the streets, we could hear each other’s tired voices wondering what it might take for real change to happen. Things would have to get worse in certain places—drier droughts in California, maybe, or more catastrophic hurricanes in New York City. A few thousand of us, dressed in blue, made that point visible the next day by clogging up traffic near Wall Street, likening ourselves to a flood of rising seawater.

The COP 21 summit in Paris last year seemed to corroborate the overall story. That dismal number, 21, marked the number of years that the world’s leaders had failed to take seriously the rising temperatures, the worsening storms, and the droughts feeding geopolitical mayhem in places like South Sudan and Syria. After 21 years, at least, things had started to become bad enough. Even the Pentagon and Michael Bloomberg were voicing worry about how the climate crisis would affect their business-as-usual. The negotiations in Paris produced a deal, though one inadequate to prevent many of the catastrophes that computer models predict. Once again, it seems that things will have to get worse before they can get better.

Things? What things, and whose? Worse for whom, and better for whom? In times like these it’s hard not to see that there is apocalypse in the air, but the question that really matters is what kind. That’s the trouble; that’s the scam. There are many kinds of apocalypse stories. One can wait for the climate apocalypse to come, or one can see that it is happening already, especially in the pockets and places far from centers of power, where people live closest to the earth. These people are already on the brink. Things can get worse before they get better, but who says that they must?

Dispensationalist Dogma

This doctrine has a history. It has appeared in many places and times. But for American culture, it is through dispensationalism—a wildly popular, yet little-discussed, kind of Christian theology—that the idea of things getting worse before they can get better has been hidden in plain sight.

Dispensationalist theology first took hold in the United States thanks to a man who hit rock bottom. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War then started practicing law despite a lack of formal schooling. He made enough of a name for himself that President Grant appointed him the U.S. attorney to Kansas. But he drank more than was good for him, got divorced and probably wound up in jail. By and by, he found Christ in 1879 and, in 1883—again, with no formal training—became pastor of a church in Dallas. His charisma swelled it from tiny to enormous. He expanded his ministry to a prominent church in Massachusetts and then to an empire of Bible correspondence courses and colleges and conferences through which his ideas spread. His chief legacy, however, would be a collection of annotations for the Bible, a firm-handed guide through the bewilderments of scripture.

Along the way, Scofield encountered the writings of a marginal Irish preacher (and fellow lawyer), John Nelson Darby. Scofield, following Darby, taught that God governs and manages the world according to a sequence of distinct ages, or dispensations, each with distinct sets of rules and expectations. Each meets some kind of catastrophic end. In the Bible, as in Scofield’s life, things always got worse before they could get better—for instance, by Noah’s flood, or the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple, or whatever social degeneracy we observe around us. Fear not, for God is in control. The job of believers is to accept whatever dispensation they’re in and await, like eager spectators, the next catastrophe.

Understanding sacred history like this has consequences for the present. Justice and peace need not be strived for now; we’re not in the right dispensation yet. Dispensationalists have held that even the beloved commands of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount can be neglected—love your enemies, give what you have to those in need, do for others what you’d have them do for you.

As one of Scofield’s later followers reasoned, “Every businessman would go bankrupt giving to those who ask of him.” Dispensationalism permits a dose of pecuniary sense to some of the Bible’s more demanding social teachings.

This theology spread in tandem with modern corporate capitalism, aided by Gilded Age benefactors like California oilman Lyman Stewart. A later follower of Scofield’s imagined that Christians who persevere through the present tumult will get to serve as a “ruling aristocracy, the official administrative staff” of Christ’s corporate kingdom to come. The bureaucrat, thus, is the model believer: Play by the rules you’re given, as excellently as you can, and even as the planet is engulfed in flames rest assured that all is well.

Few authors have been so influential in U.S. intellectual history as Scofield while winning so little credit from the intellectual establishment. Especially after the apocalypse of World War I, the Scofield Reference Bible became the best-selling annotated Bible in history and probably the most successful book Oxford University Press has ever published.

Since Scofield, dispensationalism has lived on in U.S. evangelical culture’s fascination with predictions of Rapture, Armageddon and the Antichrist. But it is far from just a religious heresy. Dispensationalism is at work whenever we conclude, in conviction and resignation, that things have to get worse before they’ll get better. It amounts to acceptance of eventual self-destruction as a tolerable path to be on, and blindness to the most vulnerable among us who are already being destroyed.

It turns up on every part of the political spectrum, from followers of Karl Marx to those of Ayn Rand. We tell ourselves a dispensationalist story each time another economic crisis comes around, when “the economy” gets saved and an official sigh of relief is breathed while millions of people suffer foreclosures and layoffs that tear apart families and impoverish communities. For now, at least, in this day and age, this is what must be done. These are the rules.

“Apocalypse does not loom before us equally,” Catherine Keller writes in her study of the Book of Revelation, Apocalypse Now and Then. Keller, who teaches theology at Drew University, points to a way of imagining apocalypse that is very different from the dispensational kind, one that better suits our ecological challenges. But her analysis begins with the Bible.

In Revelation, figures like the seven-headed Beast and the Antichrist have been interpreted through the centuries as representing strongmen, or nations controlled by men, who engage in wars that men will fight. “The revealing gaze is male,” Keller writes. The upshot: These are the characters in the world that matter.

The stories of women and others on the receiving end of power don’t play more than supporting roles in this grand story; these are the kinds of people who have to endure while things get worse before they get better. In the meantime, proto-apocalyptic corporate empires are free to go on, in Keller’s phrase, “manfully sucking the planet dry.” Every century reinterprets the figures to fit its reigning principalities. But what else might the text mean if we’re not asking it for a story of imperial politics?

The Coming of the Counter-Apocalypse

Some feminist scholars have sought to forgo apocalypse entirely, but Keller does not. What she proposes instead is that we allow ourselves to notice instances of “counter-apocalypse”—the struggles and revelations constantly taking place among those whom the masters of the present age deem insignificant.C

For Keller, the Book of Revelation is actually a model for how to “sustain resistance to destruction without expecting to triumph.” The hallucinogenic creatures and symbols that appear in its text aren’t members of a governing bureaucracy, as the Scofields of the world would have it. Rather, they’re a palette of visions for people craving hope in the midst of what appears to be crisis and powerlessness.

John the Revelator first penned this prophecy during a time of apocalypse imposed from Rome. The strange, diverse images he conjured show how even that apocalypse had many sides—the trumpeter angels, the Lamb, the woman in the pangs of birth. He preached to the churches of seven cities, each with their own story to live through and to tell. Scofield’s system proffers an overall unity in the mayhem, a reassuring coherence; Keller cleaves to the multiplicity.

Among the Johns of today are native communities whose treaty rights are being revoked so crude oil can be extracted from under their feet; farmers who live in perpetual debt to corporations that produce the seeds they’re forced to use; those in places prone to worsening storms who are unable to leave or rebuild. These should be crises for all of us. The way to respond to their counter-apocalyptic stories is not to keep on pushing papers for the status quo, waiting for a bigger crisis to come. This is when the Sermon on the Mount is most needed, when the meek on the front lines should be the light of the world. The rest of us can let ourselves see their light. We don’t need to wait for the big climate apocalypse; the counter-apocalypses are here.

Apocalypses are already happening, but the rulers of the present dispensation would prefer that we not notice; there is resistance happening, too, and they would prefer that we not join. They would prefer that we obsess about the cataclysm of their choosing, the one always just over the horizon. Waiting for more crisis is a luxury most people on this planet can’t afford, and it’s a heresy none of us should allow to fester.

Those who long for crisis, and who imagine that it is necessary, betray their privilege. They are willing to believe crisis is needed because, on some level, they know they’re well-positioned to ride the tremors and come out ahead.

Environmental advocacy has tended to be a boutique faith for those who can afford it, those with enough comfort and leisure to contemplate a hegemonic mega-narrative to the exclusion of everything else. People of color in the United States are more likely to accept the reality of climate change, but caricatures of a largely white, affluent climate movement still hold too much truth. There are those who await a mythical “paradigm shift,” a “consciousness-raising,” for only then will the public be awake enough to take action. Meanwhile, too many of us are content to carry out small-scale acts of ecological piety—choose your own fashionable eco-local-green examples—while awaiting our eventual vindication when Manhattan and Dhaka are flooded for good.

In his ecological encyclical “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis warned, “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.” He outlined an “integral ecology,” a call to environmental action inextricable from justice among human beings. Stewarding the planet, Francis argues, should begin from the experience of the poor and the peripheries, not the anxieties of the powerful.

Listening at the Margins

When the native-led Idle No More movement spread across Canada in late 2012 to protest fossil-fuel extraction on tribal lands, few south of the border even noticed. No one stirs in North America as Chinese cities and towns rise up against the pollution of factories that feed our craving for cheap goods, or as Pacific islands sink. People living among the refineries of Houston’s East End, at the terminus of what remains of the Keystone XL pipeline, have been largely on their own in demanding the right to breathe clean air. These struggles are taking place at focal points of the power structure; this is where the present dispensation is susceptible to acts of love and to the support of outsiders who can lend it. In places like these, the possibility of a better kind of world can be unveiled.

Front-line communities, at least, were at the head of the big 2014 climate march, and they were the ones who called for the next day’s sit-in at Wall Street. The climate movement is learning. The crisis it faces is not singular, but plural—not a single story everyone should be paying attention to, but a collection of stories that we all can be gathering, hearing, honoring and living out. Until then, the movement will remain small and boutique because it won’t realize how large it really is. Frustrated people will continue whispering that things have to get worse before they can get better.

Wherever we are, those facing apocalypse at the margins can be our guides, and our hope. We can learn about their stories and share them. We can support their efforts. And we can learn from them about how to better steward our world before things get even worse.

Against the doomsday landscape of Detroit, and until her death last year at 100, activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs was heralding the kind of counter-apocalypse Catherine Keller writes about. Boggs and other Detroiters have been resisting the distant investors trying to take over their city, not with claims that the end of everything is near, but with urban farms and manual skills. “Instead of pursuing rapid economic development and hoping that it will eventually create community,” Boggs writes, “we need to do the opposite—begin with the needs of the community and create loving relationships with one another and with the earth.”

This is basic Sermon-on-the-Mount stuff. And it bears a simple and utterly non-dispensational revelation: Things will get better if we make things better for each other now, if we survive and love our neighbors where those who rule the present age want us out of the way. This is our calling, and it means no longer waiting for things to get worse. This is an apocalypse worth having.

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