By David Nyberg In 1887 Lord Acton wrote a severely critical review of Mandell Creighton’s History of the Papacy during the Reformation and sent a personal letter to the author in which he defended his point that popes and kings ought to be held to account for the criminal acts they authorize.  That letter was […]

By Charles M. Payne If some black activists working in the South prior to the 1960s left an organizational heritage, other left a distinct philosophical heritage.  Leadership among southern Blacks –  in churches, on college campuses, within families – has frequently leaned toward the authoritarian.  Taken as a group, Mississippi black activists before the 1960s […]

By Ernesto Cortes Jr. When the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) began in the 1940’s, it organized around balancing the asymmetric power relationships within the existing intermediary institutions such as schools, churches, unions and political parties.  The goal of IAF then was to establish justice and accountability in these institutions through a thick network of relationships […]

By Ernesto Cortes, Jr. Long before recent terrorist attacks, invasions and hurricanes, the alienating and homogenizing effects of globalization and the dominant market culture had begun to isolate people from on another and from their institutions, destroying our relationality and creating a new kind of tribalism.  Read More…

This chapter from Roots for Radicals teaches key concepts in how to “go about organizing” via relational meetings. Roots for Radicals, Chapter 2 (The Relational Meeting)

By Walter Bureggeman The historical process is mostly hidden and inscrutable.  Enlightenment modes of understanding have led us to imagine that if we could investigate enough we could finally understand how the historical process works.  The failure of the Enlightenment has forced us to ask in a new ways how history is made.  Read more… […]

Reweaving the Fabric, Ernesto Cortes, Jr.

This book takes a journey in search of democracy, through an America that Tocqueville and Whitman never knew. It begins in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, and moves on to the Houston Astrodome, in the days when the hurricane survivors were there. It tours the borderlands of Texas, where hundreds of immigrant shantytowns somehow […]