This week someone brought Naomi Wolf’s Sub Stack post, “Have the Ancient Gods Returned?,” to my attention. The narrative presented ran counter to my understanding of how we arrived at this point in history. After reading it, I felt like I needed to talk it out, and I’m grateful that my friend Cliff Gomes offered to be a sounding board. We had a great three-hour discussion yesterday and streamed it tonight. Give it a listen. You might come away with a few tools you can use to navigate your way through these traumatic times.
If you want to revisit the segments I pulled for the discussion, here’s the slide deck.
Near the end of the session, we began to talk about the map I made linking management consultant Peter Drucker to Bob Buford and the Protestant mega-church movement in the 1980s and ran out of time. I think we’ll go back and revisit it in more detail, but until then you can use this link to explore.
The short video below is from Cliff’s channel. It’s about our ability to choose where we stand and how to be responsible for our feelings. He thought it would be a nice addition to this post. I agree.
TERRIFIC! Looking forward to the more detailed revisit.
Thanks for a great discussion Cliff & Alison. Your research & perspectives do indeed provide new tools with which to navigate with ever increasing clarity & confidence.
I’m really glad you took this one on and I’m listening to the interview now and there’s certainly much to learn from it. I’m at the 1:33 time stamp now and need to push back a little, because you both seem to so far agree that Wolf is coming at this from a position of shock. I do not get that sense. From reading many of her works over the decades, it has always been critical of the West. And, in her 2007 book, “The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot, A Citizen’s Call to Action” she lays out the ‘10 steps’ and goes into the ‘historical echoes’ of 9/11 and the closing down of our society and ‘democracy’. I was also triggered by this essay of hers, but have for several years been very wary of her work, and this, as some others of the recent past, do not sound like shock to me, frankly, they sound disingenuous and yes, that magically universally now despised “Hate” work, shillish.
What I have learned from Cliff is that the way we come into a situation informs the energy of the enterprise. Being able to offer grace and overlooking actually benefits all parties. I’m trying to move beyond making someone wrong, rather exploring different view points. I figure we are all adults and after weighing the various stories presented, people will figure out which resonates with them.