Be Still!: Departure from Collective Madness

Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness echoes the call of the Navajo sage and the psalmist who invited their hearers to stop--If we keep going this way were going to get where were going--and be still--Be still and know. . . . Like pictures in a photo album taken from a unique lens these essays zoom in on singular moments of time where the world is making headlines drawing attention to the sin of exceptionalism in its national racial religious cultural and species manifestations. Informed by Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama Elie Wiesel Wendell Berry and others the author invites the reader to slow down be still and depart from collective madness before the Navajo sage is right. Told in the voice familiar to listeners of All Things Considered and Minnesota Public Radio these poetic essays sometimes feel as familiar as an old family photo album but the pictures themselves are taken from a thought-provoking angle. This wondrous collection of rich snippets would be of interest and value if only for the rich source material that Gordon Stewart quotes from as it must be an inexhaustible memory and/or file. But the many words he quotes are no more than launching pads for Stewarts expansive imagination and agile mind that take us over and over into fresh discernment new territory unanticipated demands and open-ended opportunity. All of that adds up to grace and Stewart is a daring witness to grace that occupies all of our territory. --Walter Brueggemann Columbia Theological Seminary These are lovely powerful centering essays--messages from and for a fragile but beautiful planet. --Bill McKibben Author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet As a person who navigates the pleasures and perils of the twenty-first-century campus having Be Still! at my fingertips will be like having a counselor a guide a very present help in these times. This volume touches the pulse of our times with the rare combination of unwavering candor and tender mercy. --Lucy A. Forster-Smith Sedgwick Chaplain Senior Minister in the Memorial Church Harvard University Gordon C. Stewarts guest commentaries on faith and culture have aired on All Things Considered and in print on MPR Minnpost.com and the StarTribune. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) he has led ecumenical campus ministries and churches in Illinois Ohio Wisconsin New York and Minnesota. He was the first non-lawyer Executive Director of the Legal Rights Center a nonprofit public defense corporation in Minneapolis.