Our seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and acquisition
are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a kingdom that
creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence
that comes with the will to empire. The abbreviation of this empire is
called a consumer culture.
We think the free market ideology that
surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress. We are
called to better adapt, be more agile, more lean, more schooled, more,
more, more. Give it up. There is no such thing as customer satisfaction.
We need a new narrative, a shift in our thinking and speaking.
"An Other Kingdom" takes us out of a culture of addictive consumption
into a place where life is ours to create together. This satisfying way
depends upon a neighborly covenant--an agreement that we together, will
better raise our children, be healthy, be connected, be safe, and
provide a livelihood. The neighborly covenant has a different language
than market-hype. It speaks instead in a sacred tongue.
Authors
Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight invite you on a
journey of departure from our consumer market culture, with its
constellations of empire and control. Discover an alternative set of
beliefs that have the capacity to evoke a culture where poverty,
violence, and shrinking well-being are not inevitable--a culture in
which the social order produces enough for all. They ask you to consider
this other kingdom. To participate in this modern exodus towards a
modern community. To awaken its beginnings are all around us. "An Other
Kingdom" outlines this journey to construct a future outside the systems
world of solutions.