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Book Description

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.

Table of Contents

  1. SIGNS OF THE TIMES
  2. INTRODUCTION: CONTEXT IS DECISIVE
    1. THE LANDSCAPE OF THE MARKET WORLD
    2. ENCLOSURE
    3. COVENANTAL VERSUS CONTRACTUAL ORDER
    4. THE NEIGHBORLY COVENANT
  3. 1 THE FREE MARKET CONSUMER IDEOLOGY
    1. SCARCITY
    2. CERTAINTY AND PERFECTION
    3. PRIVATIZATION
    4. THE INSTITUTIONAL ASSUMPTIONS
    5. TOWARD A NEIGHBORLY CULTURE
    6. A CULTURE BASED ON COVENANT
  4. 2 NEIGHBORLY BELIEFS
    1. ABUNDANCE
    2. MYSTERY
    3. FALLIBILITY
    4. THE COMMON GOOD
  5. 3 ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
    1. THE CONSUMER MARKET DISCIPLINES
    2. PREDICTABILITY AND CONTROL
    3. THE MEANING OF MONEY
    4. COMPETITION AND CLASS
    5. THE MYTH OF INDIVIDUALISM
  6. 4 TENTACLES OF EMPIRE
    1. THE CORPORATIZATION OF SCHOOLS
    2. NO VIEW FROM THE TOP
    3. END OF ALIVENESS
    4. MOBILITY AND ISOLATION
    5. UN-PRODUCTIVE WEALTH
    6. VIOLENCE
    7. ILLUSION OF REFORM
  7. 5 THE COMMON GOOD IS THE NEW FRONTIER
    1. THE NEIGHBORLY COVENANT
    2. THE COMMONS
    3. AN ALTERNATIVE SOCIAL ORDER
    4. RESISTING THE EMPIRE
    5. OFF-MARKET POSSIBILITIES
    6. THE NEIGHBORLY WAY
    7. THE ALTERNATIVE TO RESTLESS PRODUCTIVITY
    8. THE SHADOW SIDE OF COMMUNITY
  8. 6 THE DISCIPLINES OF NEIGHBORLINESS
    1. TIME
    2. FOOD
    3. SILENCE
    4. COVENANT: A VOW OF FREEDOM AND FAITHFULNESS
    5. ABUNDANCE AND THE RIGHT USE OF MONEY
    6. A LITURGY FOR THE COMMON GOOD
  9. POSTSCRIPT: BEYOND MONEY AND CONSUMPTION
  10. COMMENTARIES
  11. REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
  12. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  13. ABOUT THE AUTHORS
  14. INDEX
  15. EULA