from Laurel Dykstra

Hello all,

I wanted wish everyone who will be attending this event an engaging and challenging time. I spent a lot of time thinking about whether what I might get and what I might give was worth the monetary and environmental cost of a plane ticket (and I laughed about taking a plane to a primitivist event). In the end family events, homeschooling/unschooling with the girs (who are now 8!) and a community construction project swayed my decision to stay close to home.

But I was really engaged/intrigued/stimulated by the invitation (to an event that I think of myself as neither anarchist nor primitivist enough for) and the short flurry of e-correspondence that followed. I had considered attending the women's gathering at the CW farm in Iowa and was looking forward to hearing the report back. (Particularly as the reading list for that event had struck me as heavily male and doctrinaire in contrast to the very practical proposed activities)

But what I was most excited about was the opportunity to talk bible with folk "experimenting in truth." I have some questions about how feral/primitivist the biblical vision(s) are, and the relationship of those visions to subsistence agriculture. where is the ancient and where is the modern romanticism and where is the practical resistance? What does the difference between the two mean for us?

On a sort of tangential, and perhaps less radical, track I was thinking too about the notion of "steward" and "stewardship" as the kind of middle class/mainstream way of understanding environmentalism (and church fianance). It is an idea that churches are (to make a bad pun) deeply invested in. And I would be interested in reading Kelly Johnson's Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics and Theodore Hiebert's The Yahwist's Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel with others, thinking critically about that model, looking at/for others.

So having chosen not to attend I am grateful for the invitation, I hope that you will keep me in the loop and if the conversations I hoped for and imagined are of interest to anyone perhaps we can have them electronically or somewhere closer to BC.

Love and Blessing to you all.

Laurel