Interesting take that eighteenth century Friends in Pennsylvania “elected to diminish their numbers in fidelity to doctrinal purity” by deciding on pacifism during war. It feels odd to compare 18th century Friends’ decision to drop out of politics (also at the same time becoming more and more antislavery) to modern purges like the Missouri Synod and the SBC. It doesn’t feel at all the same but maybe the excluded Friends of the day experienced it that way?

http://quakerspeak.com/welcome-to-quakerspeak-season‑6/?fbclid=IwAR1zbq8SwVPqaPecEEQSAoJrJ7MdSW2htwMxrjq5Xi51UCGMzI9MQt7deDE

From the NPR description:

Many of us spend lots of time and energy trying to get organized. We KonMari our closets, we strive for inbox zero, we tell our kids to clean their rooms, and our politicians to clean up Washington. But Economist Tim Harford says, maybe we should embrace the chaos. His new book is Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives.

Uh-oh, should we stop being so fussy about cleaned-up rooms. Just last night I spent 45 minutes cajoling and threatening and begging my five year old to clean an amazing block city he had constructed in the living room. Curiously, the link to the podcast was sent to me by my wife.

• Strongtowns blog and podcast. Charles Marohn
• Geography of Nowhere. James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book on suburban sprawl, which I loved at the time.
• The Big Sort. Bill Bishop, 2008.
• The Great Good Place. Ray Oldenburg. Popularized the “third places” concept of places people can gather together outside of home and work (as example: the coffee shop in which we met, Grooveground, didn’t seem to mind six people nattering on about urbanism until closing time).
• Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk, “Your body language shapes who you are” (in our context, we were suggesting a correlation between road rage and the physical poses of driving)
• The End of the Suburbs.  Leigh Gallagher, 2014
• Fighting Traffic. Peter D. Norton
• Wrestling with Moses. Anthony Flint’s 2009 book that goes behind the scenes of Jane Jacob’s planning battles with the near-mythic highway builder Robert Moses, a subtext that underlies Death and Life but is mostly just hinted at.
• Antifragile: Things That Gain with Disorder. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 212.
• Jacobin Magazine has published pieces about how Jane Jacob’s insights and language have been coopted by market forces. See “Liberalism and Gentrification” and “The People’s Playground.”
• I kept thinking about a big issue Jacobs kepts skirting about: race.  It’s really impossible for me to look at urban patterns without thinking about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” Decades of redlining and the racial components of who gets mortgages is a big factor in our social geography (see also TNC’s Atlantic colleague Alexis C. Madrigal’s “The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood” and ponder why charming Collingswood is 82 percent white while adjoining Camden is only 18 percent).
• Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York. Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez. A graphic novel of Robert Moses (no way!). “How New York Became New York” is an review of the novel.

Update: And also, from Genevieve’s list:

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams, for its absurdist humor around the bureaucracies of planning
• Green Metropolis. David Owen,
• “What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse,” an article by Adam Mann in Wired on the phenomenon of induced demand.
• Vision Zero Initiative
• The Pine Barrens. John McPhee, the classic which I brought up.
• The Power Broker. Robert Caro.
• The Ecology of Commerce. Paul Hawken
• Organizing in the South Bronx. Jim Rooney
• Re: race: Dalton Conley’s Being Black, Living in the Red and When Work Disappears by William Julius Wilson.
• Re: bicycles: Urban Bikers’ Tricks & Tips. Dave Glowacz

Excuse me for the next six months while I read. 🙂

Pastor Fred Schwenger also has a new local connection: he and a partner have just opened Superior Automotive here in Hammonton at 880 S White Horse Pike! 

Visit: CornerstoneFellowshipOnline.com

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