• 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. 🙂

(Still working on getting comments and Twitter to show up properly.)

Subject: book prices

I really wanted to buy the below book [Why Grace is True], but I checked amazon. com. Their prices: new is $16.07, or used from $5.94. Your price is $22.95.

I know how hard it is to be competitive, but I wanted to let you know that people do comparison shop.

Blessings, C.

Dear Friend,

Yes, Amazon, Walmart and the rest of the global media/distribution juggernaut will always be able to underprice us on the mainstream books.

What we offer is a much wider selection of Quaker books than anyone else. We don’t just have the more watered-down books aimed at the general population (mostly with the unsaid premise “what you can learn from those folksy Quakers”), but a whole list of books about Quaker religious education, Quaker vision, Quaker belief, Quaker history and what it means to be a Quaker today. We don’t just have the HarperCollins titles, but those from Quaker publishers that Amazon’s never heard of. We easily beat Amazon in selection and we certainly match them in speed and customer service.

We give a more grounded context to what these books mean to Friends–the reviews on our site’s If Grace is True are written by Friends for Friends. We try to know our books. When people call us up we’ll help with their selection. When they’re trying to decide, we’ll read the table of contents to them. Quaker publishers and booksellers talk about the “ministry of the written word,” which means remembering that there’s a purpose behind this bookselling. These books aren’t commodities, they aren’t units, they’re not ISBN numbers to be packed and shipped. We’d rather not sell a book than sell a book someone wouldn’t value (which is why we’ll include negative book descriptions & comments).

Paying a few extra dollars to support us means your also supporting the outreach and Quaker self-identity our catalog provides for many Friends. Plus you can be assured our employees get living wages and health care (for which I’m personally thankful).

So yes, customers can save a few bucks at Amazon. Always will be able to. But your purchasing decisions are also decisions about who you support and what you value. There’s a price to distinctiveness, whether it’s cultural, religious, regional, or culinary. By buying from Amazon you’re financing a Wall Street-run commodity seller that doesn’t give a jot about Quakerism or even whether grace might be true. If enough Friends choose price over content, then Quaker bookstores and publishers will disappear, our only representation being mainstream books sold at generic shops. That will cost us a lot more than seven bucks.

Well, I hope you enjoy the book. I’m sure Amazon appreciates your patronage.

In friendship,
Martin Kelley

The informal network of younger Evangelical Christians centered around websites like theooze.com and JordanCooper.sk.ca has started sponsoring a monthly Indie Allies Meetup of “Independent Christian Thinkers.” Unlike previous months, there were enough people signed up for the October meeting in the Philadelphia area to hold a “meetup,” so two days ago Julie & I found ourselves in a Center City pizza shop with five other “Indie Allies.”

According to Robert E. Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals, I fall pretty squarely into the “Post Liberal” category, a la Stanley Hauerwas. While it’s always dangerous labeling others, I think at least some of the other participants would be comfortable enough with the “Post Evangelical” label (the one pastor among us said that if I read Webber’s book I’d know where he’s coming from). One participant was from the Circle church Julie & I attended last First Day.

Just about each of us at the table were coming from different theological starting points, but it’s safe to say we are all “post” something or other. There was a shared sense that the stock answers our churches have been providing aren’t working for us. We are all trying to find new ways to relate to our faith, to Christ and to one another in our church communities. There’s something about building relationships that are deeper, more down-to-earth and real. Perhaps it’s finding a way to be less dogmatic at the same time that we’re more disciplined. For Friends, that means questioning the contemporary cultural orthodoxy of liberal-think (getting beyond the cliched catch phrases borrowed from liberal Protestantism and sixties-style activism) while being less afraid of being pecularily Quaker.

The conversation was really interesting. After all my Quaker work, it’s always amazing to find other people my age who actually think hard about faith and who are willing to build their life around it. There were times where I think we needed to translate ourselves and times where we tried to map out shared connections (i.e., Richard Foster was the known famous Quaker, I should read him if only to be able to discuss his relationship to Conservative and Liberal Friends).

It was really good to get outside of Quakerism and to hear the language and issues of others. One important lesson is that some of the strong opinions I’ve developed in response to Quaker culture need to be unlearned. The best example was social action. As I’ve written before on the website, I think the Friends peace testimony has become largely secularized and that social action has become a substitute for expressed and lived communal faith. Yet my Meetup cohorts were excited to become involved in social action. Their Evangelical background had dismissed good works as unnecessary–faith being the be-all–and now they wanted to get involved in the world. But I very much suspect that their good works would be rooted in faith to a degree that a lot of contemporary Quaker activist projects aren’t. I need to remind myself that social witness (even my own) can be fine if truly spirit-led.

Committed religious people switching churches often bring with them the baggage of their frustrations with the first church and this unresolved anger often gets in the way of keeping true to God’s call. Even though I’m not leaving Quakerism I have to identify and name my own frustrations so that they don’t get in the way. Hanging out with other “Independent Christian Thinkers” is a way of keeping some perspective, of remembering that Post-Liberal is not exactly anti-Liberal.

Recommended I check out: N.T. Wright, at allelon.net. I just saw him referenced as a personal friend of some of the Republican party leadership in Congress, so this should be interesting.