Voluntary simplicity as an alternative to extinction
According to writer and educator Mark Burch, this society’s habits and assumptions around what makes for a good and desirable life have placed us on a course 
toward economic and ecological collapse. Yet while he is unflinching in his critique of consumerism and over-consumption, Burch is not without hope, as he challenges us to consider ways to gracefully step aside and strike out along an alternative pathway of personal, spiritual and cultural development.
In this edition of ideaExchange Burch calls on us to find a better life with less. There are three ways to hear this podcast (runs 1:00:02):
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More information about Mark Burch after the jump.
thinking is close to heresy. Stu’s insight and research eventually led him to his current position as Executive Director of 
we put in those jean pockets and the harvesting of human organs for sale. Next to trading weapons and drugs, trading people produces the greatest profits for international organized crime in our increasingly globalized world.
Dennis is the Chair of the Department of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Providence College. Val is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Providence College.
activities that almost inevitably comes our way during the final few weeks before Christmas Day. Some of us will embrace this time of year in all that it brings. We relish those trips to the mall to find the perfect gift. Others will at least want to ask a few questions about what it all really means.
Well, at the December edition of ideaExchange we carved out a couple of hours to consider two very different perspectives on how we might keep the Christmas feast.
includes his creative treatment of Christian ethics. In this podcast, Dr Christopher Holmes considers Bonhoeffer’s view of ethics; a view which challenges many of the assumptions around how we often think of what makes for an ethical life.
his is the second installment of the Conversation Series audio, recorded in March 2007 (
interested church people in a series of conversations around his work on the Christian music subculture. Among the musicians present were Larry Campbell, Jenny Moore-Koslowsky and Mike Koop, as well as Steve Bell, who was invited to offer a reflection on his own work as a musician of faith.
ensemble led by Gord Johnson, we unpacked this parable in a way that allowed people to hear anew some of its deeper, more challenging and ultimately liberating textures. We are grateful to have received both the author’s and the publisher’s permission to use this cycle, titled The Father Empties His Coffers, as the focus for this liturgy. While the recording presented here does not capture the congregational singing, it does at least give some sense of how the music and the poetry were woven in and through each other.
possible that it will be his series of children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia, which will have the deepest impact and the longest staying power of all of his work.