Wednesday, July 20 - Transforming Terror

This week on Bibliocracy, Wednesday night 8 PM, on KPFK: Susan Griffin and Karin Carrington. Griffin, longtime activist and one of our most esteemed public intellectuals and Karin Lofthus Carrington, psychotherapist and teacher, have collaborated to produce an anthology of writing meant to explore our understanding about terror, to remind us and perhaps to heal: Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World. Helpfully, the book is listed by its publisher, UC Press, as Social Problems/Comparative Religion but this remarkable collection includes an impressive lineup of contributors, literary and political and philosophical --- and a creative, even provocative critical and practical response represented in essays, poems, prayers, memoir excerpts, every kind of beautiful rhetorical examination of the problem. Writers included in Transforming Terror include Mike Davis, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Tariq Ramadan and Czeslaw Milosz. Wow! Activist-actor Peter Coyote calls the book a “collection of wisdom,” which indeed assesses exactly right the book’s mission and value. Listeners to Pacifica will know the work of Susan Griffin, author of dozens of books and articles including her A Chorus of Stones:The Private Life of War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It linked the strategy of bombing civilians with the development of nuclear weapons, an insight that provides a cornerstone for this new book. Co-editor Karin Lofthus Carrington is a psychotherapist, consultant, writer and teacher whose work focuses on the interrelationship of depth psychology, spirituality and social conscience. In clinical practice for 35 years, she’s written widely and taught graduate students at John F. Kennedy and Pacifica Universities. She was psychological consultant for the American Women’s Annapurna Expedition and co-editor of the volume Same Sex Love and the Path to Wholeness. There’s no way we could possibly talk about the entire contents of this landmark book. Go online, check out the table of contents. Buy a copy. Thanks for listening.