BL55.G55

Foreword p. ix Acknowledgments p. xi Introduction p. xiii Book 1 1 A Child's View of Progress p. 3 2 The Gorgeous Chalice of Civilizational Myth p. 5 3 My Friend Pagus p. 8 4 Holding the Hand of Conservative p. 11 5 Sacred Cow Crap p. 14 6 A Left-Wing Odd Duck p. 22 7 What Is "Religionless Christianity"? p. 25 8 The Aristocracy of Consumption p. 29 9 The Kingdom of God Is Green p. 36 10 An Ethos Spawned and Nourished p. 43 11 Servanthood, Stewardship, and a Restraint on Vice p. 52 12 Clinging to Dead Ideas p. 61 13 The Engine of Disaster p. 71 14 Voting for Jesus p. 78 15 The Gathering Globalization of Disaster p. 96 16 Packed in a Comforting Mythology p. 101 17 The Superlative Proportions of Our Self-Inflation p. 106 18 Two Losers and an Icon p. 111 19 Ending the Bogeyman Cycle p. 127 20 The End of Something Big p. 135 21 Divine Terrorists p. 141 22 The Gendered Feminine and Twenty Centuries of Papa p. 142 Book 2 23 Age of the Daughter p. 145 24 Stuff p. 194 25 A Broken Bone p. 198 26 An Admonition to Gore Vidal p. 201 27 The Imposition of Those Glories p. 208 28 The Village of God p. 220 29 This Predator Beast Game p. 227 30 The Feminine Dimensions of God p. 235 31 Such Pureness of Heart p. 238 32 God's Lifeboat p. 243 33 The Global Cloning of Civilized Desire p. 253 34 The Gardener from Amenia p. 256 35 Pushing One Hundred p. 260 36 One Last Thing p. 264 37 Civilization, "Civilization," and the Kingdom of God: An Afterword p. 267 A Note on Source Material p. 272 Bibliography p. 275

In the early 1970s, living in inner-city St. Louis, Paul Gilk asked his friends to explain why small farms were dying. The answers did not satisfy. Years of study followed. Through the reading of history, Gilk began to grasp the origins of both horticulture and agriculture, their blossoming into Neolithic agrarian village culture, and the impoundment of the agrarian village by bandit aristocrats at the formation of what we now call civilization. Getting a grip on the relationship between agriculture and civilization was one thing; but, as a person strongly influenced by Gospel stories, Gilk also wanted to know what the connection might be between the kingdom of God proclamation in the canonical Gospels and the peasant world from which Jesus arose. Aided in his thinking by the works of biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, Gilk began to realize that the kingdom of God was both a harkening back to the peace and freedom of precivilized agrarian village and a revolutionary anticipation of a postcivilized village-mindedness organized organically on the basis of radical servanthood and radical stewardship. We are, Gilk says, entering the dawn of this Green culture simultaneously with the deepening of civilized world disaster.