The Hanific Alternative

Life under Empire encourages various forms of violence: bigotry, coercion, arrogance, cowardice, and greed. Therefore, in order to fully claim the Abrahamic heritage anew, let us form communities of grace as sites of counter-cultural resistance. There, while chanting litanies of mercy, we shall struggle to produce NOT one-dimensional men and women but rather independent souls comfortable with complexity and difference and dedicated to shared ideals of tolerance, non-violence, humility, courage, and generosity.

Such communities ought not to be monastic outposts, separate and distinct from the Imperial metropoles--for that would only serve to isolate them from the one-dimensional mass so desperately in need of alternative visions. It would also facilitate imperial surveillance and control. In the Age of Cyber-Connectivity, communities of grace can emerge as networks of like-minded individuals and families engaged in sohbet (conversation, communion) whose homes and places of business become "safe houses" for their fellow travelers along the Way.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin!

Hear Robert Pogue Harrison:

"Where history unleashes its destructive and annihilating forces, we must, if we are to preserve our sanity, to say nothing of our humanity, work against and in spite of them. We must seek out healing or redemptive forces and allow them to grow in us. That is what it means to tend our garden. The pronominal adjective used by Voltaire--notre--points to the world we share in common. This is the world of plurality that takes shape through the power of human action. Notre jardin is never a garden of merely private concerns into which one escapes from the real--it is that plot of soil on the earth, within the self, or amid the social collective, where the cultural, ethical, and civic virtues that save reality from its own worst impulses are cultivated. Those virtues are always ours."

~ R. P. Harrison, Gardens, x.