The e utopia Book Catalog
2025
Urstoff Love
b
About this Catalog
The e utopia Book is everything listed in this catalog. Each individual title combined makes up The e utopia Book . It isn’t finished yet. When friends ask me, “When will it be finished?” I always say, “It will be finished when I’m dead.” Who do I think I am, Walt Whitman? Hopefully it won’t be finished when I’m dead - or even before then. I’m just trying to start a small chatroom (curious, convivial) adjacent to what Mortimer Adler called The Great Conversation. I’ve listened in on some of The Great Conversation. I’m not really on their team. Most of us aren’t. But we have our own Conversations. I looked for a conversation like this to join but couldn’t find one, so I started this one. So far a few curious and convivial friends have joined. Maybe the conversation will continue after us. Each title listed is available in print as a separate book. Each title’s listing includes its cover, Index, and some representative pages from its book. This catalog is currently available only in FlippingBook because FlippingBook preserves the page layout. Because it doesn’t configure text to fit multiple screens the way most of the Inernet does, there is a downside: it can be difficult to read on small screens. The upside: it preserves the page layout. The author (me!) feels much of the content is communicated via the layout. Messing with the layout is messing with the message. At least that’s how the author feels. The first title, Overview, gives . . . an overview of the material, the message of the whole e utopia Book. So nearly the entire contents of this slim volume are shown in the Catalog. The rest of the titles don’t show nearly as much. Perhaps enough to give you a taste for that part of the conversation. These books seem to work best as the basis for group conversations. Start reading from them out loud with a group of curious, convivial friends and see what happens.
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The e utopia Book Catalog Index
About this Catalog . . . 1
Overview . . . 5
Introduction . . . 25
Purpose & Place
Front, Middle, Back
Eden: Inside & Out
The Kingdom of Heaven
Violence or Peace
Community Focus Areas
Means of Grace
The Purpose of Life
Means of Grace and the Pace of Blessing
Gospel
Disciple
Building Up Good Places and the Non-Profit Dilemma
Finding Value
The Eutopia Book Catalog
Becoming Fully Human
More
Heart of Love
Scripture Books
Mark
Matthew Psalms
A Month of Prayer and Meditation
Genesis
Job
e utopia Stories
Blue Beach Cap
Cab Ride e utopia Stories
Other Salms and Meditations
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e utopia Book Overview
This title is kind of backwards. I tend to think inductively. I like to explore ideas inductively with others. And yet here we begin with conclusions. If we were following an inductive path they should appear at the end. But it’s such a long way from here to the end! It would be easy to lose track of the points being made along the way. So here they are, up front! Maybe that helps.
See if you can find them as you go. See what else you can find, too.
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the e utopia Book the e utopia School
Overview
November 2024
Urstoff Love
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the e utopia Book the e utopia School Overview
Contents
Q & A 1
The Setting The Way The Aim 7
Two Overview Statements 15
Section Overviews 19
Book Outlines Class List 27
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Q. What is Everything? A. Everybody wants to live in a Good Place. God wants everybody to live in a Good Place.
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Q. What is the purpose of life? A. The purpose of life is to seek and allow God’s continuing creation
in our hearts and through our lives in the world.
God’s continuing creation we call “grace.”
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Q. What is the relationship between these two questions?
A.
One is about
where
it happens.
The Setting
The other is about
how
it happens.
The Way
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The Setting The Way The aim
13
a
place
for
grace
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The Setting
Where
Purpose & Place Everybody wants to live in a Good Place God wants everyone to live in a Good Place
The Story of God and Us The story arc of the Bible shows God at work providing a Good Place for us. The story arc of human history shows our various efforts to establish Good Places to live - from nations to neighborhoods to living rooms.
A Good Place: 1. where we experience and receive grace;
2. where we allow God’s grace to flow through us to others for the benefit of all.
God’s Purpose: us living in a Good Place.
God creates Good Places - from the motivation of love - through actions designed and directed by love - while in love with us - for the purpose of filling the world with love .
From love by love in love for love
God creates the world.
Love is the urstoff - that by which we understand the world.
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grace
i n
a
place
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The Way
How
Means of Grace and the Pace of Blessing Living in a Good Place
We are created to receive grace
and to allow grace to flow through us to others.
Grace: when God does something for us and/or through us that we could not do on our own.
God fills the world with
tools for/means of
grace.
The world is the place for the grace God has for us.
We choose to seek God to use these means of grace in our lives.
We choose to allow God’s grace to work in and through us.
Grace builds up hearts of love and lives of shalom.
By grace we realize the potential God intends for us.
The resurrected Christ is the full realization of our potential.
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the
purpose
for
grace
in this
place
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The Aim
Why
Becoming Fully Human
We are created at a level where we can participate with God in continuing creation - both in ourselves and in our world.
God creates us with desire for the eternal, the infinite.
God’s continuing creation in us builds up hearts of love.
God’s continuing creation through our living-in-the-world builds up Shalom in the places where we live.
Our living-in-the-world provisionally satisfies our desire for the infinite and the eternal. Living in God’s presence ultimately satisfies our deire for the eternal and the infinite.
Our model, our pattern for becoming fully human is the resurrected Christ.
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Two Overview Statements
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We are created with a continual desire for more that will not be satisfied by the world or apart from God. Our purpose is to seek and allow God’s continuing creation in us and, through our lives, in the world.
God’s continuing creation in us builds up a heart of love.
God’s continuing creation through our lives builds up shalom.
God’s continuing creation we call grace.
Our experience of grace we call blessing. God fills the world with tools (means of grace) that God uses to build up hearts of love and lives of shalom. The appropriate application of our effort is to seek out these tools (means of grace) and allow God to use them in our hearts and, through our lives, in the world. God’s presence is the highest, the greatest blessing.
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The Bible tells the story of God and us. 1. That story shows God working to make a
Good Place for us to live, where we have good relationships with the place where we live, with God, and with the people with whom we live. 2. That story also shows that we are not self-contained, self- sufficient units. Just as we require connections, interactions, and inputs from our physical place (water, food, shelter, etc.), we also need connections, interactions, and inputs from God and each other. Good that comes to us from beyond ourselves we call grace; grace being when God does something for us, in us, or through us that we could not do for ourselves or for others by ourselves. Grace is the core concept in life to understand and flow with. God’s grace is the cause and the ground of our existence. Understanding grace, living in grace, living by grace brings every good thing to us and to those around us.
3. That story also shows that
love is the reason for our place, the motivating power behind grace, where grace comes from and where grace goes. From love, by love, in love, for love God creates the world.
God makes
Good Places
by grace
where we live
in love
every good thing .
and receive
This is the story of God and us in the Bible.
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the e
utopia Book
0 Introduction
October 2024
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26
0 Introductions
1 Communities
2 Individuals
3 Organizations
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0 Introduction
Everybody wants to live in a Good Place 1
What’s in a Name? 2
Categories 3
How do we build a Good Place? 4
Conditions 5
What is Everything? Parts 1 & 2 7 The Theater 11 e utopia Principles 13
Second Things First 81
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Everybody wants to live in a Good Place . Pretty much everyone can agree about this. It is a big order, though, so we break it down into three areas: Communities, Individuals, and Organizations . In our Communities , we can work to have a shared vision of the Good Place that we want to live and work in, and then engage everybody to build it. As Individuals , we always want more . If we aren’t aligned to find more in God, we tend to live selfish and destructive lives. God wants to continue creating love in our hearts and peace, balance, wholeness, and health through our living in the world. Our purpose is to seek this work of God in our hearts and through our lives. We can work in Organizations that 1) support our living in the world, 2) develop our potential and build up who we are as individuals, and 3) help us make our world a better place. We can do all three of these through our work.
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Everybody wants to live in a Good Place
God intends for us to live in a Good Place. Not everybody lives in a Good Place. Even when we live in a pretty good place, we still want better. One characteristic of life in a Good Place: helping others make their places better. We can look at our efforts to build up Good Places in three areas: acting in Communities , acting as Individuals . acting in Organizations , In our Communities we can develop an explicit, comprehen- sive vision of our Good Place then work together intentionally to build it up. As Individuals we can seek and allow God’s continuing creation in us and, through us, in the world. God’s continuing creation in our hearts produces love for God, others, and ourselves. God’s continuing creation through our lives in the world produces justice, peace, and health (Shalom). The God of all love, beauty, wisdom, and power offers to continue creating in and through us. The world is filled with tools that God uses for this continuing creation. We can seek out these tools in the world and allow God to use them in and through our lives to continue creating hearts of love in us and justice, peace, and health in the world. We can combine three types of activities in each of our Organizations : - an Economic activity that supports our living in the world as well as the other activities of the organization, - Development for members of the organization, with training for the economic activity usually coming first, followed by education then by other development activities, and - Community Engagement, how our work benefits others - both the work by which we earn our living as well as any other efforts that benefit others, whether we get paid for it or not.
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What is in a Name?
In 1516 Sir Thomas More published a story describing his vision of an ideal society. Believing it could not exist he named his imaginary society “Utopia.” In Greek“U”represents the prefix for “not” or “no” and “topia” represents the Greek root for “place.” Therefore Utopia literally means “No-place.” It does not, and probably could not, exist. Since then we have come to call other visions of ideal living conditions “utopias,” often forgetting that the name refers to an impossible place. We will never be able to compile a comprehensive, complete description of a perfect place that everyone everywhere would agree with at all times. So we won’t try. While we can’t make our place “perfect,” we can work to make our place “good.” In Greek, “Eu” is the prefix for “good.” So we combine “Eu” for good with “topia” for place to produce another word - Eutopia: A good place. It is better to have a pretty good, fairly comprehensive description of a good place that many of us work toward than to have no overall vision. Our description of a good place will change over time as our understanding and environment change.
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How Do We Build a Good Place?
People who can’t agree together about very many things quite often find they can
agree about a place
that it should be safe for children, people should be able to work to support themselves, etc.
and
work together to make it
a Good Place.
Working together to build a Good Place is a process more than an act.
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What Is Everything? Part 1
What questions do you ask yourself? Do you have any questions that you have tried to answer for most of your life? I have always tried to find the answer to the question,“What is everything?” It is hard to maintain focus on that question, though. It is easy to get diverted to other, smaller questions, such as, what is the nature of a rock? Or of a star? Or a starfish? These smaller questions often yield much more interesting, abundant, and more practical results. They are attractive. They so easily attract attention away from a larger, more frustrating question such as, “What is everything?” But that is the question I try to answer. As I began taking philosophy classes in school, I stumbled onto the early Ionian philosophers - usually identified as “the Pre-Socratic” philosophers for their location on the timeline. I had to stumble onto them because beginning philosophy classes usually do not begin at the beginning of philosophy. They start elsewhere and find their ways around after entering somewhere in the middle. By the time I stumbled onto the Ionians, I had already read from and struggled with the works of many other philosophers before finding Thales’ (the first of the Ionians) single pronouncement: “All is water.” All is water. That sounds kooky, of course. I had to read the commentaries for some insight into why he is considered to be an important figure. They credit Thales with giving the first, non-animated observation of how the world works. (An animated observation would give as an explanation for the sun’s rising and setting that someone drives a chariot carrying the sun across the sky every day. In Thales’ time, that was in fact the commonly accepted explanation for the daily movement of the sun across the sky.) Thales proposed a single, non-animated principle that could explain all observable phenomena, that could account for all our experiences in the world: the three states of water. In our ordinary experience of water it is a liquid. When very cold it becomes a solid, when very hot, a gas. The three states of
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matter, summed up, illustrated, epitomized in: water. The one principle that explains (to some degree, anyway) everything. Everything Thales observed was either a solid, a liquid, or a gas. Therefore water was the key element that explained all else. Brilliant! His explanation covers a great deal of our experience with the world. Matter generally does sort itself out into one of those three states. However, most of us do not feel satisfied with an explanation of everything that addresses only the three states of matter. Ultimately, Thales failed. Over the centuries since his time we have been failing valiantly as well, looking to find the one explanation for all. That is the history of philosophy. That is our history. We fail repeatedly, but never give up. This, then, is my effort at a valiant failure, my attempt to explain: What is everything? What is good? And how can we live?
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Q. What is everything? A. Everybody wants to live in a Good Place. Part 2
What is Everything?
We all have to answer this question one way or another - about how we understand the world we live in, how we seek to order our lives, how we seek to engage some part of the world. Prior to World War I, addressing the question “What is Everything” was the main point of education. Our inability to restrain our destructive nature revealed in World War I - and in so much of our history since - has brought many to believe that addressing this larger question is meaningless. Whatever visions we dream up about how beautiful life could be, we will never achieve. So don’t waste time even thinking about it. Since then education has tended towards what the Greeks called technon - acquiring skills. Each of us has a desire to answer this broad question, though. And we give our answers every day by our lives. How well do we think through these answers? I propose that a good way to answer the question, “What is everything?” is by saying, “Everybody wants to live in a Good Place.” One thing I like about this response: it doesn’t really seem like a direct answer. Hopefully that makes us go back and re- evaluate our understanding of the question. Another thing I like: it provides a path by which to discover the answer more fully. What is Everything? Thales said water. I want to explore this answer: we all want to live in a Good Place. Will you join me on this journey?
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