We’re Elias and Pete, your hosts for a series of new conversations about certain lost voices of hope and vision, mostly from the mid-century, a time when “spiritual politics” was a more than live option.
It all began a few months ago when Pete, a millennial, wondered aloud why the public conversation of the last several decades has gradually become narrower and narrower, as if we had entered a kind of “ice age” in our thinking, starting somewhere around the early 1980s.
Elias, a boomer, agreed: somehow the technocratic, neoliberal orthodoxy of those years had successfully frozen out the kinds of big ideas and spiritual visions we once associated with names like Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Paul Goodman, Peter Maurin, Hannah Arendt, E.F. Schumacher, Simone Weil, Marshall McLuhan, Ella Baker. (Watch for episodes on all these figures and more over the coming episodes.)
As a bona fide member of the ‘60s generation who once hung out in Austin and Berkeley, Elias brings his own witness to this period which he remembers as a mix of public happiness and cataclysmic moments.
Pete has only been alive during the ice age, but — having been disappointed by the failed supposed saviors of the past decades (the latest politician, the latest technology, the latest viral trend) — has become a growing admirer of the mid-century thinkers who asked deep questions and shared broad visions of what happened, where we should go, and how we can get there.
In the interplay of conversation, your hosts will undertake to let these earlier figures speak in their own voices from their own contexts as we attempt to recapture their spiritual audacity and prophetic witness.
Stay tuned for our first episode later this week, where we begin with a wonderfully representative figure—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, author of an inspired and influential analysis of the Hebrew prophets and a comrade of Martin Luther King Jr.
As we hope will become clear, our conversations are not exercises in the usual political categories. Instead, to use Hannah Arendt’s image (describing Walter Benjamin’s work), we hope to work like pearl divers recovering treasures from the past. And we look forward to sharing them with you listeners — and even more, we hope that Lost Prophets will become a convivial community in which listeners offer comments and even help co-create this experience.
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Welcome, friends, as we journey into the land of the Lost Prophets.
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