I’ve been looking forward to reading Tom Sine’s new book, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, for a while now. I have a couple of reasons for this. First, the Cover is amazing. I know, I know.. I was taught by Mr Rogers and Elmo and company not to judge a book by its cover just like you were, but gosh..iIt looks like a leftist field manual from the sixties or something like that. The image of.. well I don’t know who these guys are on the cover but they look like people I’d like to hang out with! For some reason it conjures images of the Beats. It could be Jack, Allen and William sitting around drinking too much wine, smoking marijuana cigarettes discussing the deep things of the world. Seriously. I saw the cover and I just had to read the book! Second.. The New Conspirators ! ! ! I want to be a conspirator! Seriously.. what a great freaking title! It just rolls off the tongue. Subversion was always cool. (was anyone else around here an anarchist? Did you dream of throwing over the U.S. Government.. and Capitalism for that matter? I know I did!) Woo!Needless to say I had really high expectations for the book. I was going to be pissed if Tom Sine was toying with me with this ever so tasty cover.
Well. I’m not pissed. In fact, I have to say that this is a pretty darned good book. As a new conspirator (pun so intended) it was really great to be introduced to my comrades in the Mission, Mosaic, Emerging and Monastic streams. Sine breaks down the conspiracy into nice manageable chunks, but is sure to note that there is a lot of overlap between all of these groups. He then accurately diagnoses the sickness in our culture and addition to what he calls the global mall: the ideals of extreme coolness and high affluence that drive our society to place all of our faith and hope in economic systems instead of God.
It’s kind of hard to classify what this book actually does, because it covers so much ground. It introduces one to New Christianity, deconstructs western and modern Christian ideas as well was popular culture and various idolotries that exist there. It speaks of the plight of the poor and the hopeless, speaks of actions that have been taken, but probably most importantly it encourages and espouses the power of imagination. The New Conspirators says that we do not have live life by the script the has been placed before us, and our options are much greater than simply exchanging one set of dos and don’t for another. We can use our creative muscles to find ways of dealing with our current problems and forge a new path and a new way of life. Read the new conspirators!
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