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Buy The Intercessor<\/em> paperback or ebook from Amazon<\/a>, Barnes & Noble<\/a>, Bookshop.org<\/a>, or Ingram<\/a>! <\/strong> <\/p>\n NOTE<\/strong>: This post is to introduce you to the 68th episode of Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso\u2019s and my monthly podcast, \u201cA Culture of Possibility.\u201d This episode will be available starting 18 September 2026. You can find it and all episodes at iTunes<\/a>, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net<\/a>\u2018s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Podbean<\/a> and find links to accompany the podcasts. <\/em><\/p>\n In this episode, Fran\u00e7ois and I each share books by writers who\u2019ve inspired us<\/strong>, hoping that you too may find them worth reading. You can find all the links in the episode notes on miaaw.net <\/a>starting on 18 September, and most of them are embedded here too. <\/p>\n I started things off<\/strong>. \u201cTwo of the books that I\u2019ve chosen have a particular resonance for me, rhyming with a sense of how I see myself because the authors were working-class people who were curious and intelligent and big-hearted, and they decided to move out of the little world of the kind of home life and job that that they might have been expected to to occupy, to have an influence on on the big world at large. They came out into public space. The third one is about spiritual life.<\/p>\n \u201cJane Jacobs is my first author, and I want to talk about the first book of hers that made a big splash. She wrote a ton of books about separatism in in Quebec and the economy and other aspects of politics, but she started writing in the realm of architecture and city planning, and that was the place where she really made her name. This book is called \u201cThe Death and Life of Great American Cities<\/a><\/em>\u201d and it was published in 1961. <\/p>\n \u201cHers is an interesting life because she started in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and moved as young woman to Greenwich Village in New York, an exciting place to be, and pretty much stayed there. She became a journalist. She sold freelance articles. She got magazine jobs, and in her late 30s, she was hired by Architectural Forum<\/em> as an associate editor. She learned from her job to question all the received wisdom and orthodoxy of architecture and and urban planning, a field that was full of blowhards, people who had big ideas about how to fix this world: I\u2019m gonna level your whole neighborhood because it\u2019s infested and crime ridden, and I\u2019m gonna build some beautiful tower there instead. Yes, it\u2019s going to be super inconvenient for you and very uncomfortable, but think of the wonderful esthetic experience you\u2019ll be representing to the world.<\/em> I\u2019m only caricaturing slightly.\u201d<\/p>\n On the podcast, you\u2019ll hear a short excerpt<\/strong> from the chapter on Jane Jacobs in my book In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does it Mean to be Educated?<\/em><\/a> That book also has a chapter on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, another of the authors I talk about in this episode. If you subscribe to the NYU Press newsletter, you can buy it there<\/a> at a 30 percent discount.)<\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois noted that my comments on Jacobs reflected something that is true for him too<\/strong>: \u201cI was struck by one of the aspects of the writers we love, or the artists we love and are touched by. Often it\u2019s not only their work, but it\u2019s their personality, or how we imagine them to be\u2026.I would find it difficult\u2014I have found it difficult\u2014to like and admire work by somebody who I don\u2019t like as a person, because that\u2019s actually part of the broader message. Someone like Jane Jacobs was absolutely engaged in the work she wrote about, which is partly why she wrote about such a wide range of things.\u201d<\/p>\n That seemed very true to me, and it also made me think about what it is that allows or invites a book to become catalytic to the reader. \u201cI was talking to a friend of mine about this episode, and I asked this friend, so can you think of books that changed your life? My friend thought for a while and said no. My friend reads, but evidently not the same way that I did, because when I think about the first 30 or 40 years of my life, I had these repeated moments where I read something, it blew my mind, it galvanized me. For months afterwards, I was applying whatever insights I had garnered from the book to all the experiences I had, and I immediately tried to operationalize these thoughts, taking them into consulting projects I was doing and stuff like that. Now I\u2019ve read too many books.\u201d<\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois shared something he\u2019d observed in selecting his authors<\/strong>. \u201cWhen I looked at who I might talk about in this episode, I was struck that one of the things that they, to a degree, have in common is that part of what I\u2019ve got out of them is a reflection on the relationship between the individual and the group, which has been a consistent theme in my work. Lasting change requires both of those. It requires you to pay attention to both. We now live under the neoliberal philosophy. The pendulum has swung very much towards the individual. A much more collective spirit existed when I was young in the post-Second World War period. Most societies came out of the war with a lot of solidarity and a sense of collective endeavor, because that\u2019s what war had had required of them. <\/p>\n \u201cThe work I\u2019ve done\u2014the work of community arts, the work of local cultural development\u2014it\u2019s about balancing both of those things. The work changes us as individuals. That\u2019s how we grow and develop, both those who are like me professionally involved in it, and the people who take part in it occasionally, or once, or even regularly. But unless we also pay attention to groups, to communities, and to how they organize in order to to be stronger, then actually the lasting change can\u2019t happen. The people I\u2019ve worked with are generally the people who have least power in society, and the only way they can redress that is by working together, cooperating both to organize and and do things for themselves, but also potentially to put pressure back on the systems that are putting pressure on them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat was the thing that comes out most clearly in the first book I want to talk about, by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, which is called Creating Capabilities<\/a>. It came out in 2011, but I didn\u2019t read it until maybe seven or eight years ago. The book is about how the capabilities approach developed by the Indian economist Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and others, how that approach, which is about looking at how development can build people\u2019s capabilities, can be applied to people\u2019s creative and cultural lives. Towards the end of the book, she writes that the purpose of global development, like the purpose of good domestic national policy, is to enable people to live full and creative lives, developing their potential and fashioning a meaningful existence commensurate with their equal human dignity. What I like about all of that thinking around human capabilities is that it puts the work that we do in a context of justice, human rights, human dignity, and not in the the way that it\u2019s often talked about, which is some kind of remedial social work. Her definition of capabilities is very clear. She says \u2018capabilities are the answers to the question, what is this person able to do and to be?\u2019 That is human flourishing.\u201d<\/p>\n That is only the start of our book lists<\/strong>. Each book gave us ample food for thought (and sometimes action). It was really fun to talk about them on the podcast, where we had time and space to share many details and observations. <\/p>\n My second author was Raymond Williams, another prolific writer\u2014fiction, nonfiction, plays and more. I focused on an essay in The Raymond Williams Reader<\/em><\/a>. The book is out of print, but you can find reasonably priced used copies. <\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois shared John Berger\u2019s<\/a> writing, starting with the 1972 book Ways of Seeing<\/em>, indispensable for thinking about art. Berger, again, wrote at least 30 books.<\/p>\n Abraham Joshua Heschel, rabbi and philosopher, came next for me. I read some passages from his chapter in my book In The Camp of Angels of Freedom<\/em><\/a> about his central idea, radical amazement, a state of remaining in wonder at the fact of existence rather than settling for conventional notions.<\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois finished with \u201ca very different kind of book, both because it\u2019s written by somebody I know well, and because it seems like a good thing to finish by coming right up to date.\u201d The Art of Positive Fatalism: Lessons from Kinshasa<\/em><\/a>, was written by Lukas Pairon, a musician who has done a lot of work in troubled areas of the world, including Gaza and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Fran\u00e7ois explains that \u201che describes how young people are still able to meet with courage the uncertainties of each day, and to find in the day the best that they can, and to live as all human beings do, to try and find meaning in our lives, however difficult those lives may be.\u201d<\/p>\n I have a feeling you\u2019ll enjoy this conversation as much as we did<\/strong>.<\/p>\n