The following publications contain insight into the foundational philosophies and practices of Fools Mission . We encourage you to seek out these books at your local bookstore. You can find independent bookstores near you at Indiebound.com, or check the Independent Online Bookseller’s Association to find a vendor.
- Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art
- This cultural study is a “must read” for anyone seeking to understand the identity of the fool. A delightful and insightfully exhaustive exploration of the role the fool as artist, this book reveals the Trickster who shifts attitudes and culture: a delightful and insightfully exhaustive exploration of the role the fool as artist.
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In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old stories—Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others—and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication, Trickster Makes This World — authoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its style — has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism.
- Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self
- In Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, presence is the quality that describes a heart-filled state of mindfulness, an experience of being conscious in the present moment. It is only in this present moment, Sufi teachings reveal, that we can connect with the Divine, and the Divine can live through us.
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In this inspiring book, you learn how to cultivate presence in your life:
- Finding a balance between the outer stimuli of the world and our inner reactions to them
- Harnessing faithfulness and gracefulness
- Learning about the parallels between ancient spiritual wisdom and modern psychological knowledge
- Meditation and contemplation to discover more meaning in daily life
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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Pedagogy of the Oppressed is an approach to education and organizing to transform oppressive structures and create a more equitable, caring and beautiful world through action and reflection that is co-created with those who have been marginalized and dehumanized.
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In this classic study, Paulo Freire develops a process he calls conscientization, in which we reflect on our conditions, imagine a better world, and take action to create it. He offers an approach to education and organizing that can direct us toward liberation from structures of oppression by insisting that the knowledge and expertise we need already exists.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed poses education as a practice of freedom, which requires no propaganda or deposits of information (what Freire calls a Banking Model of Education) to convince us of our problems. What is required is dialogue, respect, love for humanity, and praxis (action and reflection) to transform the world.
- Theatre of the Oppressed
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Theatre of the Oppressed is a powerfully foolish method that restores theatre to its original place as a popular form of communication and expression. In this classic work based on the theories of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal demonstrates the ways in which theatre has come to reflect ruling-class control, drawing on the theories of Aristotle and Machiavelli. He then reverses the process by transforming the spectator into the actor.
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Theatre of the Oppressed raises consciousness and develops tools for encounters with authority. The powerful integration of justice making and art is a laboratory for tapping into the wisdom of the group. By taking turns sharing coping strategies with everyone in the room, we create a shared pool of understanding and meaning.
- Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery
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Truth or Dare brings practical wisdom for a fool’s psychology of liberation. A rich, complex, and radiant examination of the nature of power, Starhawk spins together myth, history, ritual, poetry, spells, psychology, and activism to offer new and creative alternatives for positive change in our personal lives, our communities, and our world.
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Starhawk develops a psychology of liberation by analyzing our internalized oppressor, the Self-hater. The faces of the Self-hater are the Judge, the Conqueror, the Censor, the Master of Servants, and the Orderer. She distinguishes three types of power: “power-over,” referring to domination and control; “power-from-within,” meaning personal ability and spiritual integrity; and “power-with,” pertaining to social power or influence among equals.
- Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
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Father Gregory Boyle’s sparkling parables about kinship and the sacredness of life are drawn from twenty years working with gangs in Los Angeles.
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How do you fight despair and learn to meet the world with a loving heart? How do you overcome shame? Stay faithful in spite of failure? No matter where people live or what their circumstances may be, everyone needs boundless, restorative love. Gorgeous and uplifting, Tattoos on the Heart amply demonstrates the impact unconditional love can have on your life.
- The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
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The Ascent of Humanity has earned its place on the bookshelf of anyone with aspirations to foolishness. This prescient book deconstructs the foundational myths of our culture and describes an evolutionary path for humankind toward the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
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Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He explains how a disconnection from the natural world and one another is built into the foundations of civilization: into science, religion, money, technology, medicine, and education as we know them. As a result, each of these institutions faces a grave and growing crisis, fueling our near-pathological pursuit of technological fixes even as we push our planet to the brink of collapse.
Fortunately, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth pangs of an earth in crisis. As our old constructs of self and world dissolve in crisis, we are entering a new narrative of interbeing, a more expansive sense of self, and a more ecological relationship to nature. Our darkest hour bears the possibility of a more beautiful world—not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control but by fundamentally reimagining ourselves and our systems.
- The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
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It is a well-established fact that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. The Spirit Level, based on thirty years of research, takes this truth a step further. One common factor links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Further, more unequal societies are bad for everyone within them—the rich and middle class as well as the poor.
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The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level exposes stark differences, not only among the nations of the first world but even within America’s fifty states. Almost every modern social problem-poor health, violence, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness-is more likely to occur in a less-equal society.
Researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett expose the contradictions between material success and social failure in the developed world. But they do not merely tell us what’s wrong. They offer a way toward a new political outlook, shifting from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more sustainable society.
- Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace
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This book is a powerful exploration of the way fools think about witness. Bernie Glassman introduces us to people who have made peace with themselves, their addictions, and their families, and have now committed themselves to making peace in inner cities, troubled communities, and war-torn countries.
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Through their stories, we come to understand that the essence of peacemaking is threefold — letting go of fixed ideas, healing ourselves and others, and bearing witness to whatever is taking place within us and right before our eyes.
- Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability
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Class and race are often assumed to be natural, biologically determined categories when in fact they are social constructs. Together with gender and other boundaries of identity, these distinctions are perpetuated and exploited by powerful social groups to maintain privilege.
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Mary Elizabeth Hobgood addresses these dynamics not only because they are unjust, but because they create isolation and spiritual impoverishment, fostering cultural values that harm everyone. In Dismantling Privilege she identifies an ethical agenda for elites and seeks to persuade them that an agenda of justice and an ethics of accountability will be of primary benefit to them. The solution, Hobgood asserts, is a politics of solidarity grounded in the realization that no one is free until all are free.
- The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
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The Great Turning and the insights contained within should be on every fool’s bookshelf. In this prescient book, David Korten argues that corporate consolidation of power is merely a contemporary manifestation of what he calls “Empire”: the organization of society by hierarchies of domination grounded in violent chauvinisms of race, gender, religion, nationality, language, and class.
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Increasingly destructive of children, family, community, and nature, the way of Empire is leading to environmental and social collapse, which will bring an unraveling of the corporate-led global economy and a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life.
We cannot avoid the unraveling. We can, however, turn a potentially terminal crisis into an epic opportunity to bring forth a new era of Earth Community grounded in the life-affirming cultural values shared by nearly all the world’s people.
The Great Turning cuts through the complexity of our time to illuminate a simple, but elegant truth. We humans live by stories. We are held captive to the ways of Empire by a cultural trance of our own creation maintained by stories that deny the higher possibilities of our human nature—including our capacities for compassion, cooperation, responsible self-direction, and self-organizing partnership.