The Pleasurable Choice Is the Ethical Choice
I like to say that I’m not an an optimist, but I am a person of hope. That is to say, I cultivate the virtue of hope in myself. Hope takes account of the enormity and darkness of challenges and problems, and yet it meets darkness with light, and points to resilience and goodness where they can be found.

In this spirit I am drawn to Barbara Kingsolver’s hope and resolve that, however grim the manmade crises of our time, we are gradually getting some things “more right.” And, Kingsolver advises, we must treat hope itself as a renewable resource, something we put on with our shoes every morning.

But she also says, reframing an equation many of us are internalizing, that it is not the job of the next generation to right the grand, looming environmental crises of the present. The work has to start here and now with our daily routines. Barbara Kingsolver has made one kind of beginning with her family’s “food life.”

The Ethics of Eating | Krista’s Journal [Speaking of Faith® from American Public Media]

I do not know how long it has been since I discovered Krista Tippett and her radio program Speaking of Faith, but it was only through the internet that I did. Her program isn’t carried on the PBS stations around here, so I only hear it through the weekly podcast. The quote above is referring to a program last month where Krista talked with Barbara Kingsolver. I listened to both the program and the unedited recording of their conversation and enjoyed both.

This weeks program was The Business of Doing Good which I found very interesting. I must admit, I am puzzled by my discomfort with the idea of doing good and getting…rich?, probably not a good word, but the concept somehow troubles me. Doing good and living a comfortable live…OK, I can see that…This whole show just left me questioning…Which I suppose is a very good thing in it’s own right.

I really like the bredth of the subjects she covers on the shows. I tend to review the shows again and again, gaining new insights each time.

If you have never heard her show, go on over and find a subject that looks interesting, download the mp3 and sit a spell and listen…I will.

 

Updated Link – BARBARA KINGSOLVER – The Ethics of Eating