What’s in a Name?

By Doug Pagitt

Doug Pagitt pastors Solomon's Porch (www.solomonsporch.com) in Minneapolis, writes (www.dougpagitt.com), and seeks seeking to find creative, entrepreneurial, generative ways to join in the hopes, dreams and desires God has for the world.

I am really excited about the Emergent Manifesto of Hope book.

I like the title because it is playful. When we were conceiving of the book we were thinking that a book that gives a picture of the varied approaches to life with God would be really helpful, but that also needed to have some girth to it. There is this tendency to think that when someone uses Emergenty language it is because they don’t believe anything. It is like if someone doesn’t want to force it down your throat they must not really mean it.  And in the Emergent world we know that that this not true, in fact the opposite might be closer to the truth. The strength with which someone forces their ideas shows their lack of conviction in those ideas. Why else be so aggressive?
But we know that neither of these assumptions are really accurate.

So, the idea of having an “Emergent” “Manifesto” was meant to be a play on these assumptions. I hope people “get” that play and don’t start thinking that we really are laying down the gauntlet. While the official definition of manifesto is:

“a public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives, as one issued by a government, sovereign, or organization.”

For many people the word has a hard edge to it--a command-like feel. Even an “I know better than you” connotation. But that is not what we were shooting for.

The inclusion of the word hope came about sort of by accident, but became really important. We were in discussion with the emersion editorial group, talking about the book, and I said, “you know this book is really going to be about hope more than anything. The kind of hope that comes when you hear other people share your ideas and intuitions.” It was clear that point that this was not about telling the way it is, but telling the way it could be.
So, it is an interesting manifesto. I is a strong, yet inviting. Real yet unfinished in its possibility.

I hope people find the content to be just that.

Comments

[djchuang]

Congratulations on this new hopeful book, and good to read a mini-deconstruction of how the book title came to be construed.

I'm curious, and perhaps a public forum is not the most conducive b/c it's too transparent, how does an edited book with many different authors & contributors get published with a traditional publisher? From what I know of the publishing world, multi-author volumes allegedly don't sell as well, and for a book to get published, it has to show some semblence of viability and profitability, or it doesn't get published. So would this book project happened to have some extra sponsorship to make it viable? It's okay to talk about money things some time right? :)

[JW]

Wow, nice site. Thanks, Doug, for these insightful comments!