William Cronon: Prophecy and History
I recently caught a talk by historian William Cronon at the Portland Center for Public Humanities. Of the many thoughts that have lingered:
Prophecy and history are joined at the hip at the moment called the present. Prophecy is our moment of looking forward into the future and imagining the arc of where our actions might be leading.
How we narrate the past pivots on the direction of our prophetic arc about what the future might be. ...
I think one of the biggest problems of the world is that the wonder of modernity is also its trap, which is that: the world has never been more intricately interconnected. Our lives have never been more dependent upon an unbelievably intricate web of relationships that most of us are completely oblivious to most of the time.And if we seek to take the moral and political responsibility for the consequences of our own lives and our own actions, if we wish to imagine and create a sustainable world, we have to somehow re-experience those connections.
