Dear Friends,
Both Randy and I have been especially busy over the last months. The launch of the new book – God’s Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love – required more attention than we anticipated. We are pleased by the reception the book has had. The (so far) five-star reviews on Amazon have been especially gratifying. We hope the book will be reviewed as kindly elsewhere, but time will tell.
Meanwhile, we are undergoing a number of changes and undertaking new projects. I hope you will take the time to read Randy’s message below. He has important things to share about logistical changes we are making. Unlike Randy, the changes in my work are thematic and not geographical. I sustained myself last year by anticipating a respite from the keyboard once God’s Gamble was published. The respite lasted about two weeks. The “next project” is now beginning to take shape, and I am intensely excited about it.
Surprisingly – if predictably – the book on which I am now working is not the one I told my publisher I was going to write next. Instead, it is the book I promised to write more than twenty years ago, the first working title of which was “Changing the Subject: From Self to Person” but which at the moment is: “The Soul is Naturally Christian” – that being a famous remark by Tertullian. As the title change indicates, this book, like its predecessors, is taking its own course. Unforeseen developments may require a title change, but today this title seems best. In any case, it will, of course, draw on the work of my teacher and friend René Girard and it will undertake to show that the conventional forms of selfhood that have arisen – via Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau, Freud, Jung, et al. – are as anthropologically incoherent and spiritually perilous as are the social and cultural projects that have been erected in a desperate attempt to sustain this unstable form of subjectivity. If God grants me the time and energy required to bring this project to completion, I think it will make a worthy companion to God’s Gamble.
Going forward I will take a more active part in the production and distribution of the monthly CDs Randy has been making of my talks on various subjects recorded years ago. I have not listened to these talks since I gave them, but Randy assures me that they have retained their relevance, and our monthly donors seem to appreciate them. If you would like to receive these monthly CDs, see Randy’s message for more details.
Thank you again for your interest in our work. Please keep us in your prayers.
Sincerely yours,
Gil Bailie
From the Executive Director:
Dear Friends,
Once again the Cornerstone Forum’s earthly tent is being packed up for a move. The law offices in which we have been ensconced for the past 4 years needs space for two new attorneys. The office rental space rates for the Sonoma area have increased beyond our means and so we have accommodated to the now common practice of a ‘virtual’ office. We have moved our CD production equipment to Gil Bailie’s home office and all our non-essential items for the day-to-day working of the Cornerstone Forum into a small storage unit. Calls to the Cornerstone Forum office will ring through to my cell phone. All of these changes have necessarily taken a toll on our ability to keep up with posting on our website and social media outlets over the past month.
On a personal note, I am taking this opportunity to make some changes of my own. At the end of April I will be moving, temporarily, to Maryland to assist our daughter’s family in welcoming their second child. This is a grandparent’s calling and I expect to be involved in many of the hands-on duties in their home. As our longtime supporters may recall, for the past six years I have been working at two jobs, one as the Cornerstone Forum’s executive director, and the other as the legal secretary for our board member and friend Bill Shea. While the virtual Cornerstone Forum office will be making the move with me to Maryland, my tour of duty as a legal secretary in Sonoma will end.
One of the benefits of clearing out of a long-used workspace is discovering items that have been out of sight for a long time. We experienced this in dusting off old boxes of cassette tapes and finding recordings of René Girard giving presentations to Gil’s weekly gatherings in Sonoma in the early 1990’s as well as an interview Gil conducted with professor Girard around that same time. I hope to make all these audio files available for streaming on our website in the coming days. You may listen to the interview by clicking on the audio player below:
Finally, while the net change to our budget due to the trading of a physical office for a virtual one is a plus, we remain in need of your continued prayers and material support. We are making available with this newsletter a complimentary downloadable MP3 audio file of the first part of Gil’s 1990 recording of Reflections on Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida (use the coupon code ‘spring’ on the checkout page in our store). Our annual and monthly donors of $60 per year ($5 per month) receive these complimentary downloadable MP3 audio files monthly. Donors at the $300 per year level ($25 per month) receive the downloadable MP3 audio files as well as a mailed CD version of the same presentation each month. Please consider supporting our efforts with a contribution made on our secure website’s Donations page.
Easter blessings,
Randy Coleman-Riese