Now at the End of Things

Now at the End of Things, A Plea for Magic is a public conversation between Báyò Akómoláfé and David Abram, hosted by Alex Forrester of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics on Thursday, September 24 at 7:00pm here at Saint James Place. What might it mean to invoke magic in a politically airless time, when the unyielding gestures of the ceaselessly pragmatic are presented as the only serious response to fascism, to genocide, and to the slow implosion of civilizational trust? What is the plea for, in such a moment? And to whom is it addressed? This is not a defense of magic against its detractors, nor an anthropological tour of its varieties. It is something more wayward: an inquiry into whether the crack in the machine might be a door. Sliding scale fee. Doors open at 6:30pm. _____ Báyò Akómoláfé is W.E.B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, Distinguished Professor, and author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and Selah: A Bayo Akomolafe Reader. He is a philosopher, psychologist, and public intellectual whose work convenes at the crossroads of Yoruba cosmologies, posthumanist thought, and the politics of the impossible. David Abram is a cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, and the author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal – books that have taught a generation that perception itself is participation, and that the sensuous world was never inert matter awaiting our instrumental attentions. Alex Forrester chairs the Board of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, and is the co-founder and Chief Impact Officer of Rising Tide Capital – a nationally recognized nonprofit working at the intersection of inclusive economics, social justice, and entrepreneurship, whose grassroots model now supports over a thousand entrepreneurs each year across multiple cities and languages. A theologian by training and temperament, he serves as Public Theologian in Residence at First Presbyterian Church of Hudson and sits on the Board of the Justice Climate Fund. He and Báyò Akómoláfé are writing a book together.