Here is what I did that was more uplifting this July. I was able to volunteer some at Monsignor King Outreach Center, a local shelter for homeless. (A lot of these folks are holding down jobs, folks, but can't afford rent. Put away any stereotypes.) I made a few trips out of Denton. A friend and I visited CitySquare in southern Dallas, perhaps the best model in this area for helping low-income folks with housing and work (though my being out in heat sent me to bed for the next two days). This weather plays havoc with my asthma. When the weather cools enough to lower the humidity and ozone, I want to follow up. I have only managed to do some photo work and have mostly just been developing film from earlier projects.
Mostly, besides doing some small repair projects inside, and visiting doctors, I wrote and read. For myself, I’ve been reading and rereading some of Simone Weil’s works. I especially recommend Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us and On the Abolition of All Political Parties. If you don’t know her work, she was a contemporary of the writers and artists connected with the French Resistance and French Existentialism. She attended the Sorbonne with Sartre and another Simone, Simone de Beauvoir. Camus called her his favorite philosopher. Etc.
I have also been rereading some of Wendell Berry’s works. Currently I am dipping into a collection of essays, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, and a novel, A Place on Earth. I also looked at an older work (1965), Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith.
Besides those already mentioned, the most thought-provoking other books I read were Ragan Sutterfield’s recent Wendell Berry and the Given Life and an older book (2003), Robert Putnam’s Better Together: Restoring the American Community. Satterfield uses Berry’s writings as a taking off place to explore different virtues. Two chapter titles, for example, are “Home and Care in the Kingdom of God” and “Reclaiming Connection in a World of Division.”
I don’t allow my students to use this as a final source, but the Wikipedia entry on “Social Capital” has a fairly extensive and helpful introduction to the ideas of Putnam and related thinkers. For my more-conservative friends, this is not to be confused with socialism. The basic idea is that we should measure happiness or, say, the good of a proposed project, not just in the economic capital gained but in the good to the community in other ways, such as a sense of security, creating relationships, etc.