A new offering by Orbis Books
A proven answer to our most difficult social problems is underway, and it begins locally. This is a way to heal racial tensions, create bonds of friendship, and cure the loneliness and depression that blights our communities. How to Remake the World Neighborhood By Neighborhood tells the story of Community Renewal International (CRI), an organization that has built a movement to include cities across the United States and Africa. Where it takes root, crime rates plummet and people come out of their homes to lead happier lives, feeling safe and loved. “You have the premier community renewal building model in the nation. I’ve never seen a more exciting opportunity than what I see here in Shreveport.” – the late Millard Fuller, founder, Habitat for Humanity “A lot of cities are struggling to build community and CRI is a model for what cities all across America need. I applaud you.” – Paul Farmer, executive director and CEO, American Planning Association (Retired)
We CAN Remake The World
Mack McCarter
(Excerpt from Chapter One)
The fundamental challenge facing humankind is the repetitive failure of our societies to create and grow a total community that incrementally and generationally improves the flourishing of all its members. We have never created a society that is ever renewing itself infinitely. We have never made a society that simply gets better and better and better with limitless possibilities of human development. Not only is this true globally, but the history of our human race shows that every major society has gone through continuous cycles of growth and decline and even death. Lurching toward some dream and hope for human betterment only to falter and ultimately fail seems our historical lot.
We are living at a time when our interconnectivity is suddenly more than the incisive imaginings of our prophets and poets. Our entire global family is now binding together in every way possible. What affects one affects all. I did not think at one time that the United States was inextricably connected to what went on in Afghanistan. Indeed, at one time it wasn’t. But then September 11, 2001 came. In that nightmare, I realized that what happens in Afghanistan and now all over the world can and does affect all of us.
Early in the days of the Covid pandemic, I was reminded of this insight. Never before had I given thought to the economic niceties of production and supply chains in places like China, India, or the Philippines, but as the shelves of my local grocery store ran thin I recalled how irreversibly our world has become interdependent. “No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote the English poet John Donne in the 16th century, and his words are even more true today.
So the challenge that is now starkly before us, is this: We must come together in such a way that we can create a global society that has learned in its maturity to actually grow better and better human beings contributing to a whole community that is ever improving in all things that touch upon our lives here on planet earth. Because only by acting together as an entire global family in a consciously cooperative way can we possibly have even the remotest chance of securing the health of our planet.
There is no Planet B.
I have devoted my life to finding our way forward in answering this fundamental challenge facing humankind: creating a global society which grows better and better with no stop sign in its future. How in the world can we do that? How can we, of all people, accomplish something that has never been done in our entire history? Indeed, Lewis Mumford, the great seer of human society, lamented the chief enigma of history: why do we keep collapsing the societies we construct? So is it possible? Can we do it?
Over the past three decades I’ve become convinced that the answer is through connecting caring people. My home town of Shreveport, Louisiana, is proof that caring for each and all works, because it responds to the most fundamental longings of the human heart. In these pages, I’ll share the story of how connecting people together who care for one another has transformed entire neighborhoods of the city, giving people hope and helping to rebuild lives. Rich and poor; Black, white, and brown; Democrat and Republican; old and young—over 50,000 of my neighbors have joined our movement, and block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood we are remaking the world.
How To Remake The World 