8:46 Book Club

“Hospicing Modernity” by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Mondays, Jan 22 – Feb 26

7:30-9:30pm EST

A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity—for fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity

This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet.

But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?

Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance—the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker—and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back… and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest.

Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, we will engage in  thought experiments that ask us to:

  • Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis
  • Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure
  • Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things
  • Understand the “5 modern-colonial e’s”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism
  • Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm
  • Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness
When we talk about getting our Holy on, we mean individually and collectively. We are therefore committed to addressing the one thing that affects all of us, that has been responsible for much of the pain and inequality and injustice in our country…
…systemic racism.

In 2020, the world erupted in one voice against police brutality fueled by racism after the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer, who knelt on his neck for 8 min and 46 sec. His death was not the first like it, or sadly the last, but perhaps because the world was able to witness the entire cruelty of it, a nerve was struck like never before and an awakening was triggered.

Since then we’ve led book studies with the intention of educating ourselves about systemic racism and what’s our to do individually, and collectively, to dismantle this scourge, and to create a world that works for all. In honor of George Floyd, all the needless deaths before and since his, and in recognition of the work that’s collectively ours to do, we are calling our ongoing book studies the 8:46 Book Club.

While we later learned through the course of Derek Chauvin’s murder trial that the length of time he brutally knelt on George Floyd’s neck was much longer, 9 minutes and 30 seconds, we chose to stay with 8:46 – a number that had already been carved into the minds of millions – a number that reminds us of our individual and collective work of deconstructing racism and building an antiracist culture.

The only cost for anyone to participate will be a donation of your choosing. A portion of the proceeds we collect are donated to organizations committed to antiracist work.

Connect with us today!

Join with us as we create a world of love, justice, and liberation by healing our misguided ideas of who we are, as well as what we think the world is, so that together we live our Holiest selves.

To change our world we must live and work where courage, inclusion, belonging and purpose intersect.

project_SANCTUS is that place.

For more information feel free to CONTACT US.