More Fruits of the EDI Symposium: Against Amazon

One of the themes of the Eighth Day Institute Eighth Annual Symposium, "Friendship in a Fractured Age" last month was that friendship may be impeded, not aided, by our digital communications systems and processes--that was the theme that Ken Myers of Mars Hill discussed in his two talks “Liberalism and the Trivializing of Friendship” and “Social Media and the Commodification of Friendship).

To foster conversation and discussion without those digital aids, the Eighth Day Institute hosts several regular events, including the Hall of Men and the Sisters of Sophia. Tomorrow night, EDI will host the second Round Table--a monthly meeting of members and others talking around a rectangular table at The Ladder. The EDI website explains the format:

Doors open at The Ladder at 6:30 pm on the first Tuesdays of each month. At 6:45 pm., anyone interested in pitching a topic gets thirty seconds to use their rhetorical skills to convince us their proposal deserves discussion. Proposed topics are ranked by secret ballot, tallied in real time, and then taken in sequence, third-ranked, second-ranked, and finally the first-ranked question from the previous meeting, which will have given you some time to ponder and prepare for one of the three topics. Each topic is given about 30 minutes of discussion, with a ten-minute break in between each round.

The pre-selected question for this meeting is provoked by a beautiful little booklet I purchased from Eighth Day Books: Against Amazon: Seven Arguments / One Manifesto: Is there a justifiably moral rationale to boycott Amazon? In other words, are you for or against Amazon and why or why not?

Light hors d'oeuvers will be provided.

As usual, beer and wine will be available on a donation basis.

We're looking forward to room full of ladies and gentlemen engaging in a great ecumenical dialogue of love and truth.

We hope to see you 6:30 pm at The Ladder on Tuesday, February 6!

More about the booklet here (I own #22 out of 1000 in its second edition!) I don't think you'll find it on Amazon!!

It's snowing here in Wichita as I type this so the picture of the front door of Eighth Day Books on a snowy afternoon in March 2015 is most appropriate.