From ArkiBlog (some highlights):

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth…

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

&c.   There are 43 individual lines in this manifesto, and most of them can easily apply to what I think I’m trying to do in my classroom, with the youth group, with the Writing Project, with the bands, and with my life in general.  Do yourself a favor and read the whole piece.

The problem, though, with this kind of manifesto/credo is that while it’d be wicked cool to be able to say you follow the whole thing, it requires a big leap of faith.  Right before I read the ArkiBlog post, I came across this in A.J. Jacobs’s amazingly wise and funny book The Year of Living Biblically:One Man’s Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

The emphasis on faith is a key difference between modern Judaism and current evangelical Christianity.  Judaism has a slogan: deed over creed.  There’s an emphasis on behavior; follow the rules of the Torah, and eventually you’ll come to believe.  But evangelical Christianity says you must first believe in Jesus, then the good works will naturally follow.

Is it possible that the Jewish approach might help here?  Does it make sense to accept the principles of this manifesto as practices to strive for, hoping that somewhere along the way we’ll have a conversion experience and start to do them as if there were no other way?  Am I asking the right questions?