There is, it seems, an unbridgeable chasm between the concerns of a Sri Aurobindo and a Pat Robertson.

We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.

A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals.

The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.

There must be engagement: there must be protest.

Charisma is a sign of the calling. Saints and pilgrims are defiantly moved by it.

We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here.