THE TIME OF MONSTERS

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

That’s Antonio Gramsci, writing from prison. A writer, journalist, parliamentarian, and anti-fascist, he was arrested when Mussolini stopped pretending Italy was still a democracy. It was 1926 and Gramsci was 35 years old.

Now a new generation, living in what we might call a time of monsters, is learning his name. A thinker for our time, with a ringing quote that fits on an Instagram slide.

One clarification, though: Gramsci didn’t say that.

The quote is a mash-up from thinkers and politicians across time and space, trying to name what it feels like to be alive right now, whenever that is.

Here’s what Gramsci actually wrote, in the middle of thousands of pages of philosophy he wrote from prison, and then under guard on his death bed: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Not as pithy.

But what’s a philosopher, living and writing during an interregnum, supposed to say?? It’s not a simple thing.

Interregnum: the time between two powers. Between one sovereign and the next. After one world order has ended, or been put to death, and before the next has emerged. When you don’t yet know what’s coming.  A time of uncertainty, instability, and many kinds of monsters. 

Relatable. What’s a church supposed to do?

Join us this October at Bethany as we shine a light under the bed of the world, turning out the monsters from their hiding places and, together, find the courage we need to be alive right now.

Sundays at 10:30 am in-person or online.

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