Born Remembering

by Elise Boulding

Overview

Everyone has had some experience of early childhood remembering: remembering an otherness not to be explained by family experiences, stories heard, events witnessed. Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting? Is this a joke that God would share with us, but that we can only laugh at in the moment when we have come full circle, and remember again? That coming full circle and remembering again is no laughing matter however. It is a conversion experience, literally, and life cannot go on as before. This happened to me very recently, and I am going to spend these pages in reflecting on the remembering, and the forgetting, and the remembering, as I have experienced it in my own life.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940148270775
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	02/19/2014
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #200
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	30
File size:	78 KB

About the Author

Elise Boulding is professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, and is a practicing Quaker, teaching in the Boulder Friends Meeting First Day School and participating in the Meeting’s extended family project. She joined Friends the same year she joined Kenneth Boulding in matrimony – 1941. She gave the William Penn Lecture on “The Joy That Is Set Before Us” (1956) while in the process of translating Fred Polak’s Image of the Future, the English version of which was published in 1961. Meanwhile the five Boulding children were growing up, and these family experiences resulted in Friends Testimonies in the Home (1962) and The Fruits of Solitude for Children (1963).

Several studies of women in the peace movement brought her back to sociology. As first editor of the International Peace Research Newsletter, and as chairperson of both the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and of the North American Consortium on Peace Research, Education, and Development (COPRED) she has linked a concern for the international community with continuing research, while her involvement with family life has expressed itself in such articles as “The Family as an Agent of Social Change,” “The Child as Shaper of the Future,” and more recently, “The Child and Non-Violent Social Change.” But the present essay is a departure from these social areas, for it takes her into the realm of personal devotion and the spirit. It will be included as a chapter in the Tulane Catholic Center’s forthcoming collection, Freedom in Christ.