Sister Society: Association Internationale Jacques Ellul
Sister Society: Association Internationale Jacques Ellul
The Society now has a place for shorter writings to be featured online and for responses to be aired. One cannot help but wonder what Jacques Ellul, were he alive today, would think about contemporary issues as they arise and often surprise us. These might include topics such as polarization in party politics, immigration clampdown, fake news, drone warfare, cyber-hacking, not to mention a host of technological innovations that have emerged since his death in 1994. All of these issues can be traced as current trends, indeed, drifting trends that have real histories and real frameworks which must be examined. At the same time, we can still hear Ellul’s warning to us (see below) to not drift off and slacken in our own responses to the subtle changes happening around us.
Current Drift provides an open space for IJES members to address and confront the various forms of cultural drift in today’s world. Guest authors (who must be current IJES members) can submit works within a 500 to 600 word range. Each submission should engage a current issue, grounding it in at least one example, and provide some analysis by the guest author. References to Ellul’s thought and writings are encouraged, and links to further studies can be included. For those interested in longer, more in-depth studies, please consider the Ellul Forum.
“Day after day the wind blows away the pages of our calendars, our newspapers, and our political regimes, and we glide along the stream of time without any spiritual framework, without a memory, without a judgment, carried about by “all winds of doctrine” on the current of history, which is always slipping into a perpetual past. Now we ought to react vigorously against this slackness—this tendency to drift. If we are to live in this world we need to know it far more profoundly; we need to rediscover the meaning of events, and the spiritual framework which our contemporaries have lost.”—Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (p. 138)