This September, CIIS Professor Don Hanlon Johnson published a memoir entitled Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams (North Atlantic Books, 2006). Written in the aftermath of 9/11, the book and its title reflect what Johnson sees as a core tension in the conflicts affecting the world today. “On one hand are the simple, modest hopes for a better life here and now and a better life for one’s children,” said Professor Johnson. “On the other hand, the fuel of transcendent inspiration embodied in such systems as Christianity, Islam, and Marxism expand too easily into aggressive attempts to enforce a particular view of the world.”

In Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams, Professor Johnson draws on the life goals within his own family, which ranged from the mundane to the apocalyptic. “I used a memoir of the shaping of my early life in the Sacramento Valley as a lens for analyzing the major tensions that are now fragmenting our society,” he said. “The work was born in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the idealism which had fueled my life’s work of teaching and writing collapsed in the face of the regressive ways in which our country responded to the disaster.”

By using nostalgic vignettes and personal stories, he examines the ways in which certain American ideals are ingrained in us early in life and continue to both nurture and, in some cases, harm. He explores the primal roots of that idealism through specific details of neighborhood, sexual liaisons, ethnic mixes, local churches, manners, public and religious schools, and local politics. These memories, according to Professor Johnson, “provide the groundwork for sorting out the hopes of our forbearers: what endures, what needs revision, and what is harmful.” Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams presents an unusual vision of the possibility of a community that honors not only ideological diversity, but also a substantial historical and philosophical basis for progressive politics in this country.

Don Hanlon Johnson earned his Ph.D. (1971) in Philosophy at Yale University and is the founder of the first graduate degree program in the field of Somatics, based originally at Antioch University before it moved to CIIS. In addition to this memoir, he is the author of three books and several journal articles on the central role of bodily experience in providing a unique understand of critical social, spiritual, and psychological issues.