Six (actually Seven) Degrees of Martin Buber

Six (actually Seven) Degrees of Martin Buber

            This semester when reading about Martin Buber I noticed there are interesting connections between the authors we have read.  I set out to see if I could connect Buber to Joseph Bailey.  For the connection to be made it took seven degrees.  Some of the connections are not authors but they played an interesting role in the connection’s life.  With all of the authors we read this semester there was a pattern of building on the information from one to the next, they are almost interrelated. 

Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (1923) first translated into English in 1937 by Ronald Gregor Smith. Smith would have Buber degree of one.  Later Smith would be influenced by Francis A. Schaeffer Secular Christianity (1968); Schaeffer would have a Buber degree of two.  Schaffer co wrote a book with C. Everett Coop titled Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, Coop would have a Buber degree of three.  In this book they discuss the “thinkable’ and “unthinkable” issues that arise in every era of time, communication plays a large role because much of the controversy is over miscommunications (Koop & Schaeffer, 1983).  On a side note, Coop’s second wife Cora Hogue has a blog where she posts the following comment “One day we will be perfectly healed and there will be no more painful layers to peel off. It's hard to imagine what it will be like to be made perfect, to be without pain or brokenness.”  This statement made me think of Jefferson and Grant in A lesson Before Dying, because in the end, Jefferson accepts his impending death and Grant accepts the death and allows himself to cry in front of his class (Sargent, 1999).   Back to C. Everett Coop, he served as the Surgeon General under the Ronald Reagan administration; Reagan would have a Buber degree of four.  In 1988, President Ronald Reagan appointed Richard Carlson to the National Commission on Children, Carlson would have a Buber degree of five.  Richard Carlson is the co-author of Slowing down to the speed of Life with Joseph Bailey, author of Slowing Down to the Speed of Love.  Carlson would have a Buber degree of six and Bailey would have a Buber degree of seven.  In both of the slowing down books they talk about taking the time to connect with others in our lives.  We do this by being present, listening deeply, forgiving others and speaking from the heart (Joesph Bailey, 2003) (Carlson, 1997). 

            In the game of connections there are variations based on the assumption that almost anyone in the world can be linked to anyone else in the world by six or seven degrees.  In the path I took I had to use seven degrees to connect Martin Buber with Joseph Bailey. The connection is strong because they both have an underlying message of taking the time to really talk and listen to someone you care about, by taking the time to be present with someone we create the relationship Buber was talking about.

Resources

Carlson, R. (1997). Slowing Down to the Speed of Life. New York, NY: Haprper Collins Publisher.

Joesph Bailey, M. L. (2003). Slowing Down to the Speed of Love. United States: McGraw-Hill eBook.

Koop, C. E., & Schaeffer, F. A. (1983). Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

Martin Buber. (2004, April 20). Retrieved April 24, 2012, from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/

Sargent, J. (Director). (1999). A Lesson Before Dying [Motion Picture].