You must check out the newest from my favorite transcendent and down to earth preacher.--Laurie Anderson, artist, musician
The Earth Wants YOU is a motivational handbook, filled with inspired visions of a wild, creative, Earth-led cultural revolution. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping offer up a heady mix of humor, insightful critique, passionate commitment, emotional catharsis, and example after example of vibrant direct action. Stop shopping and feel the love as you sign up for the struggle of our lives! Earthalujah!
Praise for The Earth Wants YOU:
Singing instructions for joining the Earthalujah choir!--Jodie Evans, CODEPINK
My Earthmojis are smiling for Reverend Billy! And that''s all the dirt you''re gonna get from me. O;--Justin Vivian Bond, trans-genre artist, Radical Faerie
Mama Earth will shake us ALL off unless we shake shit UP and shut it DOWN!--Bertha Lewis, The Black Institute
This is what makes social
Trade Review
"Welcome, brothers and sisters, to the Church of Stop Shopping in Brooklyn, where the right Rev. Billy Talen rocks his ecopulpit with impassioned performance art and guerilla theater happenings, reminiscent of back-in-the-day 1960s La MaMa Theater and the Living Theater, in service of his clarion call social activism to save our Black Friday-addicted shopping souls and heed Mother Earth's doomsday climate change wail. The gospel according to Reverend Billy can be found in this title, a compilation of short rants, monologues, and sermons decrying our collective crass commercialism, cultural propensity for materialistic gormandizing, and comprehensive ecological rape of the planet. A leitmotif throughout is the concept of 'The Replacement Planet,' in which everything is a commodity to be monetized and marketed. Monsanto, violence in Ferguson, the annihilation of honeybees, Hurricane Sandy, and the Earth as being r-e-a-l-l-y pissed at us (and letting us know) are favorite pinatas, but the reverend juxtaposes these jeremiads with encouraging stories of humorous and sometimes successful nonviolent protest. VERDICT If Elvis and the Goddess of Greenpeace got together on Match.com and had a bastard child, it would be the Reverend Billy, and while it might be easy to dismiss his theatrical schtick, it would be wrong to ignore the message--brethren, can I get a Earthalujah!"--Barry X. Miller, Library Journal "Reverend Talen is a warrior whose aim it is to wake the sleeping to the realities of climate change. He is guided by a higher power and fueled by love."--Clayton Thomas-Muller, member of the Mathais Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan, Manitoba) "I had a dream about the Reverend Billy last night. He came to Harvard Divinity School. People were distraught that no one had authorized him as a reverend to preach, and yet he preached."--Tim DeChristopher, Peaceful Uprising "The Church of Stop Shopping helps us ready ourselves for the times ahead by finding solace in the persistent force field of living beings."--Severine von Tscharner Fleming, The Greenhorns "Reverend Billy will have you raising your hands in Hallelujah while the Earth's plight brings you to your knees."--Zen Honeycutt, Moms Across America "This is a movement that you hold in your hands, which you will then feed back to the wind, to the fire and the water."--Leah Borromeo, The Cotton Film: Dirty White Gold "This is a new Psalm for the Earth, for her human and other-than-human inhabitants."--Beth Stephens, ecosexual artist, professor "The Reverend reminds us that we are complicit in the delusion that we are somehow separate from the evolutionary process of Mother Earth."--Alnoor Ladha, The Rules "This is a kaleidoscopic journey, from disobedient grandma's fighting fracking to rebellious choirs against police racism, from profound animistic prayers on ecological collapse to complex political critiques of the NGO sector."--John Jordan, Laboratoire d'Imagination Insurrectionnelle "He's hysterically serious."--Andy Shallal, Busboys and Poets Praise for Reverend Billy "Combining the situationalist flair of Abbie Hoffman with an evangelist's tireless zeal, Reverend Billy's efforts against mindless consumerism and corporate greed have added the oxygen of publicity to flames of a number of worthy causes, as well as reintroducing a much-needed sense of fun to Manhattan's somber and overregulated plazas."--Publishers Weekly "[Reverend Billy has] the zeal of a street-corner preacher and the schmaltz of a street-corner Santa.--The New York Times
