First, a quick hurrah 
to Johnny for the rain dance, and to Ed for this…
There is an organization in Boulder County called Slow Money, which is focused on investing in the local food economy; and there is also the “slow food” movement, which focuses on the quality, taste, and ecological relations involved in humans preparing food and eating together. Similarly, I’ve thought of Infinite Conversations as participating in a kind of “slow discourse” movement, which prioritizes certain (perhaps not fully expressed, but underlying/emergent) values —e.g., quality over speed, listening over marketing, independent and small-scale over corporate, cafeteria-model “feeds.”
“Memes,” we might think of as ingredients, or sometimes spices, condiments. What matters is how they’re combined, cooked, or even fermented, but also, the worlds they conjure. I recall when I was a child, how my uncles and aunts used to come over and the grown-ups would eat, drink, and talk. Nothing was off the table: politics, religion, history, sex…dirty jokes. My dad, who immigrated to the US from Italy, was a progressive Democrat and my uncle (his older brother) an old-school patriarchal authoritarian who admired Mussolini, because, well…
I’m not saying it was the most high-brow intellectual discourse—and after a couple bottles of wine, all bets were off (though invariably, this is when the best stories were told—e.g., its where I learned about what it was like growing up in Italy during the war)—but the point was the conversation itself as a human phenomenon: the lifeworld it sustained.
Tillich’s Love, Power, and Justice looks like it would be a great book for a Cosmos Café. (I’ve added it to the wiki.) I have not read anything by Tillich before, but the review suggests a significant resonance, and a deepening of the consideration that’s at the crux of Caroline’s essays, as well as Alexander Blum’s The Case Against Liberation. To be continued…