Now at the End of Things, A Plea for Magic at – Pittsfield, MA

Get your tickets to see Now at the End of Things, A Plea for Magic in Pittsfield, MA. Happening on Thursday, September 24, 2026 at . Doors open at 7:00 PM.

There is an old rumor, dutifully repeated in the corridors of the sensible, that magic has left the building – and that it is now only to be found irretrievably tucked between the fonts and sentiments on the dog-eared pages of old browning books and Harry Potter-esque movies. The rumor says that somewhere between the printing press and the algorithm, between Weber’s iron cage and the fluorescent hum of the office park, the world was successfully drained of its agency and rendered fit for management. The rumor insists that enchantment is in short supply.

We are not so sure.

Consider a small etymological embarrassment: the words machine and magic are siblings. Both descend from the Proto-Indo-European root magh-, which named a powerful class of citizenry, yes, but also named help, and quietly fathered our words might and may. Which is to say that modernity’s most triumphant achievement (mechanization, industry, the Newtonian world-machine, the predictive apparatus, the atomic clock, and the sweet schadenfreude of rogue AI models upsetting their masters’ designs) shares a bloodline with the very thing it claims to have replaced. Disenchantment, it turns out, was never an exorcism. It was a sorting exercise: magh- was filed under “machine,” while its twin (magic) was demoted to the residual, the primitive, the childish, and the merely felt.

The remainder is not gone. The magic is beside the machine… still doing what magh- has always done: naming the radical incompleteness of bodies in their speculative relations with everything else.

On the evening of September 24, at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, two long-time accomplices of the more-than-human world – held in spiritual embrace and generative dialogue by philosopher and theologian Alex Forrester – will sit together to ask what it might mean to plead for magic now – at the precise moment the machine’s accommodation has begun to fail on its own terms. When the algorithm devours its own predictive coherence. When the wellness industry metabolizes enchantment into its newest product line. When even the administrators of disenchantment find themselves strangely unmoored.

What might it mean to invoke magic in a politically airless time, when the unyielding gestures of the ceaselessly pragmatic are presented as the only serious response to fascism, to genocide, and to the slow implosion of civilizational trust? What is the plea for, in such a moment? And to whom is it addressed?

This is not a defense of magic against its detractors, nor an anthropological tour of its varieties. It is something more wayward: an inquiry into whether the crack in the machine might be a door.

Come through it with us.

Thursday, September 24 · Doors at 6:30 PM · Event at 7:00 PM 
Saint James Place, 352 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 
Sliding-scale tickets – because thresholds should not be tollbooths.

Báyò Akómoláfé is W.E.B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, Distinguished Professor, and author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and Selah: A Bayo Akomolafe Reader. He is a philosopher, psychologist, and public intellectual whose work convenes at the crossroads of Yoruba cosmologies, posthumanist thought, and the politics of the impossible.

David Abram is a cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, and the author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal – books that have taught a generation that perception itself is participation, and that the sensuous world was never inert matter awaiting our instrumental attentions.

Alex Forrester chairs the Board of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, and is the co-founder and Chief Impact Officer of Rising Tide Capital – a nationally recognized nonprofit working at the intersection of inclusive economics, social justice, and entrepreneurship, whose grassroots model now supports over a thousand entrepreneurs each year across multiple cities and languages. A theologian by training and temperament, he serves as Public Theologian in Residence at First Presbyterian Church of Hudson and sits on the Board of the Justice Climate Fund. He and Báyò Akómoláfé are writing a book together.

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