Comments on: An FPR Symposium: Shop Class as Soul Craft, by Matthew Crawford

By: Contemporary Furniture

Contemporary Furniture — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:33:00 +0000

I do agree with this!

By: Localist Principles, Populist Words | Front Porch Republic

Localist Principles, Populist Words | Front Porch Republic — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:53:32 +0000

[...] mixed reaction to Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft–which, of course, we spent a whole week talking about here–Tim and I got into a bit of an exchange, during which he sharpened his [...]

By: for all you readers out there « the life and times of grant, sara, jasper and roxy

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:20:08 +0000

[...] 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment Shop Class as Soulcraft is generating lots of talk, as it should. It is one of those books that I keep thinking about long after I finished [...]

By: Typical Whitey

Typical Whitey — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 03:06:33 +0000

The ancient Jews taught that one should be able to use his hands and his mind. Our society has drifted away from respecting those who can fix things and glorifying those who work in a virtual world of finance. I found woodshop in grade school – yes, grade school – to be the greatest of classes.

By: Shop Class as Soulcraft « Tugging on the String

Shop Class as Soulcraft « Tugging on the String — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:27:45 +0000

[...] up on some items in my Google reader that I wanted to take a look at. Looks like last week the Front Porch Republic did a big thing on Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which I mentioned here in [...]

By: The Doughty Traveler » Blog Archive » A Defensive Defense of Autism

The Doughty Traveler » Blog Archive » A Defensive Defense of Autism — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:25:38 +0000

[...] a DIY tag is attached to interesting projects that would help me improve from hopeless handyman to soul crafter (to use Matt Crawford’s lingo). I budget an hour or two over the weekend to try my hand at [...]

By: shop class as soul craft « wonder and the wooden post

shop class as soul craft « wonder and the wooden post — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:18:43 +0000

[...] the post, Carter also refers to a week-long symposium about the book on the Front Porch Republic blog. You can read a variety of perspectives there. You’ll find lots of other [...]

By: John Willson

John Willson — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:49:56 +0000

Goodness gracious, as my grandmother used to say. That this discussion could come up in my lifetime shows how quickly we have slid downhill. Shop classes were a joke in my school years; we already knew how to do all that stuff. I never mastered carburetors, but all my friends could take a tractor, truck or car apart and put it back together by the age of fourteen. We all learned crafts. I remember Bill Buckley writing somewhere that his father insisted that each of his ten children learn to type and to play a musical instrument. Among the upper classes, the economy was already a mystical thing.
The order of Creation, at its most basic, requires us to grow things, make things, and fix things. Jesus spent many years making things before his ministry. There is no better model. For about 48 years now (1961 and the cult of the Kennedys is a pretty good dot spot) we in this declining country have been growing, making, and fixing less and less. And as we have put the teaching of such matters into public educational institutions, at whatever level, it gets only worse.
All of my students can text message; not one can grow a tomato.

By: First Thoughts — A First Things Blog

First Thoughts — A First Things Blog — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:35:08 +0000

[...] laborers and the word workers is almost insurmountable. For example, my favorite localists over at Front Porch Republic have dedicated an entire week(!) to Crawford’s book. Yet their discussions are not likely to [...]

By: Casey Khan

Casey Khan — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:59:12 +0000

I always like watching American Chopper. Imagine how pathetic I am, it’s enjoyable to watch other people make neat stuff while I waste away as a Weberian technocrat.

By: Beowulf

Beowulf — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:47:04 +0000

(cross comment in Rod Dreher’s blog regarding his post about a Papal thanks to carpenters)

I wonder what P. Deneen, who is both a Catholic and praises Ancient Greece, thinks about this statement by the Pope:

“In the Greek world, intellectual work alone was considered worthy of a free man. Manual work was left to slaves.

The biblical religion is quite different…”

I believe that what his majesty the Pope calls “Greek world” was coined by several city-states and had different views regarding “labour and trade”:

- in Sparta, all work was despised and no citizen was allowed to engage in it; this was the result of they military situation and control of population that outnumbered the citizens
- in Athens, they were strongly attached to the idea of democracy and freedom, so that farmers and mechanics were permitted citizen status and voting rights

Pericles declared during his famous “Funeral Oration”, that “our ordinary citizens, thought occupied with the pursuits of industry are still fair judges of public matters” (Thucydides 1934, 2:38)

Source is “The Concept of Work” by Herbert Applebaum, available in Google Books.

By: Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:24:10 +0000

The good news is that our industrial model is headed toward a reuniting of head and hands. The Sloan model of mass production industry will probably be replaced by the kind of networked production that prevails in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region: integrating power machinery into craft production, using general-purpose machines to switch frequently between small batches of different products. And as Johann Soderberg pointed out, the computer is the ultimate artisan’s tool–a general-purpose machine controlled by a flexible, skilled operator and adaptable to a wide variety of purposes. And that artisan’s tool is well on the way toward destroying the corporate dinosaurs of the old proprietary content industries–music, software, publishing, etc.