Tag: Matthew Crawford

Wayne Coyne and the Creative Benefits of Fry Cooking

By contrast, developing skill through direct contact with nature increases our confidence, efficacy, and even patience. Although fry cooks have a shorter learning curve than motorcycle mechanics or hockey players, all three experience the freedom of agency and causal influence on the outcome of their work.

Common Arts Education: A Review

In a world mediated through technology, the common arts bring us into daily encounters with a material world where we have not made the rules. They orient us to truths outside of ourselves and foster humility as we subject ourselves to realities beyond our control.

Grandmother’s Wisdom

When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting.

Cultivating the Skills that Freedom Requires in Matthew Crawford’s Why We...

Human driving requires unending mutual predictions and constant accommodations for each other. It is in such experiences that we end up with something meaningful for life in the physical world and life in community.

The Allure of Old Tools and Vintage Machinery: Memory, Meaning, and...

Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator.

Whose Nostalgia? Which Liberalism? Reflections on “Faith and Democracy in America”

Liberalism can be marked by the gospel and still be a political and cultural dead end. As Ivan Illich argued, corruptio optimi pessima.

An FPR Symposium: Shop Class as Soul Craft, by Matthew...

During the course of this entire week, FPR will devote its main pages to a symposium on the recent book Shop Class as Soul...

Lessons from a Motorcycle Mechanic

Wichita, KS Let's pause a moment and be grateful that the job market for political theorists is so bad. Because if it wasn't, Matthew Crawford,...

Dirty Hands, Clean Mind

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. As I read Matt Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, I thought often of Simone Weil, that young champion of the workers...

Shop Class and the Romantic Mode of Politics

It goes without saying that Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft is compelling.  Discussed on NPR, profiled in The New York Times and The...