Front Porch Republic » Short

Wendell Berry to Deliver 2012 Jefferson Lecture

Sydney Thomas — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:35:51 +0000

Purcellville, VA…. Our readers will be delighted to know that Mr. Wendell Berry has been named the 41st Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities. The 2012 Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, will honor Mr. Berry’s

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Van Gogh’s Nature Paintings in Philadelphia

Peter Daniel Haworth — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:17:07 +0000

FPR readers in Philadelphia should visit their new exhibit featuring several unusual Vincet Van Gogh nature paintings. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times:

“It examines van Gogh’s relationship to nature at its most intimate, cutting a narrow path through his achievement, with 45 often small, sometimes seemingly tossed-off paintings… The show focuses on van Gogh’s tendency to depict nature in close-up, either in teeming detail or with a highly compressed sense of space, sometimes achieved by high horizon lines and thick brushwork that flatten the image and appear to push the surface of the picture close to the viewer. It includes a cache of unfamiliar works from abroad, some of which are being exhibited in this country for the first time anyone can remember.”

I wish that I could view these. Please enjoy!

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Protest and Tradition

Jeffrey Polet — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:03:57 +0000

David Brooks editorializes about the penchant of young people to engage in spasmodic protests without coherent or meaningful alternatives; or, for that matter, knowing exactly what they’re protesting against.

One of the most difficult things to teach young people is intellectual humility, one which is neither diffidence nor self-assurance. Too often they believe they are the first persons to come up with a particular insight, or the first generation to find social institutions failing. They possess simultaneously high levels of narcissistic confidence in the rightness of their beliefs while also being convicted there is no way to reconcile contrary beliefs without resorting to a non-judgmental (oh horrid buzzword) tolerance. I’ll often remind my students that, while they have been seriously let down by their social institutions, there is nothing unique about their situation. Take a look at Glaucon and Adeimantus, for example. The adage applies: One ought to be confident in the truth and skeptical about oneself, and not the other way around.

Brooks’ article, however, is a reminder that our educational institutions, which ought to know better, are failing even worse, precisely because they make no effort to equip students with the right sorts of grounding for their ideas and impulses. Instead, students are encouraged to believe they have a right to faulty opinions and reasoning, that no one ought to challenge them, and that they’ll agree not to challenge anyone else. It makes for a very uninteresting and unfruitful education, one that has become largely the norm.

The schools best positioned are those that operate self-consciously and unapologetically from within a tradition, which they seek to deepen and broaden through creative engagement with young people.

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A Day Late, and a Mint Julep Short

Darryl Hart — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:59:07 +0000

I had previously thought that Ground Hog Day was strictly a holiday for the residents of the virtuous commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Turns out that the day is celebrated far and wide by localists of all kinds, even Canadians. But as…

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Dark Places and Dappled Things

James Matthew Wilson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:01:48 +0000

Devon, PA.… The Catholic magazine of arts and letters, Dappled Things, is no stranger to the writers of FPR, having published a debate on the free market between John Médaille and Robert T. Miller, last spring. The most recent issue

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What is a Conservative?

Jeffrey Polet — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:55:33 +0000

There have been accusations on our site that we are liberal, conservative, socialist, and so forth; as well as accusations that we are confused about our identity. Conor Friedersdorf over at The Atlantic has provided a list of 21 different things people might mean when they identify themselves as conservative. If nothing else, it’s a conversation starter. I should draw special attention to number 9 on his list: “An embrace of localism, community and family ties, human scale, and a responsibility to the future.” And, according to his judgment, only Ron Paul has a concern with this.

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Monsanto vs. Family Farmers

Mark T. Mitchell — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:37:16 +0000

Today in New York City the oral arguments will be heard. You can read more here and here.

On January 31, family farmers will take part in the first phase of a court case filed to protect farmers from genetic trespass by Monsanto’s GMO seed, which contaminates organic and non-GMO farmer’s crops and opens them up to abusive lawsuits. In the past two decades, Monsanto’s seed monopoly has grown so powerful that they control the genetics of nearly 90% of five major commodity crops including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola and sugar beets.

In many cases farmers are forced to stop growing certain crops to avoid genetic contamination and potential lawsuits. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto admits to filing 144 lawsuits against America’s family farmers, while settling another 700 out of court for undisclosed amounts. Due to these aggressive lawsuits, Monsanto has created an atmosphere of fear in rural America and driven dozens of farmers into bankruptcy.

h/t Stewart Lundy

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On Wisconsin

Bill Kauffman — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:29:54 +0000

My friend Paul Buhle, the great historian of the American left, has edited, with his wife Mari Jo Buhle, It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest (http://www.versobooks.com/books/1076-it-started-in-wisconsin), just out from Verso. The best pieces in this collection of eighteen essays on the recent uprising in Wisconsin place the spirited pro-union and anti-Governor Walker rallies in the context of Wisconsin’s democratic populist history: in other words, as rooted expressions of a still vital La Follette tradition. Paul Buhle—who coauthored an outstanding biography of the Iowa patriot and New Left historian William Appleman Williams—notes that a “fresh, fascinating” aspect of the Wisconsin movement was its “localist or regionalist” character. “Reference to the distinctive features of Wisconsin pop culture,” he writes, “situated the resistance to Walker within the vernacular of Midwestern democracy.” Never underestimate the iconography of brats and cheddar and the Green Bay Packers.

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Ciceronian Society Meeting at UVA: Call for Papers

Peter Daniel Haworth — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:12:49 +0000

CALL FOR PAPERS: CICERONIAN SOCIETY

2012 ANNUAL MEETING AT UVA

The Ciceronian Society will be holding its annual meeting at the University of Virginia, March 29-31, 2012. This will be an academic conference in which panelists can present on a variety of topics related to our core-themes Tradition, Place, and ‘Things Divine.’ A more elaborate description of these core-themes and their relation to the humanities is provided on our website. FPR writer participation currently includes John Medaille, Jeff Taylor, Jerry Salyer, Peter Haworth, and (probably) James Matthew Wilson. Contact peterhaworth@theciceroniansociety.com if you are interested in presenting or attending.

Possible panel themes include the following:

The Relationship of Modern Thought to Tradition and the Divine.
Greek and Roman Thought.
Place, ‘Things Divine,’ and Tradition in Medieval Thought
Human Scale, Decentralism, and Federalism
American Thought/Experience and Tradition and Place
Literature, Localism, History, and the Divine.
Agrarianism, Localism, and Economics
Social-Political Theology

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Saul Alinsky, Localist

Russell Arben Fox — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:05:43 +0000

Well no, not exactly. But as anyone who has ACTUALLY READ ALINSKY KNOWS–in contrast to those who simply parrot his name as part of rather stretched smear of anyone they which to paint as dangerous un-American radical–Alinsky was primarily about trying to create democratic, Jeffersonian responses to the pathologies of the big-business, big-government, highly undemocratic postwar liberal American consensus. Michael Kazin lays out the facts:

On the night of his triumph in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich boldly announced: “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.”….[T]his was classic demagoguery: connect a name that, at least to a crowd of Southern Republicans, sounds rather alien—and certainly not Christian—with a president whom many conservatives already suspect of being an un-American, anti-religious socialist….

[In fact, while] Saul Alinsky often called himself a radical….his career as a community organizer had thoroughly traditional foundations in grassroots democracy and institutional religion. Indeed, it was built with the active support and resources of key figures in the Roman Catholic Church….

In the late 1930s, Alinsky launched his first project in the Back of the Yards, a multi-ethnic, working-class, mostly Catholic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Bernard J. Sheil, the city’s auxiliary bishop, championed the new Back of the Yards Council and encouraged local priests and leading parishioners to take part. Sheil, founder of the Catholic Youth Organization, helped set up Alinsky’s network of local organizers—the non-profit Industrial Areas Foundation—and convinced financier Marshall Field III to bankroll it.

During the 1940s and early 1950s, Alinsky worked closely with another influential priest, Monsignor John O’Grady, director of the National Conference of Catholic Charities. O’Grady liked Alinsky’s focus on mobilizing local people to help themselves and introduced the “radical” to a parish priest who was working with young Puerto Ricans in a poor neighborhood near the University of Chicago.

The Monsignor and the Jewish troublemaker got along so well that Alinsky began to work with O’Grady on the older man’s biography. The book was not completed, but the outline made clear that the two shared a strong critique of modern liberalism that would be congenial to many conservatives today: “…the New Deal was important, it was good…yet it carried an opposite side to the shield, in terms of a gravitation of power and the establishment of enormous bureaucracies which were evil.” Americans should turn, instead, wrote Alinsky, “to grass roots organization and decentralization.”

As Alinsky knew well, O’Grady’s thinking drew from the Catholic principle of “subsidiarity,” which the Church began to develop in the late 19th century as an alternative to social change directed by powerful nation-states. Subsidiarity holds that social problems should first be handled by the smallest, most local authority in existence. As Pope Pius XI wrote in a 1931 encyclical: “It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry.”….

Contrary to Gingrich’s ignorant slur, [Alinsky] frequently quoted Jefferson and Madison and had contempt for young leftists in the 1960s who disdained the American flag. “The responsible organizer would have known,” he wrote in 1971, “that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America’s hopes and aspirations.”….

In 1969, Saul Alinsky received the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award, given annually by a coalition of Catholic groups in the Midwest to commemorate an encyclical about human rights and alternatives to war written by Pope John XXIII. Most honorees have been ardent reformers of one faith or another: Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, Cesar Chavez, Daniel Berrigan, and Jim Wallis are on the list—as is Lech Walesa.

Newt Gingrich would, no doubt, point to some of those names as proof of how the Left can seduce innocent devotees of his new-found faith. But he might find it difficult to criticize the woman who received the award seven years after Saul Alinsky: a community organizer from Calcutta named Mother Teresa.

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Seen Your Video

Bill Kauffman — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:20:53 +0000

This is the last audience to which I should announce such a thing but after fumbling an editing gig or two because I lacked a one-stop site containing my bio, clips, etc., I have agreed to—aw, to hell with the passive voice, I cooperated in–the creation of http://billkauffman.net. Has lots of my fugitive articles/essays, flattering quotes, even a noir-ish photo by the innovative and indefatigable journalist Howard Owens, who put the site together. But no, I ain’t gonna blog or clog or, except on rare occasions, flog.

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No, It’s Not from The Onion

Jason Peters — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:17:45 +0000

The Right may be beyond redemption, but it isn’t above parody.

Except this isn’t parody. A psychiatrist and member of the Faux News “Medical A-Team” explains why Newt’s marital woes could mean he’d make a good president.

h/t: RG

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Larger Deficits, Anyone?

Jason Peters — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:45:35 +0000

Two days ago The New York Times ran a piece on tax plans coming from the GOP.

Turns out Mitt Romney is the most fiscally responsible aspirant among the pachyderms. His tax proposals will increase the deficit by only $600 billion. Newt Gingrich, the lately lamented Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum appear to be a tiny bit more reckless: increases of $1.3 trillion, $1.0 trillion, and $1.3 trillion, respectively.

The article also points out—and this may come as a bit of a surprise—that those who stand to benefit most from the family-values, good-money-management crowd are the rich.

Tsk, tsk. Such bias in the media. Maybe a little coercion is in order.

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2012 Climacus Conference: February 24th & 25th, Louisville KY

Jerry Salyer — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:57:35 +0000

Once again St. Michael Orthodox Church here in Louisville will be hosting the annual Climacus Conference, with this year’s event focusing on the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual legacy of Byzantium. Scheduled speakers include University of Kentucky Philosophy Chair David Bradshaw, Professor Kyriacos C. Markides from the University of Maine, and American Conservative editor Dr. Daniel Larison. In addition to discussions of the Byzantine order there will be a screening of Russian film genius Andrei Tarkovsky’s surreal science-fiction classic Stalker, with Bobby Maddex of Salvo magazine on hand to offer some thoughts on the movie.

Those desiring additional details may consult the Climacus Conference website, or call conference director David Wright at (502) 296-2095.

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Super Cuts

Bill Kauffman — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:39:21 +0000

Brian (no relation to Lefty) Frizzell, Brooklyn’s archivist of Americana, sends a link to Matt Morris’s Pickin’ & Trimmin’ http://vimeo.com/31066145, a lovely documentary short film about a barbershop in Drexel, North Carolina, in which banjos and mandolins and clippers and shears make the joyful noise of community.

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Hope for Peace and Quiet

Jeffrey Polet — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:36:32 +0000

This piece from the Sunday Times serves as a reminder that the claims made for technology, progress, and modern conveniences are too overblown, and that human beings have fundamental longings and needs that can’t be satisfied by texting and TV. When I reflect on the fact that this culture we have is in many ways unsustainable, it is typically more an expression of hope than despair. Humans tend to return to that which is genuinely human. Plus there’s just some good advice here.

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