Joshua Pauling

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https://sites.google.com/site/daddysworkshopofthecarolinas/
Joshua Pauling taught high school history for thirteen years and is now a classical educator. He also runs his own business building fine furniture and restoring vintage machinery. He studied at Messiah College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Winthrop University, and has written for Areo, FORMA, Front Porch Republic, Mere Orthodoxy, Modern Reformation, Public Discourse, Quillette, Salvo, The Imaginative Conservative, and Touchstone. He is head elder at All Saints Lutheran Church (LCMS), while he and his wife Kristi have two children who are being classically homeschooled.

Recent Essays

Reality’s Bite: Responding to the Reality Privilege Argument

Joshua Pauling -
Are those who question transhumanist progress or Metaverse predictions just knee-jerk Luddites whose visceral reactions are worthy of only a patronizing pat on the head for not seeing their own privilege? As might be expected of a Porcher, I don’t think so. Instead, those who are hesitant about digitality are remembering what it means to be embodied human beings and acknowledging the gravitas of reality’s bite - even when reality bites.

Your Brains are in Your Hands: Doug Stowe on Forming Mind, Hand, and Culture

Joshua Pauling -
Stowe’s book is both timeless and timely. Our physical embodiment as human creatures is always essential, but it is especially so amid increasing digitality. The last two years of pandemic-related economic fluctuations and supply-chain instabilities have further driven home the importance of developing manual competence on a local and familial level, which adds to the book’s importance.

What are Hands For? Technology, Hands, and the Wounds of God

Joshua Pauling -
Christ touches. With his hands he heals the sick, opens mouths, unstops ears, blesses the children, and raises the dead. And ultimately it is the marks in Christ’s hands that fully and definitively reveal his true identity in his post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas. Christ himself, the enfleshed God, invites Thomas to put his hand into the hands that made the world and saved the world.

The Classroom as Sanctified Space: Human Formation away from the Screen

Joshua Pauling -
For the sake of human formation and flourishing, it is essential to carve out sanctified spaces of peace and refuge away from the mesmerizing pull of screens.

When Innovation Runs Out: The Vindication of Maintenance

Joshua Pauling -
The Innovation Delusion goes a long way toward demystifying and destigmatizing the ordinary yet essential work of maintenance.

Jacques Barzun’s 1937 Critique of Race-Thinking

Joshua Pauling -
On the heels of a consequential election, and the accompanying commentary demonstrating the continued pervasiveness of race-thinking, Barzun’s message of honoring each human individual’s value while recognizing our shared common humanity is a timely and timeless message.

Cultivating the Skills that Freedom Requires in Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

Joshua Pauling -
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 Making

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

Teddy Roosevelt’s Prophetic Speech: The Perpetual Relevance of “The Man in the Arena”

Joshua Pauling -
Roosevelt delivered an oration he entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” but which the world would soon come to call “The Man in the Arena.” Every fresh reading of the speech brings something new into bold relief.

Coming Home, COVID-19 Style: A Moment to Reconsider the Natural Family

Joshua Pauling -
The lengthy drift from family to individual as the primary social unit carries an alluring promise of autonomy and individualism which sounds so good, so freeing, but it comes up lacking in times of crisis.

The Super Bowl Spectacle Sends Mixed Messages about Women

Joshua Pauling -
What was on display in the halftime show was not a celebration of sexuality or empowerment for women. It was an elevation of instinct.

Recapturing the Real: Physicality, Imitation, and Tradition in a Digital World

Joshua Pauling -
Our educational approach should include the validation of physicality, the imitation of the master, and the celebration of tradition.
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