Articles 355
Benedict on Business: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Irving, Texas. Since its beginnings with Aristotle and Plato, the study of economics has always been regarded as a branch of philosophy, a colony of politics and ethics. But all…
“On the Grid”: When Electricity (and Other Things) Came to the Countryside
“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house. I got up from the wooden bench on which…
The Strange Lament of a Bohemian Conservative
“Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.” --Nietzsche Several…
Lookin’ Out My Back Door; Or Sounds From Boo Radley’s Porch
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---Caleb has proposed this beautiful rendition of “Our Town” by Iris DeMent as the Front Porch theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FikZwgj89HI (Anyone not moved by it is either dead or,…
When Lawyers Catch the French Disease
Devon, PA. No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped its potencies as they have actually…
What’s in a Name?
Holland, MI. I live in the only part of the country where the “V” section is the largest part of the phone book. When your landscape contains burgs with names…
The Red Tories and the Civic State
Phillip Blond Irving, TX. It has been sometime since I have called myself a “conservative.” It is not that any of my opinions have changed, but rather that conservatism forgot…
Family Matters
Kearneysville, WV. The debate, such as it is, between liberals and conservatives frequently centers on issues pertaining to that oldest of institutions, the family. On the one hand, there are…
Buddhist Economics: The Eight-Fold Path
Cold Spring, N.Y. In order to get people thinking rightly about economists, Fritz Schumacher used to tell the story of an architect, a priest, and an economist talking about which…
On Feeling “Forgotten”: Agrarian Aspirations in the Andes
“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” The villagers of Pomatambo, Ayacucho, Peru, did not coin the phrase, though it has captured their lives with eerie precision…
Nomen est Omen
Henry County, Kentucky. If your name is your fate, what does the future hold for Rylynn Shikaela Novaleigh? There she is in the paper, age one, wrapped in the…
“Servile World: How ‘The Big Business Government,’ ‘The Loathsome Thing Called Social Service,’ and Other Distrubutist Nightmares All Came True
In response to my posting on "'A Distributist View of the Global Economic Crisis': A Report," several people asked for more specifics regarding the popssible shape of a contemporary Distributist…
Cleanup in Pew 16
I have just returned from two weeks in England, were I was more or less out of touch with the internet. The occasion was a conference at the University of…
Hospitality and the Hopis: Piki
Cincinnati, OH. My oldest son manages a pool for the city recreation department while he’s home from college. It’s a summer job that should be well-suited for him: part schmooze,…
If Cooking Slowly and Growing Organically are In, Why Is Rural Ministry Out?
Any self-respecting Christian should come down a few rungs on his ladder of self-esteem after reading Wendell Berry on the all-too-common view of organized churches toward farms, farmers, and rural…
Turn On, Tune In, Watch TV
Claremont, CA. I am not ashamed to admit it: I like television. I think television is important. I think television is worth watching. Oh, I know all the objections.…
Of Games, Gadgets, and God
Coeur d'Alene, ID. One evening our family and two cousins were playing Uno. It’s a simple game requiring nothing more than a deck of Uno cards. We’ve played this game…
An FPR Symposium: Shop Class as Soul Craft, by Matthew Crawford
During the course of this entire week, FPR will devote its main pages to a symposium on the recent book Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford. The book…
Lessons from a Motorcycle Mechanic
Wichita, KS [Cross-posted at In Medias Res] 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 of the world who took it…
The Tacit Dimension of Shop Class
Kearneysville, WV. Whenever I pick up a book dealing with ways of knowing, I invariably flip to the index to see if the author refers to the work of Michael…
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 New Yorker, it is attracting attention…
The Whole Hog
Alexandria, VA They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can sometimes tell how the book’s designers wanted the book to be judged at first glance.…
Recognition and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Matt Crawford is a good friend of mine, and I read and commented on early drafts of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and so I don’t have much in the way…