Local Culture

here are many such images, as many images as there are places where good folk deep in this life perform the communal rites of place. Several of them are collected here in this issue of Local Culture, the first and I hope not the last devoted to food and drink.

Think not, then, of the ubiquitous screens and hideous architecture and suburban metastasis and microwave dinners. Think rather of Eric Voegelin’s famous quip—Voegelin, who said that “no one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.”

Jason Peters contrasts the traditional telos of education, what John Newman called "a great but ordinary end" with the current emphasis on utility and constant social change.

Is only the life of the busy and bustling place, the place of mergers and acquisitions, worthy of story and song and canvas?

What about Lasch’s analysis of limits? I have in mind two contemporary cultural developments, the rise of technocracy and our extreme aversion to risk, that seem to challenge certain aspects of Lasch’s thinking.

Over and against manifest follies that characterize American life in the first quarter of the twenty-first century there stands the wide-ranging work, keen and voluminous, of the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch.

Although the basic principle of widely distributed property may be known and competently grasped—it is a tune that in America had been played in a Jeffersonian key, after all—it is perhaps less firmly grasped that, on Belloc’s account, what capitalism had killed among men was in fact a Distributist society.

And so in 2019, at the tenth annual FPR conference marking FPR’s tin anniversary, we are pleased to bring out the first issue of Local Culture: A Journal of the Front Porch Republic.