Uncategorized 1144

68 apparently.  I had to laugh when I saw this.  I recognize many of them as my interlocutors from the old New Pantagruel days.  And if I learned anything, it…

Posted originally as a comment to Patrick Deneen's "Road Rage" (and re-posted here at his insistence): The State of Oregon Highway Comm. had a wonderful engineer named Conde McCullough who…

Here is an interview from The Guardian. Blond has the ear of David Cameron, calls himself a Red Tory, and is launching a new think tank in the fall. Do…

I'm still on my summer blogging hiatus, but this artifact was too good to pass up.  Seen at local post office this afternoon.

Michael Pollan doesn't know what he's talking about and neither do the millions of his soft-handed readers. So says a farmer here. One wonders, though, what Wendell Berry and Joel…

College graduates are certainly learning something - all that resume padding isn't worth a bucket of spit when all the imaginary jobs that kept people busy moving around notional financial…

Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason, is one of my favorite writers on matters cultural and political. His fugitive essays for No Depression, the magazine of American music, have just been collected…

If you're lucky enough to be near beautiful Allegany County, New York, over the weekend of August 7-9, drop by Alfred University to check out the New York Green Fest…

Here is Schumacher discussing Buddhist economics. He admits that he could have called it Christian economics, but then no one would have read it. H/T The Western Confucian.

Most media outlets have treated the financial crisis as a consequence of Wall Street Gone Wild. However, this New Yorker article suggests - I think rightly - that the world's…

As so often seems to be the case, the Monty Python troop somehow managed to make Matthew Crawford's point about the enduring value of working with your hands decades before…

Several years ago I (sarcastically) noted a hot trend in the DC Metropole - the outsourcing of many mundane tasks seen as superfluous and distracting from the busy lifestyles of…

Joe Carter weighs in at First Things with a set of challenging reservations about the relevance of Matt Crawford's arguments for a more general audience. He rightly notes that it's…

I must apologize to all our readers and my fellow contributors here for the intrusion of my cousin Cassie Pigeon in a recent post under my byline. I had my extended…

The following is not intended to upset our happily balanced ecumenical apple cart ... As a Scots-Presbyterian of old psalm singing austerity, I tend to enjoy observing the furor set off…

The folks at First Things have been kind enough to ignore my lame punning and respond to some of my criticisms, which has resulted in some helpful progress on examining…

Good Lord, blogging is bad for the soul.  That is a confession, not a violation of the Third Commandment, for those of you keeping track.  What am I doing in…

As Caleb has already noted here, Rusty Reno and Jody Bottum have been mixing it up over at First Things over issues of localism, a hot topic of late on…

Jody Bottum says the problem with localists is that they're all raving racists.  O goody, let's get down to brass tacks. It's bizzare how Bottom's problem with localism is traceable once again to…

Hey, JP opened the door.

I just deleted the following spam from our comment cache.  "We have just added your latest post 'Teenagers, Gratitude, and a Culture of Affluence' to our Directory of Car Insurance.  [blah…

Most of the debates within the "conservative" wing today are yawners.  They pit one brand of worn-out "conservatism" against another (often with the assistance of screeds on talk radio), with…

An interesting case of local activism. And bonus, hear me discuss the issue on the local KC talk show.

I neglected to comment on the Illich post when it was timely (funny how the internet compresses time and reduces us all to servants of what Berry called the "absolute…