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The ecomodernist approach of Regenesis relies on a mechanistic understanding of humanity. The presumption is that humans are merely fleshy machines that can adapt to flourish in any environment as long as their basic material needs are met. That doesn’t match with most people’s experience of life.

We were all, adults and children alike, doing things that really mattered to the whole free world, and we’d better get on with doing them, every day, all the time. Everyone came from somewhere else and was hustling on their way to somewhere more important. Perhaps we were, all of us, rootless.

But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t enter into the picture. A child’s life was not packaged up and dressed for ambition. That meant, too, that the fans did not take things too seriously.

What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but not without earning some dry humor along the way. Jeffrey excels at the hard task of publishing the culture of his upbringing, as well as some of the best of his private life, with both charity and clarity.

Do real things together. Celebrate. Take delight in the world—together. Don’t feel compelled to broadcast your views about the dangers of technology. Let your life speak, but be prepared to give an account of why you’re living the way you are.

By now, no one should be shocked when a conservative says something unkind about the free market. Still, those unfamiliar with any right-wing tradition...

Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts

One easy solution is the crockpot. Why? You can throw in some basic ingredients in the morning before work or school, and then when you get home in the evening, you have a hot meal waiting. Bonus: the house will smell really good when you walk in. What’s not to love?

For Banks, the glory of natality is not that it is a passage into the world for something or someone else, but that birth is a tool for our own self-creation, whether that be through materializing other people in our bodies or projecting our ideas and actions onto the world.

Vermont dumps almost all of its own garbage into Mount Casella, though it exports some to New Hampshire and New York. Its own consumption of goods–often including unhealthy processed foods, shipped huge distances–is culturally indistinguishable from the flow of garbage trucked out of the cities.