consumerism 32
Black Friday, Affluenza, and the Election
Instead of appreciating the local and the staggering beauty of our God-given world, as FPR suggests we do, the good life requires million-dollar jaunts into outer space.
Rendering Me into We: A Review of The Crisis of Narration
Disagreements aside, however, Byung-Chul's argument remains a valuable one: the cultures of consumption that rule the modern world are death to the cultures of community that give life meaning.
Reject the Consumer: Imagining A New Identity Politics
Freeing ourselves from the corrosive Consumer identity isn’t an individual task, but a call for system change rings hollow if we are afraid of personal change. How can we imagine…
Back to the Bottom-Line (Apocalyptically and Practically Speaking) at the Land Institute
Wendell Berry has written endlessly about the goodness of local work; if, for Berry, the goodness of such work is connected to agrarian virtue, while for Jackson it is connected…
Pasolini’s Lutheran Letters and Our Times
Reading the Lutheran Letters today, I cannot help but think about woke capitalism. The fundamental economic and cultural and human issues are obscured by clashes regarding discourse and slight gestures.
Finding Joy in Intentional Community
Intentional community stands as a powerful rebuke to the modern pursuit of the good life: it is not by restlessly seeking to improve our circumstances, but by committing ourselves to…
Weird Christianity’s Aesthetic and the Tyranny of Values
So long as old Christianity is treated as an aesthetic or an alternative lifestyle or a set of values contending against alienated modernity, it will never be anything more than…
The Consumer: Time to Wake the Sleeping Giant
In my first essay here at Front Porch Republic, I wrote about the idea that creation-friendly agriculture is not about going back to old fashioned ways, but is actually quite…
Justice, Sovereignty, and the Throwaway Culture: Reading Charles Camosy
We live in a time of political disruption. In the United States and around the developed world we are seeing nationalist and populist agitation against the established liberal order. While…
The Promise of the Green New Deal
For all its current weaknesses, the GND is an effort to “solve for pattern” as Wendell Berry recommends.
Nonsense on Stilts? Dandyism? Okay.
If I were God, I’d keep other company.
The Banks we Deserve, the Economy we can Sustain
If you didn't catch this panel put on by Marketplace and BBC, it's pretty exciting. It takes the expert panel only about 10 minutes (2:00 to 12:40) to get to…
New Symposium on Distributism
Porch readers will be interested in the new online symposium on distributism that is now on ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and 'Things Divine.' This includes…
Thoughts on the British Riots
They do not smash shop windows to get their hands on plasma televisions, because their parents' wealth makes such toys readily available to them, but they really have no greater…
Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising: Ten Years Down the Road
Springsteen’s music does indeed return to the things that are most important in an hour of crisis. But contrary to popular impressions, these things turn out to have very little…
Our Special Today is Spleen
Ah, you know what? Screw it. Give me the hairshirts wherever they are.
Perils of the Stationary State
When economic growth finally levels off, what kind of world comes after? Shall we be unchained from the mad rush for money of the last century? Or will other but…
The Old College Try
Claremont, CA. The New York Times has joined a host of other publications asking the question: Is college worth it? And again, just like every time I read an article…
The Other Side of China, and What It Might Say When It Speaks
As the heat of late summer subsides here in Nanjing and our university settles into the new semester, many look forward to the annual “Golden Week” holiday in early October. …
Thrifty Americans Threaten Recovery
Kearneysville, WV. Things are looking up. According to the “experts” the global economy appears to be stabilizing. For what it's worth, the use of phrases like “economic Armageddon” are not…
Tocqueville on the Shores of Titicaca
Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time in the countryside. He observed that…
“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…
Cultivating Gratitude
Blairsville, GA. Recently I was with a friend whose oldest son, having just completed his junior year, is home from college. The young man has not yet found a summer…
Brave New World Reconsidered: A Tale of Two Gnosticisms
Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning – an imaginative rendering of our…