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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.
December 10, 2024

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…
October 25, 2022

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…
August 12, 2019

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.
March 18, 2019

Nonsense on Stilts? Dandyism? Okay.

If I were God, I’d keep other company.
Jason Peters
March 15, 2017

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…
September 12, 2011

Our Special Today is Spleen

Ah, you know what? Screw it. Give me the hairshirts wherever they are.
Jason Peters
September 22, 2010

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…
March 1, 2010

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…
October 13, 2009

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. …
September 22, 2009

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…
Mark T. Mitchell
August 24, 2009

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…
August 10, 2009

“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…
July 31, 2009

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…
Mark T. Mitchell
June 15, 2009

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…