Tag: localism

If we don’t experience full, unqualified “concrete, historical community,” then we won’t experience full, unqualified “genuine deliberation.”

America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and Northern Michigan is a central location in that history.

Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces.

Knowing your family’s past fugitives and pretty boys is the kind of localism anyone can aspire toward and practice.

Kennard himself, though worrying about his legacy during his last illness, seemed remarkably free of bitterness. Concerning a prison guard who had abused him, he thought that the abuse had harmed the guard more than himself.

That’s the great cultural task now: to relearn this old language, to keep it from dying out, to nurture it and refine and expand it, to develop new idioms and accents. Holston’s book is part of that project.

“By their fruits you will recognize them,” Jesus tells his disciples. If what appears is bad or worthless, you’ll have been made aware of what was there all along, incipient. You can tear up the weed and try again. But when something good appears, something truly good, you’ll be glad you let it grow.

Walk boldly. Whistle not, but do keep walking. Keep walking right on by it and let the dead bury the dead.

The Empire did not fall the day Front Porch Republic rose. But in 15 years FPR has done much more than simply add weight to the human scale. It has revivified the most humane and practical traditions in American social, cultural, economic, and political life and thought.

Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the “right side of history” are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence on the corporations that have long damaged ecosystem and human health.