Tag: localism

We always have been an unruly people, from the very beginning. It is a fact that gives us hope that our current disagreements and fights are not signs of our democracy’s weakness but its enduring strength.

As I learn how to be a sticker, I hope to continually see the beauty of Battle Creek, no matter its faults. I want to persist in finding the good in my city, to be motivated by affection and love for it, and to be faithful to the place God’s called me to.

I am not now lamenting my station, which is a kind of existential loneliness, though at times I do. I’m putting it down in writing because I know for certain that in this loneliness I’m far from alone.

To know a particular hometown, with its triumphs and tragedies, its gains and losses, its names and namesakes, its heroes and eccentrics, its myths and peculiarities, its landmarks and symbols, its deliberations and disputes, is to know a part of America and to deepen one’s commitment to it.

J. R. R. Tolkien imagined a society characterized by people who care for one another and their natural spaces, cultivating human and ecological flourishing in their communities.

So leave if you must, but perhaps not today. Stop and consider all the ways you can stay.

Undergirding Leacock's work was not a desire to restore a previous version of Canada, but to preserve the gifts God had given: the best traditions of the past, the communities in which we live, the surrounding creation, and the dignity of man.

He has never chased the new or tried to be avant-garde. Even in the physical act of writing, he has famously resisted the “advantages” of a personal computer and has opted instead to continue using the older technologies of pencil and paper. Though How It Went is technically a new book from Berry, the stories are pleasingly familiar.

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 a world beyond the Consumer if we can’t talk about our experiences of consuming and acknowledge that down-powering will not be easy?

They know their neighbors; they know their village; they know their land. They have their own vernacular that everyone who lives there understands because their father and mother taught them, just like they were taught by their fathers and mothers. The book is a survey of one man’s quest to bring the lives of his ancestors into the light. It is a description of what it is to belong somewhere.