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Matthew Crawford 15

Wayne Coyne and the Creative Benefits of Fry Cooking

By contrast, developing skill through direct contact with nature increases our confidence, efficacy, and even patience. Although fry cooks have a shorter learning curve than motorcycle mechanics or hockey players,…
January 27, 2023

Common Arts Education: A Review

In a world mediated through technology, the common arts bring us into daily encounters with a material world where we have not made the rules. They orient us to truths…

Grandmother’s Wisdom

When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting.

Cultivating the Skills that Freedom Requires in Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

Human driving requires unending mutual predictions and constant accommodations for each other. It is in such experiences that we end up with something meaningful for life in the physical world…

The Allure of Old Tools and Vintage Machinery: Memory, Meaning, and Making

Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator.

Whose Nostalgia? Which Liberalism? Reflections on “Faith and Democracy in America”

Liberalism can be marked by the gospel and still be a political and cultural dead end. As Ivan Illich argued, corruptio optimi pessima.

An FPR Symposium: Shop Class as Soul Craft, by Matthew Crawford

During the course of this entire week, FPR will devote its main pages to a symposium on the recent book Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford. The book…
Patrick Deneen
July 17, 2009

Lessons from a Motorcycle Mechanic

Wichita, KS [Cross-posted at In Medias Res] Let's pause a moment and be grateful that the job market for political theorists is so bad. Because if it wasn't, Matthew Crawford,…
July 17, 2009

Dirty Hands, Clean Mind

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. As I read Matt Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, I thought often of Simone Weil, that young champion of the workers of the world who took it…

Shop Class and the Romantic Mode of Politics

It goes without saying that Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft is compelling.  Discussed on NPR, profiled in The New York Times and The New Yorker, it is attracting attention…
July 16, 2009

The Whole Hog

Alexandria, VA They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can sometimes tell how the book’s designers wanted the book to be judged at first glance.…

Recognition and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Matt Crawford is a good friend of mine, and I read and commented on early drafts of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and so I don’t have much in the way…

Working with Words

Our relationship was still in its early swoon when Nate came to pick me up from work one night. He was so obviously excited to see me that even my…

A Certified Deep Thinker

I don’t like machines. I find them dirty, confusing and, even worse, boring. I also don’t much enjoy working with my hands. I like reading books and telling people, in…

Gumbo as Soul Craft

When I read “Shop Class As Soulcraft,” I initially felt like a twerp. I’m the guy who was raised in the country by a father who tried to teach him…