work 39
Reviewing Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Taking up a craft—such as knitting, woodworking, or gardening—restores focal practices, re-connects us with the physical world, and provides the satisfaction of self-reliance. These benefits are good news to a…
Leisure Starts at Home
If leisure is the basis of culture, it must first be the basis of home life. So I argue over at Ethika Politika: Leisure as the Basis of Home Life
Fences, Vines, Bees, and Huge Chickens
Hidden Springs Lane. We’re building fence this summer. I purchased 150 eight foot posts and we’ve been slowly planting them. We’re putting a paddock in the front and a larger…
Chicken Palace and Too Many Roosters
Hidden Springs Lane. This spring we got chickens. In preparation for the arrival of the chicks, a coop needed to be built. Being the frugal sort (some mistake that virtue…
Where Will You Die?
Hidden Spring Lane. “I plan on dying here.” The words came quite unbidden and surprised me. We were in the process of building a house on a few acres in…
Democracy as Spectacle: The Messianic Compulsions of our Republic
Americans do not need a Messiah because this nation is not Heaven on Earth.
Hot Tub Economics
The ideology of free trade and managed society continues to destroy the prospects of a prosperous American in the Twenty-First Century. Let us dig down and return to the one…
Wasting Time
A friend of mine with a penchant for self-effacement said “There’s just not enough time to get the work done and procrastinate.” It is not that he only works well…
The Economic Stork
The answers we get are dictated by the questions we ask, but there was one question which always grated on my wife's nerves, no matter who frequently she was asked.…
Jacques Maritain on Art and Work
Devon, PA. In the early pages of Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism, he provides a philosophy of art that restores "art," in the sense of the fine arts, to its…
A Lost Job and a New Life
Kearneysville, WV. At 10:00pm on New Year’s Eve 2008, just as his shift was ending, Patrick McCarron was asked to turn in his badge and keys and to clean out…
The Speech of Work and the Work of Speech
Devon, PA. Outside of certain, very particular, Christian circles, one seldom hears much about man's fallen nature anymore; and yet, as G.K. Chesterton once observed, original sin may be the…
Home-Making for Home-Coming
RINGOES, NJ. You’ve seen the commercials.A middle-aged couple drops their son off at college. As they drive away, nest now empty, they feign sorrow. Quickly, though, their mournful countenances are…