Monasticism

Periodically I run across folks writing on the internet who aren’t too impressed with the idea of seeking a life that is more simple, separate, and deliberate, especially if it involves agrarianism. The most common criticism leveled against such thinking is that it represents “creeping monasticism,” a pietistic withdrawal from a world that we are [...]

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Readability tests

I found this online readability test via Dave Black’s weblog. Use it to estimate the readability of your weblog. For the three tests run, the first test says this weblog is written at an eleventh-grade level, roughly equivalent to the Wall Street Journal; the second test says it is at an eighth-grade level; and the [...]

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Hot dogging

Chris and I have spent a fair amount of time in music classes that involve group instruction. Inevitably there will be someone who is less interested in learning than in hot dogging, i.e. showing off for the class and especially the instructor. We always laugh about it; the instructor is always so much more accomplished [...]

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Agrarian puzzles

I was talking with a friend yesterday who asked me how much I thought Joel Salatin’s vision was driven by his Christian faith. I replied that I didn’t know, because much of what he advocates is plain common sense, easily embraced by the rankest of pagans. Even the stay-at-home and multigenerational aspects could be driven [...]

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Little Britches

Our current readaloud is Little Britches by Ralph Moody. We read it once before, a few years ago, and I think we’re enjoying this second reading even more. It is the first in a series of books in which Moody recounts his childhood and early days. In this book, eight-year-old Ralph moves with his family [...]

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Compost

We went through the three trailer loads of composted manure that the Ellises so kindly gave us and put it on half the garden ground that needed it (carrot and sweet potato areas didn’t need any). Jerome has been purchasing some high quality compost made from race horse manure that is delivered from Lexington, and [...]

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Coffee apologetic

Once I heard a radio preacher speculate that the history of man has rolled steadily downhill since Adam’s day, i.e. that Adam was as sophisticated as any man could be because everything he knew came straight from God, and that human history has been mostly a matter of forgetting what Adam knew. It’s a wacky [...]

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Hedge school

Chris and I left the house at 5:30am Saturday to drive to Nashville. Not because we had landed a big record contract, but because Franklin Sanders and the Tennessee League of the South was putting on a one-day hedge school on the topic of Southern Reconstruction, with Dr. Clyde Wilson as the teacher. About 60 [...]

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Unplugging

The story of how we became detached from mass media isn’t very interesting, because for the most part it wasn’t deliberate. Except for that one shining moment when we junked television after reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, I don’t think we ever decided to purge our lives of any other media. It just [...]

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Binding tradition

Too often we moderns yearn for tradition out of a misplaced romanticism and a desire for novelty, rather than a determination to seek out wisdom and submit to it. We scour the past for patterns of behavior that were traditions for our forefathers but are novel to us—and we like them because they are novel [...]

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