November music

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What are health and happiness worth?

I’ve written about chronological snobbery before. Here’s the definition from the fellow who coined the term, Owen Barfield: Chronological snobbery is the presumption, fueled by the modern conception of progress, that all thinking, all art, and all science of an earlier time are inherently inferior, indeed childlike or even imbecilic, compared to that of the [...]

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Preying on weakness

I don’t know how to properly balance mercy and justice. I know that it is good to spare others the full consequences of their actions; we do this for our children on a daily basis. And I also know that it is good to suffer the consequences of our actions, so that we’ll learn to [...]

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Movement thinking destroys community

Christina Fuller, the Kansas Milkmaid, offers some wise words about the divisiveness of labels in her 11/24 post entitled “Christian agrarianism and community.” (You’ll have to look at the home page of her blog, for some reason directly linking to the post does not work.) And her conclusion is powerful: I am hesitant to recommend [...]

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The woefully ignorant citizen, take #387

During every election season we can count on a round of hand-wringing over the deplorable state of civic knowledge among American citizens. Here’s an example. The writer makes a good case that when it comes to both current political events and the system of government we live under, more than half of Americans range from [...]

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Modern living requires us to be omnicompetent

When I first began using computers, they were things that were housed in special rooms and attended by highly trained system operators, while I and hundreds of other programmers were connected to them by terminals and allowed to perform a narrow range of carefully delimited tasks. Many of the things I did were actually done [...]

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Non-recourse clauses

I suppose it’s neither fair nor productive to raise questions about the morality of walking away from a mortgage without first isolating and describing some of the factors that might bear on the questions. But I don’t yet understand enough about mortgages (or contractual obligations in general) to do that, at least in any systematic [...]

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Ethics and mortgages

Christian teachers know a lot about morality and ethics, but not so much about economics and related matters such as contractual obligations. Many secular writers are strong on the ins and out of current economic entanglements, but weak on matters of morality and ethics. For now it is up to us lay people to do [...]

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Differences among the brethren

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together changed my thinking about Christian community at a fundamental level. You can read what I wrote about it here, here, and here. One of the most important things that Bonhoeffer taught me was that the distinctives that Christians treasure so highly are exactly the things that poison community at its [...]

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Some never stopped living the agrarian life

Here’s a brief profile of a couple in Lynchburg, Virginia still living a mostly premodern life. Kinkle and Grace Campbell’s modest white house is still heated from a wooden furnace in their bedroom. The Campbells still get their water from a backyard well, despite their proximity to a public water line. They even still grow [...]

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