Out of the Ashes

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture
© 2017 Anthony Esolen
256 pages

Some things, like a Roman bridge, can last for millennia through the virtue of their design, the simplicity of their use, and the inherent strength of their materials. Other things, like the Golden Gate Bridge,  or a house, require more steady attention. It isn't that they're built in an inferior fashion, but they are far more complicated and ambitious.  A culture is a thing that requires attention; it must be renewed generation to generation. In Out of the Ashes,  Anthony Esolen calls attention of Americans to the fact that western culture  is past need for attention: it has sat too long exposed to the elements without refreshing layers of paint, the termites and mice of base creation have withered away its walls and support posts, and the foundation has sunk and cracked. What is needed is rebuilding and restoration. No one can do everything, but everyone must do something, and here Esolen offers hearty arguments for resurrecting education, play, a society based on marriage, family, and the home, politics reoriented towards the local, and the veneration of beauty and virtue. In short, he bids us deny the unholy trinity of Self, Sex, and the State, and  to become participants in our own lives once more.

In interviews and lectures Esolen maintains that what  we must realize about American culture is that there isn't a culture there at all, merely memories and leftover habits. It is as we are walking through a dry creekbed; the impression of the creek is still there upon the land, even as the water itself is a far-distant trickle.  The role of culture in Esolen's sense isn't the mere transmission of music and games from generation to generation, with improvisation and growth along the way. Instead, culture is more broadly applied to civil institutions supporting a common appreciation of man and the cosmos, supporting human life -- the cultivation of man as it were, the garden in which we are watered, thrive, and  create anew the next generation.  Society formerly relied on the  subtle, consistent, and constant pressure of civil society -- of places like the home, the church, and the school. These were all institutions which people not only participated in, they were in complete control of them.   These institutions not only shared a common architectural language, in that schoolhouses, homes, and village churches might look like, but they shared a common mission in promoting human welfare.  That mission was also shared by social organization (the organization of dances to allow young people to meet one another, for instance) and ordinary habit, like allowing children to run outside and play unattended.   In 2001, Robert Putnam decried the decline of civil institutions -- churches, civic groups, bowling clubs, local political moments -- and attempted to figure out what caused their decline. Now the fall is complete:  state schools are such failures that colleges must teach remedial English (prior to their English Literature courses on Twilight and Fifty Shades, Dickens and Stoker having been dumped);   young adults raised in the hookup miasma have no socialization in creating a bonafide  soul-speaks-to-soul relationship,  and every romantic encounter must be  carefully navigated lest someone be sued because the old culture what ensured everyone knew what was appropriate and what was not is lost.

There is no use complaining; we can only rebuild, and the place to start is the family.  Esolen emphatically rejects the modern primacy of the individual, maintaining the family is the foundation of every human society. The home and family are where children are created, nurtured, and taught to become authentic members of their society, their polis.   Speaking of the polis, it too needs awakening:   the State has taken away every prerogative of local communities, leaving them a few pittances like garbage pickup. This is wrong in that it takes away from people the ability to be effective citizens of their community.  Citizenship in the national government means nothing; the individual is grist in the mill.  Yet there is little point in running for something like the school board nowadays, because the decisions have already been decided by far-distant strangers who know better than people what and how to teach their children.   Esolen thus encourages people to create alternative institutions, to  homeschool their children and work together to create private colleges in response to the past-pathetic state of university education today, a place that provides safe spaces and coloring books to its wards instead of teaching them to grapple, body and soul, with adversity and ignorance.   Yet helping to participate in the restoration of society isn't as formidable as creating new and virile sources of education like St. John's and Christendom College;   it can be as simple as learning to appreciate the poetic beauty of traditional hymns,  so much more potent than the happy-clappy praisesongs favored by megachurches -- or leaving the television behind to use one's leisure time to build something with their hands.   Fight ugliness with beauty, lies with truth, decay with work. Participation is the thing -- walking one's neighborhood and picking up litter is more effective than parading about D.C. dressed up as a vagina.

Esolen's concerns are not necessarily exclusive to Christians;  the Swedish eudaimonic philosopher Alain de Botton, for instance,  has written extensively on the role of art, literature, and architecture in human flourishing,  seeing them as important as philosophy in allowing human beings to grow to fulness.  Wendell Berry and Bill Kauffman are both emphatic voices for subsidiarity,  but rarely refer to religion.  Robert Putnam also delivered the essential book on civil culture's decline in his Bowling Alone, which was not religious in the least.  Nevertheless, Esolen is indisputably writing primarily to Christians,  because the west’s civil culture has been Christian, and he is  inspired and rooted by the Catholic social doctrine, referring to papal encyclical at times. At the end Esolen doubles down that he is writing a defense of Christian civilization.   As he urges readers to devote themselves once more to truth and beauty amid the constant babble-babble of lies coming from politicians, the news, and , the amazon of banality that is social media, he bids them to realize that truth remains treason in the empire of lies, and that  ultimately, we pursue the good and true because it is Good, not to create a heaven on Earth. That can never be, for all Christians are ultimately pilgrims on a journey to another world.

Esolen -- whom I've heard described as a "fun Jeremiah" --  is a joy to listen to and to read, a man of passion with a deep bench of literary references. In a lecture on the decline of culture, for instance,  he once used an obscure play by Ben Johnson to make his point. In an interview, someone off-handedly mentions a hymn -- "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" -- and Esolen recognizes it, seizes on it with joy, and at once begins lovingly reciting it.  He is capable of slinging barbs as his foes, but animosity is largely absent here. Instead he writes here in a mood of intense concern, driven on by hope in redemption.   For those who  look at the American landscape -- all the lonely people, the dehumanizing stretches of asphalt and smoke, the constant presence of the foul beast of Jabba the State, who forever demands attention and obedience -- this is a handbook to what went wrong, and a bracing cup to cheer to begin the work of restoring a more humane culture.

Related:
Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam

The Long Loneliness

The Long Loneliness
© 1952 Dorothy Day
288 pages (Harper Collins, 2009(

            Dorothy Day came of age amid the Great War, a child of struggling parents whose labors to make ends meet stayed with her even after they had achieved some success. Caught up by the social upheaval of the early 20^th century, Dorothy moved among the ranks of Communists, anarchists, and draft-resisters. Her determination to fight for the poor changed directions after she joined the Roman Catholic Church, however, and in The Long Loneliness she recounts the efforts of her comrades, both radical and Catholic, as they worked to create a better world for the impoverished. Day’s autobiography is a beautifully written response to the early 20^th century’s social turmoil, the story of a hell-raiser on the verge of sainthood. 

            Although overtly pious as a child, Day recounts here falling away from religion as she aged;  what did faith have to offer the poor, she thought, except meaningless promises of a happier afterlife?  Why should the impoverished and oppressed remain meek and serene when they could throw off their chains? Dismissing religion as the opiate of the people, Day recounts how she threw herself into the struggle for social justice. Her faith in inexorable progress was tested, however, during repeated periods of imprisonment, periods which she worsened by engaging in hunger strikes. In the despair of those hours she turned again to the God of her childhood, and when she was finally set free,  her Christian faith would be reborn and strengthened. Ultimately,  her yearning for comfort and  order led her to the Catholic church, and so strong was her desire for inner peace that she converted despite knowing it would mean leaving her common-law husband, who refused to submit to a church marriage. 

            The Long Loneliness is by no means a comprehensive biography; even if Day were blessed with total recall, constructing a narrative means leaving some facts behind to focus on others.  From this account she seems to have accepted the Church on its own terms, rather than being able to embrace it after learning about its social doctrine, which is by no means passive concerning poverty. I suspected the social doctrine might be the  draw for her, but she gives it scant mention and indeed passes over a discussion of Distributism. Instead, she mentions its similarity to the Southern Agrarians and similar movements as her own. The distributist ideal is hers, “a world where it is easy for people to be good”, where people are not destroyed by their work but ennobled by it. There is no escaping poverty in The Long Loneliness, either material or spiritual; it is to escape spiritual poverty that Day finds herself almost revering the material. She and her great ally, Peter Maurin, both emphasize voluntary simplicity as a means of not only focusing on what really matters, but in saving money to create self-reliance. “Self” is misleading, however:   The Long Loneliness is often a book about creating community.  Her rich collections of her neighbors, regardless of where she moved,  and the emphasis she and Maurin both place on experience life communally – through group discussions on philosophy, or establishing cooperatives and charity houses – demonstrate how  vital being with and working with others was to her life, to her worldview.  Day’s journey here ends on a farm, where she, Maurin, and other staffers of The Catholic Worker would be self-sustainable, she writes, if they did not give so much food away.  

            What a fascinating work this is, quoting from church fathers and personalities like Emma Goldman in the same breathe; what a life she lived,  as a journalist and nurse and agitator during a most interesting period of the 20^th century, when workers were brawling in the streets with the forces of  establishment and winning victories even as they were imprisoned and beaten en masse. Many of the  laws they fought for, Day writes, are now on the books.  At the time of this writing she was no doubt by what had been achieved, not by her but by the people she served, the people who took the ideas of The Catholic Worker – pacifism and libertarianism among them --  and spread them across the world.  Hers is a dream still unrealized, but a life such as hers is a testament as to what is possible. 

Related:

• A Life of Her Own, Emile Carles. Also the biography of a driven young woman whose response to seeing her village and its boys swallowed up by the national government during the Great War is to become increasingly sympathetic toward anarchism and the libertarian left. 
• The Story of my Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi, which also ends in a newsletter staff being run from a communal farm. Pacifism and self-reliance are also common motifs, though Day is more sensual.
• Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, Shane Claiborne, whose 'new monasticism' brings Day to mind..
• I’ll Take my Stand, various authors. She frequently mentions the southern agrarians who penned their defense of a culture rooted in the land.
• Red Emma Speaks, Emma Goldman

The Simple Living Guide

The Simple Living Guide: A Sourcebook for Less Stressful, More Joyful Living
© 1997 Janet Luhrs
444 pages

Life distracts easily and passes by without being noticed. The Simple Living Guide is written as an antidote, one which both prompts people to think more deeply about their lives -- how the ordinary can take on meaning --  and which provides resources for living an engaged life. After an initial section on inner simplicity, separate sections concern personal finance, food,  health and exercise,  homes, travel, gardening, entertainment,  and so on, with a special section near the end devoted to clearing out clutter. Though distinct, the chapters link together. Each section is laced with real-life examples and book summaries drawn far and wide, and ends with a larger testimonial and list of resources.  The only fly in the ointment, and it is a truly minuscule fly, is the book's datedness: written in 1997, it reminds readers that cell phones are useful, but unnecessary given the widespread availability of phone booths. Ah, but time marches on. The majority of her advice rings as true today as it would been back in those halcyon days, but  a work written this century would have included the revolutionary impact of ubiquitous wireless connections and 'smart' electronics;  her multitude of pages on cheap car-renting strategies is practically moot considering car-sharing services. Luhrs' sections on inner simplicity and personal finance are exceptional, however.

Home Economics

Home Economics
© 1987 Wendell Berry
192 pages

The term economics originally referred to household management, and to Wendell Berry, that's what it should remain still. Home Economics collects essays on the meaning and relation of economy to human life. In it, he deplores the cancerous growth of massive, unwieldy structures like agribusiness, globalization, and the state which destroy culture, communities, and the land, reducing the human experience to economic inputs. He ruminates thoughtfully on the value of more traditional ways of life, and advocates for an approach which is much more finely-grained For Berry, the humane society is one built to a small scale, built on local economies wherein people, not institutions, are the primary actors, and where the relationships between people and the land are respectfully maintained.

Berry is a fascinating author. At first glance, he's manifestly romantic and old fashioned, advocating for the same kind of agrarian  Republic of citizen-farmers that Thomas Jefferson yearned for. Though he's grounded in the past, quoting freely from classical poets and the Bible life, he's not mired by it: he does not despise cities as Jefferson and other agrarians did, and writes that if we wish to preserve the wilderness and farms, we must preserve our cities, too.  Though he doesn't outline his reasoning, it may be similar to that of David Owen's, who sees energy-efficient cities as the best hope for combating climate change. It's certainly a better  hope than car-dependent suburbia, which Berry despises (however much a gentle and aging scholar-farmer can despise something).   Berry urges readers to consider a return to localism not just because it's better for the environment (his veneration for which is religiously inspired), and not just because the new institutions are oppressive and destructive but because Nature has a way of correcting the unsustainable. That which cannot sustain itself will not: eventually it will fail. We will not persist living as we do now forever: our choice is in how and when we change.  In the hereafter, Berry writes, we may ask forgiveness for the crimes Nature has judged us for, but God has never shown any inclination to overturn her just sentences.

At times a warning, the vision of Home Economics is not dire.  In elaborating on the weaknesses of industrialized and globalized modernity,  he affirms that the ongoing desecration of human life and the planet will not long endure -- and in articulating what was lost, he makes clear to modern readers what it is they miss without being able to describe; the bonds of family and community life, attachment to place, and the sense of a life of meaning and purpose. His holistic vision offers to restore those powers laid waste in getting and spending.

Related:
Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin. Salatin advocates some of the same ideas, at least in terms of farm ecology. He's more cheerfully manic and provocative, though.
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey (on the virtues of the wilderness)

What Are People For? (Comments & Selections)

What Are People For?
© 1990, 2010 (2nd Edition) Wendell Berry
210 pages

Did the Lord say that machines oughta take the place of livin'? ("John Henry", Johnny Cash)

Wendell Berry is a softly outspoken critic of the triumph of inhumanity. What are People For? collects essays both literary and critical, with topics ranging from poetry to economy, but settling most around the meaningful life and obstacles to it. Before locavorism and community-supported agriculture, Berry preached the diverse benefits of local, organic agriculture: before James Howard Kunstler, he talked about the value of Place, and mourned the destruction of it by the expansion of sprawl. But Berry is no progressive prodigy: he is, in fact, a traditionalist, who sees great value in a nation of small agriculturists and great danger in one of big agribusiness corporations and consumers. Berry sits in judgment of a modernity that destroys families, communities, people's connection to the land, and their ability to derive pleasure and independence from it. He has little regard for economic arguments for Free Markets that allow tumorously huge food-factories to drive out the little farmer: he moved by a man of flesh and blood, more concerned with his "fellow humans, neighbors, children of God, and citizens of the Republic" than economic principles and statistics that prove people are better off even as their places are destroyed by progress.  You can't stop progress, Berry might say with a sigh, but you can wish mightily for it to choke on its own exhaust.

One need not agree with Berry in entirety to appreciate his work, and I have found this collection of his essays, the first I've read (aside from "Health is Membership" in The Plain Reader), to be full of a great many humbling, gracious, and troubling thoughts. Below are a few excerpts.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Waste"
The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators, but we must count ourselves among the guilty nonetheless. In my household we produce much of our own food and try to do without as many frivolous 'necessities' as possible -- and yet, like everyone else, we must shop, and when we shop we must bring home a load of plastic, aluminum, and glass containers designed to be thrown away, and 'appliances' designed to wear out quickly and be thrown away.

I confess that I am angry at the manufacturers who make these things. There are days when I would be delighted if certain corporate executives could somehow be obliged to eat their products. I know of no good reason why these containers and all other forms of manufactured 'waste' -- solid, liquid, toxic, or whatever -- should not be outlawed. There is no sense and no sanity when objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands."

"Economy and Pleasure"
In the right sort of economy, our pleasure would not merely be an addition or by-product or reward; it would be both an empowerment of our work and its indispensable measure. Pleasure, Ananda Coomaraswamy said, perfects work. In order to have leisure and pleasure, we have mechanized and automated and computerized our work. But what does this do but divide us ever more from one another and the world?

"The Pleasures of Eating"
"Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. 'Life is not very interesting,' we seem to have decided. 'Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast'. We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work to 'recreate' ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation -- for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the 'quality' of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world."

"Word and Flesh"
"Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence -- that is, to the wish to preserve all its humble households and neighborhoods. [...]
We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make."

"Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer"
I should give my standard for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Do engines get rewarded for their steam? ("John Henry", Johnny Cash)

Hannah Coulter

Hannah Coulter
© 2005 Wendell Berry
190 pages

This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and is now like a dream dreamed. [...] This is my story, my giving of thanks.  p. 5

Hannah Coulter is a coming of age story, the tale of a young woman who becomes a widow twice over, raising children through wars and hardship, strengthened by her family and extended community of Port William. Like Jayber Crow, it is less a story that is told in a straight line, and more an experience which is shared by the reader, a tale that meanders with purpose. The novel is a collection of stories and reflections, knit together by the life of Hannah into a literary quilt, one beautiful to behold and comforting to snuggle under. The prevailing themes are of love and loss,  family, enduring faith (not limited to religious, but faith in life and in one another), and communion -- communion with one another, with the land, and Providence.

Agrarianism is the backbone of Hannah and her kindred's lives: it establishes the cycles of life, provides a means of self-reliance, and offers the "joy of achievement, the thrill of creative effort".  The manifest importance of the land makes itself known even in the way characters orient themselves: they do not live on this road or that, but  take their directions from topography. Families live in this hollow, or on on those hills, or off that branch of the river: the people who inhabit Port William know the land as intimately as any deer or hawk. To them, their world is not limited to narrow strips running alongside lanes, a grid that people occupy as dots. The land and place of Port William are whole, connected, and rambling. But the lives of the city are not linked just by physical presence; they're tied together too by their common experiences. Hannah and her second husband both lose loved ones in World War 2, and that shared loss is the impetus of their relationship. When they settle in, they join an informal 'membership' of neighbors, who despite occupying separate farms, work together as one, helping to mend one another's fences, or gather in the harvest.  They do for one another whatever "needs doin'", and receive in the same spirit.

As said, this intensely thoughtful work combines stories and reflections.  The stories are sometimes tragic, other times uproarious, often charming, and always demanding --  Berry's stories have a way of hovering off the page and floating right in front of a reader's eyes and mind, impossible to ignore. Closing the book does not help. Although the reflections tend toward the melancholy -- Hannah begins her life losing one parent, promptly loses her first husband, and will see her children be scattered to the wind by ambition  -- the work is, as she says, a story of giving thanks, even in the midst of trouble. This is her abiding faith -- "rejoice always".  For though the years are not kind to Port William, as its way of life is paved over by asphalt and "developed" and the sons and daughters of the community are brought low in war or move away to make better lives for themselves in different places -- lives that prove to be not as good as they thought --  the book ends in hope.

I continue to be astonished by the beauty of Wendell Berry's prose

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

p. 57

Jayber Crow

Jayber Crow: the Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber of the Port William Membership, As Written by Himself
© 2000
363 pages

"Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told."

Jayber Crow is many things. It is one of the most agonizingly beautiful and moving novels I have ever read. It's a lyrical testament to the power of love,  the richness of community, and the pleasures of a life lived close to the rhythms  of nature.  And it's also the story of a man named Jonah, called Jayber, who once thought he had the call to preach, but left the seminary to practice barbering to live out the questions that the seminary had no answers for. It is the story of a man twice orphaned, who went on a journey, a pilgrimage, and found himself. It is a work of art.

I should acknowledge from the start that I am biased to like -- to adore -- this book, for the author's narrative voice is the kind I like best; gentle, wise, and slyly witful. I was unable to simply read the book; it had to be read aloud. Slowly. Multiple times.  The text is swollen with sentences that, like fruit hanging from a tree, demand to be plucked and savoured; they have body, being something beyond ordinary words.  Jayber Crow isn't an action drama with a clearly defined Conflict, Rising Action, Climax, and Conclusion; it's a coming of age story, in which the gracefully maturing subjects are both Jayber and his adopted home of Port William.  Jayber is a child of the Great Depression, and arrives in town shortly before the outbreak of World War 2.  That war and those that follow  will hurt his fair city, but the pain of them brings his characters to life all the more. It is a deeply reflective novel, in which Jayber will begin to wax poetic about one topic or another -- the decline of ecologically-savvy family farms and the advent of debt-based agribusiness, or the damage automobiles do to one's sense of place -- for a spell before returning to telling the story of Port William as it attempts to survive the 20th century like a little skiff tossed in a turbulent ocean.

For a long time then I seemed to live by a slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to all the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life. And when it was complete, or nearly so, it was shapely and beautiful in the light of day. It endured through the nights, but sometimes it only barely did. It would be tattered and set awry by things that fell or blew or fled or flew. Many of the strands would be broken.  Those I would spin and weave again in the morning. 

p. 330

I think the only words that do Jayber Crow justice are the words of the author himself, so plea  peruse some of the quotations for this book listed at GoodReads or even Tumblr. One selection which I posted on facebook:

One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, [he said] "They ought to round up every one of them [war protesters] and put them right in front of the communists, and then whoever killed who, it would all be to the good."
There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try and top it. I thought of Athey's reply to Hiram Hench.
It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said "'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.'"
Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. "Where did you get that crap?"
I said, "Jesus Christ."
And Troy said, "Oh".
It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

If I could only ever read one novel for the rest of my life, Jayber Crow would be it. The idea that it has only been in existence for thirteen years is staggering. It seems ageless.

Crunchy Cons

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of counterculture conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican party)
© 2006  Rob Dreher
272 pages

Imagine a Republican who praised Jimmy Carter instead of dedicating a Two-Minute Hate to him. That's Rob Dreher. In an age of bitter partisan rancor, it's refreshing to encounter someone who looks beyond the asnine liberal-conservative divide and realizes that politics and values aren't as simple as they tell you on the television. Alas, values are still simple to Dreher, who knows there's still an Us and a Them; it's just that the Thems and the Us's sometimes swap sides.  The Us's are those people on the left and right who seek a meaningful life and are prompted by their inner convictions to live differently than the mainstream; the Thems are those wretched modernists, the consumerists, the cafeteria Catholics, and the individualists who defy culture and brazenly think for themselves. (You know, because thinking for yourself makes you so mainstream.)

The title alone may give you a feel for the goings-on of crunchy cons. Various sections cover Dreher's (who is the authority on who may be and who cannot be a Crunchy Con) thoughts on consumerism and technological dependence (bad), food (industrial food bad, CSAs awesome), homes (modern architecture bad -- read Jim Kunstler), and religion (orthodoxy for the win). While the thoughts as expressed can be found in other books*, Dreher's positions and criticisms are couched in the language of conservatism and traditionalism; he attacks agribusiness not on the grounds of social justice (as Eric Schlosser did in Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness), but because he wants  to promote the rugged  old values of small farmers and promote self-reliance.  Dreher doesn't attack consumerism because mindless consumption plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie, or destroys Mother Earth; his hostility stems from the fact that there's more to life than owning stuff, and the idea of our being able to buy happiness is not only unhealthy, it's impious.

Religion undergirds Dreher's approach: for him, being a 'crunchy conservative' means living sacramentally; "viewing the physical aspects of life -- the food we eat, the places we live, the world in which we move -- as being inseparable from spiritual reality."  Dreher's aim in being a crunchy con is to live a meaningful life, and for him, religion supplies that meaning. The problem with mainline conservatism is that world changes too quickly for traditionalism-for-principle's-sake to mean anything. Yesterday's raging liberals are today's  conservatives, because the status quo is a moving target. Dreher's people stand out among  other conservatives by defining what they intend to conserve, instead of being content to resist change on principle. Hence, while most conservatives are fine defending relatively recent developments like automobile oriented sprawl, Dreher is still defending the old-fashioned, traditional, human-oriented cities that have now been embraced by progressives.

There's a lot to like about Crunchy Cons, but there were a few too many flies in the soup for me. Like the authors of The Plain Reader, Dreher puts a lot of stock behind parents being the chief cultivators of their children.  And while I get the reason for concern -- I, too, would prefer not exposing children to television for numerous reasons, the values it imparts among them --  as someone who was raised in a "conservative", no-television household, I'm awfully glad I was able to view TV and other media from time to time that let me see the world beyond the prison walls of my controlled environment. I was able to compare my parent's worldview with another, and figure out what I wanted out of life. This obsession with controlling children, witnessed in both The Plain Reader and in Crunchy Cons, and displayed in the authors' hatred for public schools and media, strikes this escapee as sinister and unhealthy. Your values mean nothing if children cannot grow into adults who can make a choice. And therein lies the rub with Dreher's work, for as much as he advocates choice in other areas -- people should be free to run small farms, instead of being forced to play by agribusiness' rules; people should be freed from compulsory education, raising their children whatever way they decide; when it comes to belief, people should Learn their Place and believe what they're told. Tradition is God, and if you think you can modify it you are a degenerate loser who is responsible for the imminent destruction of humanity.

At times, Crunchy Cons was an eye-opening delight. Like The Plain Reader, it demonstrates how people can lives of purpose and value amid the noise of an entertainment-obsessed world.  The author's contempt for those who do not seek more meaning, however, and his anti-human belief in the primacy of tradition, left me feeling sick. The Plain Reader was a far better example of a conservative counterculture, and though problematic in ways, it was far gentler.

 *In Praise of Slow, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Fast Food Nation, The Geography of Nowhere, Technopoly, Amusing Ourselves to Death, To Have or to Be, American Mania, and Bowling Alone.

Mudhouse Sabbath

Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline 
© 2008 Laura Winner
162 pages

Increasingly, Christian religious scholars are examining Jesus in the context of his Jewish roots. While the works I'm familiar with have done this primarily to understand his teachings as portrayed in the New Testament,  Laura Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath asks: how can Jesus' Jewishiness inform contemporary Christian spirituality? In Mudhouse Sabbath, she examines eleven aspects of Jewish spirituality and discusses how they can be applied more broadly. While her intended audience is Christians,  this slender work can be of some use to any person with a 'spiritual' bent.

Winner is in a unique place to write this book, because despite being Jewish and raised in the conservative tradition, somehow while  studying in England she became an Anglican priest. She writes in her introduction that upon conversion, she at first did away with all of the elements of her Jewish roots -- the practices and tools of her childhood faith -- but then realized she felt as though she was missing something. Restoring those practices in a new context  made sense to her after she realized that since Jesus was Jewish,  taking inspiration from practices that might have been his, even if the contemporary Christian faith has forgotten them,  would mean being more like Jesus.  In this slender little work she addresses the sabbath,  keeping kosher, mourning, hospitality, prayer, body image, fasting, aging, candle-lighting, weddings, and doorposts. Some elements are distinct to Judaism (Shabbat and nailing mini-Torahs to doorposts) while the majority address a given issue in a Jewish context.

Mudhouse Sabbath leaves me with mixed feelings: Christians should explore Jewish spirituality. They should explore Muslim and Buddhist spirituality, too,  and the reverse is the same. No religion, philosophy, or worldview on Earth has a monopoly on truth, and  few are entirely bereft of it. Our minds find strength in exploring diverse pools of thought: homogeneity is stagnation and death.  Mudhouse Sabbath focuses more on what Christians can learn from Jews, but the value of certain practices transcends all boundaries. I'm particularly partial to the idea of sabbaths, for instance, as an affirmation of human dignity. In the United States, we are feverish with activity -- working long hours, then filling our leisure time with scheduled activities. We are constantly "connected" to the larger world, never free to just rest.  I like the idea of people declaring: Enough!.

The slenderness of the volume prevents Winner from developing her ideas, though. She offers sparks of potential insight rather than a roaring fire of enlightenment. Take the chapter on kashrut, or keeping kosher. She doesn't advocate that Christians or anyone else start keeping two separate sets of cookware because pots that have contained milk can never, ever contain milk; instead, she looks at the broader application of food mindfulness, and her example is the value of eating seasonally instead of letting the supermarket fool us into thinking that tomatoes in January are perfectly appropriate. A more salient example would be that of over-consumption -- or more pointedly, a  given company's sanitary standards or labor practices, both of which are in dire shape in the United States.


Although Winner didn't flesh out her ideas as expansively as I would have liked, it may be enough that she prompts Christians to draw inspiration from a broader source, especially given that Christianity tends to be dominated by beliefs instead of practices, and Winner principally addresses ways of working spiritual themes, like awareness, into the fabric of everyday lives.  Actions are more substantial than beliefs and ideas; as Epictetus groused in his handbook, what we intend matters little. ("Your dumbbells are your own affair, O slave; show me your muscles!")

So, may Winner's sparks be enough to ignite a few ideas in those who read his.


Related:

• The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Amy Jill-Levine
• Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes, John Shelby Spong
• The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Miracle, Shane Claiborne

An Altar in the World

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
© 2009 Barbara Brown Taylor
240 pages

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest who no longer pastors a church; for although she still finds enriching experiences inside the walls of her parish and its creeds and rituals, her journey has led her to look for ultimate meaning in the living of life itself.  Although she incorporates a great deal of religious language (God, blessings) into Altar, the central theme of mindfulness is one accessible to anyone -- and an antidote to the constant busyness and distractions of today. She finds the sacred in the ordinary -- meaning in simple, universal experiences like labor, walking, and even getting lost. Readers with an interest in Buddhism will notice that Taylor seems to be walking the eight-fold path, particularly in the sections on vocation and labor. I found An Altar in the World a beautiful work and an instant favorite. It should be of great interest to those with interests in simple living, mindfulness, and  inspiration drawn from life instead of old books and extinct civilizations.

Why Do Catholics Do That?

Why Do Catholics Do That? A Guide to the Teachings and Practices of the Catholic Church
© 1997 Kevin Orlin Johnson
304 pages

Continuing in my newfound curiosity about the oldest extant Christian organization, I accidentally read the book that inspired the man who created 'Catholics What We Believe and Why' -- the PalTalk chatroom that made me interested in gaining a little Latin rite literacy in the first place. His motivation is understandable: this is an excellent, thorough book. Johnson goes into great detail explaining the theological significant of elements like the Eucharist, but also reveals these element's historic origins, like the Mass's pomp and ritual being drawn from Roman courts.

Johnson's  work is in four sections -- Faith, Worship, Culture, and Custom. Between them they cover a great deal --  Catholic symbols, the calendar,  the difference between Latin and other rites,  the thinking behind church architecture,  the role of incense and prayers,  church law, the Cycle of Redemption, and more. In addition to the Church itself, Johnson also gives a short history of the Vatican City (complimentary, of course -- no corrupt political popes here!) and writes about books which are not included in the Catholic canon as such, but which  still may add to a person's understanding and appreciation of the Christian faith. One of these books is the story of St. Christopher, a giant who decided he wanted to serve the strongest king alive, and whose path to Christ took him into the desert where he found Satan marching around with his army and joined up.

My only caveat is Johnson's light protectiveness of the Church. I say light because as far as I am concerned, the man is impressive in admitting that the Church has taken inspiration from human culture as well as 'divinity': Easter's pagan roots are acknowledged by him freely. Still , as a child of the Church he leads the reader around some of the unpleasantness in Catholic history, like the utter corruptness of the papacy through much of medieval history.  Even so, I'd recommend this to anyone curious or interested in Catholicism. As far as I'm concerned, it's first-rate.

If you're wondering what the imprimateur mentioned on the cover is,  well -- that's answered in the book, too. (It means the bishop in question has read the book and found it worthy of examination.)

Blue Like Jazz

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

© 2003 Donald Miller

243 pages

In addition to my comparative religion and philosophy studies, I'm also trying to get a handle on why one religion in specific -- Christianity -- matters so much to people. I can appreciate Christianity just fine when people approach Jesus as a moral teacher, but when they start gushing about his dying for them, I'm lost. I don't see the appeal. Christian theology on this point seems to me to be utterly arbitrary: "Okay, there was this one time when this guy named Adam disobeyed God, and got all of his relatives utterly cursed with this thing called sin. It separates us from God. But then, thousands of years later, God made a little love-child with a human and this guy let himself be killed so that you can live free of sin." And I blink. If you tell me that the guys who died in Vietnam died for my right to vote, I'll disagree but know where you're coming from. But this sin thing? It's arbitrary. You have to force belief onto a series of statements: one, that everyone is doomed to be a bad guy: two, that this is because of some taint called sin: three, that this sin can be dealt with by killing innocent beings: and that four, that Jesus was utterly innocent and was thus the ultimate sacrifice and his willing death ended sin's power over people. I cannot force belief. I cannot make myself believe in arbitrary things even if I want to -- and in this case, I certainly don't want to. Now, if Christianity actually freed people from sin, this might give some credence to what they're saying -- but as far as I can tell, in all the lives I've observed first-hand and read about, in all the various approaches and interpretations, people who believe in Christ's power over sin and who believe they are personally filled with his spirit still do bad things. Where's the power? In the religion I was raised in, getting the "holy ghost" meant that you had this source of living sin-free inside you, that if you worked at it you could live a perfect life -- but only through work. None of the forced beliefs made sense to me, and I was really concerned about the whole "most everyone is going to be tortured in a fiery pit forever" thing, so I said screw it and left organized religion. That's when I realized I could change my life myself -- so I became a self-empowered humanist and I've flourished ever since. But -- in the past year I've found myself being able to get inside the minds of religious people and see what we have in common, and why we're different, and I'm curious to see if I can get inside the head of a Saviour-Christ-believing Christian to understand. That's what brings me to Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.

Its title is a prelude to the things that come: it's confusing. Author Donald Miller isn't actually nonreligious. He's nondenominational, which means that he has his own fundamentalist but fluid grasp on Christianity. The book is the story of his life, arranged topically and written in a manner that seems freeform. Although I've read "stream of consciousness"-type literature before and disliked it, I liked this: his writing style seemed to be quirky, fun, and lively. It's like you're listening to this guy talk to you, and he's just leaning back against the wall in a cafe or restaurant and chatting about whatever comes to his mind -- with some topical restrictions. He has spent his entire life grappling with what Christianity means to him, and the book is at times frustrating, insightful, muddled, mystical, uplifting, and funny. I suppose it's like people: there are few people who you or I can say we like everything about. This book is that way, because it's a look inside his head -- and sometimes I liked what I saw there, and sometimes I didn't. I despaired for him when he inflicted dogma on himself -- fretting about having sex or drinking beer or not reading the Bible -- and I was utterly confused when he started gushing about Jesus fixing his "Sin nature" -- but there were times when I'd laugh or sit back with a smile because he'd made me laugh. I can't understand the idea of having a personal relationship with a metaphysical being, but I do get thinking about values, and I do understand his thoughts about dealing with difficult people, because that's something I think a lot about. Do I recommend the book to you? I don't know, because I can't get a firm handle on how I feel about the book. I know I like reading what other people have to say about it: I know this is the kind of book I'd like to hear people discuss and argue over, because it is a book about life and dealing with the meaning of it. What Miller says, you might not like -- but then again you may. Both conservative Christians and former-Christians-turned-skeptic who I've read from dislike the book, and they both despair over its popularity among young Christian evangelicals. One of their particular beefs is that Miller doesn't take Christianity seriously enough, but I disagree. His youth group doesn't get together to have pizza -- they go serve soup at homeless shelters. They try to live their lives with love, which I think is admirable, because it's easy to talk about but hard to do. In this line of thought they criticize him for hand-waving away logical arguments against Christian dogma: as he says, the intellectual arguments about Christianity ceased to be about God a long time ago, so he doesn't bother. While I understand why someone would think that wrong, I also suspect that religions are to the spiritual more about inspiration -- not truth. Miller's book is very much open to interpretation, I think.

Click here for a google search including the skeptical and conservative Christian viewpoints I mentioned earlier. I read the first, third, and fourth entries.

Here If You Need Me

Here If You Need Me: A True Story
© 2001 Kate Braestrup
211 pages

Here If You Need Me is the story of Kate Braestrup, a Unitarian Universalist minister and game warden chaplain who went into that service after the death of her husband, a Maine State Trooper who had planned on a double career as a Unitarian minister. In a sense, I suppose she converted her pain into a way to honor her husband and help others -- and in so doing, helped herself. Reverend Braustrup mixes stories of her current service with stories from her past. Some of the stories are happy and some tragic, but they all have a point to them -- or Braeustrup has found meaning in them. She shares the meaning of those stories with the reader, all the while reflecting on ideas of life, compassion, and God. I found the book to be very enjoyable as well as intensely moving. I definitely reccommend it.