“An Education in Thanksgiving.” Rachel Alexander Cambre gives a very perceptive reading of Hannah Coulter: “Stories that bring the past to life, on the other hand, pass down memories of the blessings that have shaped our lives, and in doing so, they pass down gratitude. Rather than dismiss the past as irrelevant or mistaken, stories told ‘right,’ to quote Hannah, convey the true condition of man’s state, which is one of indebtedness. They reveal that one’s life is a gift, not to be discarded for something ‘better.'”
“An Ode to Six-on-Six.” Bill Kauffman sings the praises of Iowa’s forgotten local version of basketball: “Iowa, the historic hotbed of girls’ basketball, is hailed today for producing the superb Caitlin Clark, but for most of the twentieth century its hundreds of small-town bandbox gymnasiums were alive with the wonderfully idiosyncratic sporting variant known as six-on-six basketball. Like the culture of small-town Iowa — and, I might add, like such great Iowans as historian William Appleman Williams, painter Grant Wood and Senator Harold Hughes — six-on-six was ‘simultaneously conservative and progressive,’ as Midwestern historian Max McElwain wrote in The Only Dance in Iowa.”
“The Invisible Man.” Patrick Fealey describes his life as a homeless man in Rhode Island: “My morning routine is taking gabapentin (an anti-seizure medication that also alleviates psychic and neuropathic pain and brightens my perception), lamotrigine (another anti-seizure medicine, but for me it helps my mental energy and cuts through fog, because gabapentin creates fog), fluoxetine (Prozac, an antidepressant), and Adderall (for focus and energy, because after the manic depression struck in 1997, my brain was a flat tire), walking the beach with Lily, getting coffee at the Mobil station up the road, and writing on an HP laptop I got two months ago that has already had one power-input jack fail. It sits on an upside-down acoustic guitar resting on my lap, a 12V/120V converter plugged into the lighter with the car running. I play the guitar first thing every morning, songs I’ve written. The rest of the day, I flip it over and it’s my desk.”
“Our Farm’s Valued at £8m—Under New Rules We’d Barely Break Even.” Ben Spencer and Tom Calver try to make sense of the economics of farming, inheritance, and tax in Britain. While the government is trying to prevent people from buying up farmland to avoid taxes, the proposed changes would force many farmers to sell their farms rather than pass them on to their children: “In Britain, a very large proportion of farmland is owned by a relatively small number of farmers. Figures unearthed by the campaigner Guy Shrubsole, author of The Lie of the Land, show that just 3 per cent of farms — each of them bigger than 1,250 acres, four times the size of Poplar Farm — occupy more than a quarter of all farmland. ‘These stark figures underline how unequal land ownership is in England, and how huge swathes of farmland have become concentrated in the hands of a few,’ said Shrubsole. ‘Small farmers deserve all of our support — and they’re not helped by giving tax breaks to wealthy investors who’ve been snapping up farmland as a handy tax shelter, inflating the price of land and starving public services of cash.’”
“Disposition.” Alan Jacobs offers a timely reminder, indebted to Oakeshott, that conservatism is a disposition and not a political ideology: “If this is the conservative disposition — and I think it is; at any rate I know that it is my disposition — then its two major elements are an impulsive gratitude and a consequent desire to preserve that for which one is grateful.”
“Pilgrim at Plaster Creek.” Sara Kyoungah White describes the desecration and slow restoration of a creek near her home: “’In its consciousness, ours is an upland society,’ essayist and poet Wendell Berry notes. Indeed, we are unaware of the outcomes of our consumptions and practices. ‘The ruin of watersheds, and what that involves and means, is little considered.’ Consciousness stirs when creation care is no longer an abstract concept but actual dirt on our hands. At our church’s cleanup event, my son, his bag of litter slung over one shoulder, looked up at me and said, ‘Mama, this is our creek, right?’ An act as simple as picking up a soiled candy wrapper sends a message: I care about the cleanliness of this place. I care about it like it’s my own.”
“Challenging the American Creed.” Mark Noll has an incisive review essay responding to Jerome Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order: “Showing the impossibility of reinstituting Christendom in a pluralistic nation is not the same as justifying Copulsky’s understanding of American civic life. That understanding he eventually sets out, but only in the book’s last paragraph: ‘If it is to endure, America’s liberal democracy will have to be sustained in the absence of a moral consensus or clear-cut spiritual foundations.’ This stance, as he must surely realize, puts him at odds with most of the nation’s history.”
“How One Woman Became the Scapegoat for America’s Reading Crisis.” Helen Lewis doesn’t make Lucy Calkins particularly sympathetic in this story, but she does give a good overview of the reading wars in American education and the fundamental dynamics that feed them: “The backlash against Calkins strikes some onlookers, even those who are not paid-up Lucy partisans, as unfair. ‘She wouldn’t have been my choice for the picture on the ‘wanted’ poster,’ James Cunningham, a professor emeritus of literacy studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Indeed, over the course of several days spent with Calkins, and many more hours talking with people on all sides of this debate, I came to see her downfall as part of a larger story about the competing currents in American education and the universal desire for an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the country’s reading problems.”
“Ten Reasons I’m Thankful This Thanksgiving Day.” Brian Miller counts his blessings this Thanksgiving, even including “the drought over much of the past year. Nothing sharpens and challenges my commitment to be grateful like the things I’d prefer not to experience. The dry pastures have also helped me focus on how to make our farm more resilient, and, of course, to be a better steward of this land.”
