The Barbershop

Since having kids, I have come to resent the loss of our pettier freedoms and less complex ways of life the most. I certainly do not want my children to do some of the things that I did in, and with, cars, but I also recognize that there was something instructive in it. Driving a car is, paradoxically, one of the few acts where autonomy and unchosen obligation are held in some degree of harmony.

The spirit of community that arises from festivals such as Halloween is a common good. I suggest that it is also a great time to practice the virtues of shared deliberation at all levels—from organizing in the residence hall floor and the classroom, to planning activities at the town’s community center. Doing so we will grow in the virtues on a personal level.

What is the goal of life? Cultural messaging has tricked many of us into thinking it is wealth and status, or career advancement. For us, it is the project of our marriage, our family, friends, and the good we can do in the world.

We sense that there’s more at stake in a restaurant visit than simply gustatorial or financial gain. Eating out, as Plato might have observed, is a chance to reinforce or undermine the rule of the rational over the appetitive soul.

To walk a place is to open the door to the possibility that you will grow to love it. With time, you could get to know it in an intimate way. Streets or roads or wild forest paths that we walk for the first time can be the object of wonder, even if sometimes also mingled with fear and mistrust.

Beyond writing about craftmanship and antique furniture, M&T explores ideas about human work in a technological age, work in the context of community, and the relationship between craft and tradition. Regardless of your interest in the nuances of woodworking, many Porchers would find reading M&T to be worthwhile.

Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our region’s creative culture. Our mission is to celebrate the literary culture of the American Mid-South: all its paradoxes and contradictions, all the ways it gets us home.

Venus’s love for her sister, and Serena’s recognition of it, has also shown us the transcendent power of family, the possibility of forgetting the accolades and the worldly recognition and the desire for advantage and finding instead deeper connections and possibilities of love.

Do I know by pruning the tree, picking the apples, and eating them? Perhaps, Pickstock proposes, truth is what we find when we act in the world. Our true condition is that we are beings who pick apples and prune trees.

More to the purpose of this essay, organized youth sports should challenge students to be dissatisfied with amusement or entertainment in their pursuit of excellence. Our culture is soaked in entertainment, the preponderance being of a low quality. While it can be entertaining, sports also offers an education.