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Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts

One easy solution is the crockpot. Why? You can throw in some basic ingredients in the morning before work or school, and then when you get home in the evening, you have a hot meal waiting. Bonus: the house will smell really good when you walk in. What’s not to love?

For Banks, the glory of natality is not that it is a passage into the world for something or someone else, but that birth is a tool for our own self-creation, whether that be through materializing other people in our bodies or projecting our ideas and actions onto the world.

Vermont dumps almost all of its own garbage into Mount Casella, though it exports some to New Hampshire and New York. Its own consumption of goods–often including unhealthy processed foods, shipped huge distances–is culturally indistinguishable from the flow of garbage trucked out of the cities.

It is profoundly strange to suggest (as Shiny Happy People implicitly does) that there is something strange and nefarious about people who believe in their principles wanting to see them become a reality in the public square.

In a perfect world, our children would romp out the door after completing their chores and their schoolwork (we homeschool) and knock politely at their best friend’s door, who lived just around the corner in our quiet, speeding-car-free neighborhood, and spend a couple of hours engaged in free creative play, or a massive self-directed building project, or an epic game of Scrabble. How I sometimes wish we lived in that world!

We are not meant to die alone in nursing homes and hospitals, with gray faces, morphine drips, and flickering television screens. We are meant to live, die, and live eternally surrounded by a community of love. Creating that community of love, especially within one’s family, takes hard work and sacrifice.

Folks reading this site might, and there is a minority of the public that spends the time and money to grow produce or seek out good, local farms. But most people only really think about food when they can’t get it or when the grocery bill increases. A big reason we have the system we do is that the majority of the populace prefers cheap, convenient, processed food.

Turns out, there are other Mandalorians, and our hero is a traditionalist. After this encounter, some speculated that Mando would go “the way of the creedless Unitarianians, steadily shedding his beliefs one by one.”

To appeal to personal rights seems to be an appeal to the highest value, and it is no wonder that people are feeling spiritually and socially starved. No one in earlier times would have considered his rights apart from his duties and responsibilities, or her privileges apart from her obligations.