Tag: community

What We Can Learn from a Society Where Community Still Matters

“By their fruits you will recognize them,” Jesus tells his disciples. If what appears is bad or worthless, you’ll have been made aware of what was there all along, incipient. You can tear up the weed and try again. But when something good appears, something truly good, you’ll be glad you let it grow.

So to all my friends in this haven, this meeting place, this village green—you lovers of federalism, distributism, neighbors, neighborhoods, regional accents, little platoons, and forty acres and a mule—happy anniversary.

Walk boldly. Whistle not, but do keep walking. Keep walking right on by it and let the dead bury the dead.

The Empire did not fall the day Front Porch Republic rose. But in 15 years FPR has done much more than simply add weight to the human scale. It has revivified the most humane and practical traditions in American social, cultural, economic, and political life and thought.

Friendship is, in fact, a vital key to any flourishing political order, for friendship is rooted in affection and a commitment to the good of the friend, which translates in the aggregate to a commitment to the common good. And friendship is necessarily local.

Our modernist mindset too easily leads us to the comfortable notion that ‘they’–the government, the scientists, whoever–are going to save us with the latest whizz-bang techno-fix. They’re not. Nobody is coming to save us.

In these movements, we are but a speck of dust in the great desert. But here, where our feet are, we hold a power forgotten.

A chief virtue of sheep is, indeed, that they are content with remarkably little, and—this is key—they are rooted and aware citizens of their locale.

If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives and reads in place, bringing my reading and my other work in the world closer together in the most literal, physical sense. For encouragement in my pursuit of that home field, I have Tiffany Eberle Kriner to thank.