Tag: Matthew Crawford

By contrast, developing skill through direct contact with nature increases our confidence, efficacy, and even patience. Although fry cooks have a shorter learning curve than motorcycle mechanics or hockey players, all three experience the freedom of agency and causal influence on the outcome of their work.

In a world mediated through technology, the common arts bring us into daily encounters with a material world where we have not made the rules. They orient us to truths outside of ourselves and foster humility as we subject ourselves to realities beyond our control.

When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting.

Human driving requires unending mutual predictions and constant accommodations for each other. It is in such experiences that we end up with something meaningful for life in the physical world and life in community.

Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator.

Liberalism can be marked by the gospel and still be a political and cultural dead end. As Ivan Illich argued, corruptio optimi pessima.

During the course of this entire week, FPR will devote its main pages to a symposium on the recent book Shop Class as Soul...