Mark Mitchell is Professor and chairman of Government at Patrick
Henry College and the founding president of the Front Porch
Republic. He is the author of The Politics of Gratitude: Scale,
Place, and Community in a Global Age (Potomac Books, 2012) and
Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing (ISI, 2006).
Jason Peters is Dorothy J. Parkander Professor in Literature at
Augustana College (IL). He is the editor of both Wendell Berry:
Life and Work (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) and Land! The
Case for an Agrarian Economy, by John Crowe Ransom (a Front Porch
Republic book published by the University Press of Notre Dame,
2017).
"Why reorient our lives toward local communities, economies,
farmlands and forests? Because that's where you can be a citizen
rather than a consumer, where you can see a need and help to meet
it, where kinfolk might gather not just to visit but to live, where
flesh-and-blood neighbors can offer one another aid and
companionship, where public officials must answer for their
actions, where you can grow food when the trucks stop rolling,
where sun and wind offer free energy, and where you can protect and
restore a piece of Earth. If anything in that list appeals to you,
then you'll be stirred by this book--a bold reimagining of our
lives and our places."
--Scott Russell Sanders, author of Staying Put: Making a Home in a
Restless World and other books
"If each of these essays is a gem--and it is--then coming upon them
all in one place is what it must feel like to come upon a streak of
emerald in a layer of shale. To find them embedded in one place, in
a manifesto that is a paean to place itself, is a sight, and a
site, for hope. Singly, they bring us--with equal parts humor,
humility, and gravitas--to new vantage points from which to glimpse
tantalizing glints of an alternative to today's creed of greed and
gain. Together, they construct a non-military equivalent of a
phalanx--with equal parts criticism, common sense, and
ideals--against destruction of the particular local places and
bonds that give us our lives. Only such patient words and
intricately argued bridge-building can help us withstand the
ravages of expansion without limits, exploitation without renewal,
and social and political polarization without thoughts of
perpetuity."
--Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University, author of Race
Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age
Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution
"Among the few remaining signs of civilization these days is this
smallish salon of wonderful writers and thinkers, the Porchers, as
they call themselves. In well-tuned prose, they celebrate
rootedness and that elusive notion, a sense of place. Not to
mention, a sense of the truly human."
--Elias Crim, editor and founder, Solidarity Hall
"This is a book of serious ideas, well parsed, and rather brave
considering the pervasive intellectual perversity elsewhere on the
American scene. But mostly it is a lot of really good writing."
-- James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and other
books.
"For over 30 years we have heard lamentations from across the
political spectrum about the decay of community. Most sound quaint
now, for we have lost so much more than community. We've lost
contact with reality as we move through an environment of
abstractions and, worse yet, appeals for even more unreal
abstractions. Even our most "real" and tangible institution,
family, has come perilously close to being little more than an
emotionally charged set of freely chosen and temporary affections
bound only by fragile allegiances. Localism in the Mass Age is not
just about local communities, but about the local context in which
real things are either made or discovered. Localism isn't a
political creed or a reactionary abstraction: it is an affirmation
of the most human of things, in all their messy and colorful
expressions. This collection of essays is about real things,
including human needs, and ought to be the starting place for our
national conversation of rebuilding a nation of free republics.
Free republics are constructed of gnarled oak, not Formica
uniformity and clean simplicity. Gnarled oaks may be found locally,
the individualized products of real life situated in a real place.
A better future is found
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
