The Brass Spittoon: Recent Episodes
frontporchrepublic
Thank you for gathering at the Brass Spittoon, the podcast of Front Porch Republic. We chew on issues timeless and timely, with a focus on place, limits, and liberty. Find out more at frontporchrepublic.com.
The former editor in chief of Christianity Today stops by to talk about his love of Port William and the AI infused world to come.
Highlights
1:00 Biloxi boy and Berry man
5:30 Unlikely CT choice?
11:00 Wendell at his most metaphysical
16:30 Crowning Kingsnorth (or not yet)
26:00 Carl Henry and the future of Evangelicalism
32:00 Praying away
35:00 Ezekiel and the fog machine
40:00 Kids seeking Orthodoxy and old folks?
44:15 A global and Martian focus
48:00 Keller on moving institutions
51:00 Berry patch pickings
Resources
Russell's bio and Berry's cover
Marce Catlettat the FPR Bookshop
Scott Moore and Berry at Georgetown College
Rise and Fall podcast
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
The author, activist, and grandfather who once warned of The End of Nature has a brighter disposition these days.
Highlights
1:15 Dirt roads and tricorne hats
3:15 Protesting with the life-changing Wendell Berry
6:45 Paneling over real problems
16:30 Evacuate the building!
19:15 Looking back, looking forward
23:30 Deregulation to the rescue?
31:00 Lone Star State of mind
34:30 Corny truths and consequences
40:00 Cultists and conservative Sunday school teachers
53:30 A new day for the sun
Resources
Bill's bio and buy the book (and the other book)
Solar SunDay and nitro Sunday, Sunday, Sunday
Van Morrison’s Brand New Day
If Bill’s statement about 9 million deaths raised an eyebrow, here’s more on that.
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
The longtime editor-in-chief of World magazine discusses the Zenger Prize, his new gig at Christianity Today, the temptations of conservative politics (compassionate or otherwise), and his memoir Pivot Points.
Highlights
1:00 Aspiring galactic editor and globe trotter
5:45 Street level reporting v. suite level pontification
15:15 BREAKING: Flatwater Free Press on the Zenger Prize long list
18:00 Welcome to the jungle . . . and Phoenix
25:00 Adventure is out there!
30:00 A young communist hears Jesus in Russian
34:00 Leaving World for purple pastures
41:00 Character counts, on the diamond and in the Oval
49:00 Covering Marvin’s seat at W’s table
59:45 Hitchhiking as a way of life
Resources
Marvin's bio and buy the book (and the other book)
Announcing the Zenger Prize winners at FPR
Read the winning articles
Nominate the next winner
Marvin’s work at Current (R.I.P)
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
After a life of physical and spiritual adventure, an innovative homesteading teacher and pastor turns green with gratitude.
Highlights
1:00 California to Idaho (before everybody was doing it)
12:00 The plane, the plane!
19:00 Picture pages, picture pages
26:00 Raising the dead with his students (and Robert Redford)
37:00 Finding Jesus in the mountains
45:15 Turning green in the pulpit
57:00 Timber Butte homecoming
61:00 Looking for the real thing
66:00 Thanks and love
Resources
Tri's homestead website and buy the book
Full Cowboy & Preacher film
“Check your local listings.” (It’s 10 a.m. 12/28/24 in Idaho on PBS World)
On PBS with Bill Moyers two decades ago
“Liver-Eating” Johnson’s grave
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
The editor-in-chief of the FPR website discusses the recent conference in Grand Rapids and his latest book, Words for Conviviality.
Highlights
1:00 Pacific Northwesterner in western PA
8:00 Prospects for localism and trad wives now
11:00 Bilbro’s obsessive bibliography
17:00 Printing press 2.0 and Postman problems
25:30 Frederick Douglass, cancer patient
30:00 Margaret Fuller, proto-podcaster
35:00 Melville’s pilgrimage and Jeff’s truck stop oats
40:00 A convivial reading
Resources
Jeff's bio and buy the book (and some more books)
FPR’s excerpt (suitable for nailing on church doors)
Exploring Ivan Illich on the podcast
John reviews Jeff’s early works here and here
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
The AEI scholar and author of American Covenant joins John to talk about a document that he believes could unify we the people, again.
Highlights
1:30 Second home
8:15 The national “we”
13:45 A dignified basis for unity
21:00 Changing culture by changing institutions
25:00 Make Congress boring again
29:00 What women want
32:00 Cheese pizza and Tip O’Neill
37:00 Think Tank U
41:00 A hunger for scallops and solidarity
47:00 Plausible deniability?
50:00 A hopeful Constitution Day
Resources
Yuval's bio and buy the book
FPR’s review
Yascha Mounk, Yuval, and the back of John’s head at AEI
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Longtime ghostwriter Nancy French tells her own tale in the Ghosted: An American Life. French was raised in rural Tennessee and would later provide the words behind famous talking heads but found her own enchanting voice amid political and personal tumult.
Highlights
1:15 Mud pies for Parisians
6:00 Hillbillies on the run
9:30 Romney/Palin ‘08
11:00 Prison break with the Kardashians
13:30 Pulling political punches
20:00 Google University School of Journalism
27:30 French Holy Ghost revival
31:30 Befriending a critic
38:00 Laker girl
39:30 Trusting God with cancer
42:00 Back on the case
Resources
Nancy’s website and buy the book
John’s review
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Timothy Carney, an AEI senior fellow and the author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, talks about the village it takes to raise a child and the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) rise of “No Children Allowed” signs.
Highlights
2:30 A lively home and coffee shop
4:00 Trumpy Christians?
7:15 Find a secular van fam, win a free book!
16:30 Was Hillary right?
22:15 Trickling down to Fishtown?
29:30 House plans, town plans
36:30 Work from home
43:45 Childless for the planet or better by the trillion
54:00 Ponzi scheme or Korean contagion
57:00 The sporting life
Resources
Tim’s bio and buy the book
FPR at 15
Churchy Trump resistance column
Nancy Pearcey’s “Common Good Men”
Korean “Child Free”Zones
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Ashley Colby, founder of the Rizoma Field School, digs up inspiring true stories of resistance and restoration (with references to donkeys, elephants, and our 49th state). Bill Kauffman, author and regular conference closer, weaves Wisconsin professors of the past and the robo-umps of tomorrow into a seamless and side-splitting localist garment. Rory Groves introduces the duo and ponders a porch free of PhDs.
Highlights
1:30 Rory Groves, unlikely agrarian
Ashley Colby: “Doomer Optimism: Life Adjacent to the Machine”
5:30 Adjacent, whether we like it or not
7:45 Donkey driving, mastodon ranching, hospitality boot camp
12:00 Alaskan laundries and cider-sipping city dwellers
Bill Kauffman: “Off the Empire, On Wisconsin”
17:15 A thieving historian
22:00 Rural drama
26:00 Little things mean a lot
33:00 You’re out!
38:30 A midnight tale
Resources
Speaker bios and conference videos
FPR Books and bookshop
Conference co-sponsor Plough
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for our theme music
Brian Miller visits the porch to talk about his new book chronicling life on a Tennessee farm.
Highlights
1:30 Bayou Bengal Volunteer farmer
5:45 A monastic text
11:15 Man of letters
14:00 Pesto chango
15:30 Remote control
18:00 Growing pains
23:00 Lamb on the lam
27:15 The rest of the story
Resources
Buy the book
An excerpt at FPR
Brian’s farm and blog
Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer”
Adam Smith, a philosopher at the University of Dubuque, counterattacks the disenchanted War on Suffering. FPR President Mark Mitchell goes biblical to bring down a heightened politics of insanity. Brass Spittoon podcaster John Murdock looks at a key architect of religious politics and wonders what might happen if his blueprints were followed. Gerald Ford groupie and FPR perfect attendance award winner Jeff Polet opens by reflecting on political goats.
Highlights
Jeff Polet: Introduction
1:30 Statistical sirens
3:00 Humane oxymorons
5:15 Dirty politics
6:15 Animal farm
9:45 Oh yeah, the intros!
Adam Smith: “The Politics of Reenchantment”
10:15 A reading from St. Aldo’s almanac
11:45 Frontlines in the War on Suffering
20:00 Enchanting politics with fairies and green fire
24:00 Institutionalizing flatness
31:00 Supernaturally small
Mark Mitchell: “Politics in Babel”
33:00 Towers trump?
38:00 Name callers
42:00 Crashing symbols
46:00 Abraham skips the bricks
47:15 Hope in failure
John Murdock: “Back to the Future of the Religious Right”
51:45 “The Poll” and holy holes
57:00 Franciscan biography
62:00 White and wrongs
66:00 The limits of integrity
69:00 Polyface politics and ravines made for walking
Resources
Speaker bios and conference videos
FPR Books and bookshop
Conference co-sponsor Plough
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for our theme music
Jeff Bilbro, FPR’s super-beaver EIC and Grove City College professor, looks to ancient mythology to assess modern technology and fiction of the future. Cassandra Nelson of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture is stuck in the middle, a bit like AI itself. Author, teacher, and mother Tessa Carman looks for life in abundance in Minnesota and Maryland. Writer and Berry Center board member Kate Dalton Boyer introduces the speakers.
Highlights
1:00 Kate kicks things off
Jeff Bilbro: “Where Now Are Wayland’s Bones?”
3:30 Kingsnorth and Norse smith explained
12:30 Tempted by ease and justice
15:00 AI amigos for the autonomous
19:00 Computerized convocations
22:00 Wise touch
Cassandra Nelson: “Median Humans and the Life That Really is Life”
26:00 Harboring a secret subtitle
29:15 A hallucinating average machine
34:30 M.A.D. results
41:00 Fancy tooters over computers
45:00 Against photocopies
Tessa Carman: “The Joy of Tech Resistance”
46:30 FPR Match Game
48:00 Manifestos and better tools
51:00 You don’t have to!
55:00 Postman knocks, people dance
63:00 Better names and best practices
Resources
Speaker bios and conference videos
Interview with Jeanne Schindler on Postman Pledge
FPR Books and bookshop
Conference co-sponsor Plough
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for our theme music
Eric Miller, biographer of Christopher Lasch and a professor at Geneva College, plus longtime porcher Jason Peters of Hillsdale College address the role of imagination in shaping our shared reality. Matt Stewart, an associate editor of the FPR website, introduces this duo that has impacted his life in important ways.
Highlights
1:00 Matt Stewart, teacher’s pet/pest and herb connoisseur
Eric Miller: “The Instructed Imagination”
6:00 Hannah Coulter v. Mark Heard
13:30 Collegiate conscience and imagination
16:00 Augustine’s commonweal
20:00 O’Connor’s name calling
23:00 Walker and Wendell looking for hope
Jason Peters: “Imagination: Not Whimsical but Fatal”
27:45 Last year’s speech and this year’s joke
29:30 The propositions begin
35:00 Stoves and stand-up
38:00 Rainbows on the run
43:00 Unified Kauffman and computerized thinking
50:00 Fatalities and old farts
Resources
Speaker bios and conference videos
FPR Books and bookshop
Conference co-sponsor Plough
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for our theme music
Paul Kingsnorth delivered the keynote address at the 2023 FPR conference in Madison, Wisconsin. With help from a diverse band of fellow travelers including Jewish-Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, Anglo-Catholic social critic Malcolm Muggeridge, and the prophetic French-Egyptian Sufi Rene Guenon, the unexpectedly Irish Orthodox Kingsnorth takes listeners on a tour of techno-mirages, holy wells, and green deserts in a search for culture-seeding saints.
Highlights
2:00 Jeff introduces Paul
3:30 Paul introduces his thrift shop shirt
7:30 The disquiet of machine things
12:30 Surface debates and the depths beneath
19:00 Mumford and some on the suicide of the West
25:00 Anti-culture and real culture-making
29:00 Who is on the throne? (Or Paul as a sociological Bill Bright)
35:00 Transhumanist candor
38:00 Signs of light and darkness with Guenon and Spengler
47:00 A reluctant convert
50:00 Leaving the broken center for the margins
60:00 Short on saints
Resources
Paul’s Substack and an interview at FPR
On "AI Demonic" at Touchstone
“The Cross and the Machine” at First Things
Conference videos
Conference co-sponsor Plough
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Paul Kingsnorth, the keynote speaker at the 2023 FPR conference in Madison, Wisconsin, begins things with a bonus talk on the power of prayer in a desecrated western world.
Highlights
1:15 Mark Mitchell’s welcome
4:00 Paul flies in
5:30 A long list of labels
7:30 Roots and power
8:15 My neighbor Vinny (and his dying cousins)
12:30 Centering work
14:00 Citizen culture
19:00 Two trinities
23:00 Our like will not be here again
24:30 Candles to blow
37:30 The still point in the turning world
30:00 An Orthodox Texan’s sermon
32:45 Closing hymn
Resources
Paul’s Substack and an interview at FPR
“The Cross and the Machine”
Conference videos
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Bill Kauffman, author of multiple books including Poetry Night at the Ballpark and long the closing speaker at FPR conferences, talks about the origins of Front Porch Republic and his unique life of letters.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Bill Kauffman
Highlights
1:30 Defending the homeland
2:30 The Closer
7:45 Muckdog memories
12:15 Perfectly sized
15:00 First Man and Senate staffer
18:00 Morning drinks and Mormon journeys
22:15 Life on the fringe
24:00 Not a murderer
26:15 Jimmie Foxx found dead
29:30 Paying the bills
31:30 A Barber in the House
34:30 Bucket listless
36:00 See you in Madison, but I digress
Resources
Bill’s work at FPR, TAC, and The Spectator
Poetry Night at the Ballpark
The Congressional Journal of Barber B. Conable
Liberty Fund
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
The After Virtual conference podcast series closes with a focus on civics and cemeteries. Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism, talks on, well, plutocrats and socialism (plus the importance of property ownership to maintaining the republic). Rachel Ferguson, author of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, highlights the historic role of roads in undermining minority communities and current efforts at neighborhood stabilization. Regular conference closer Bill Kauffman regales the crowd with tales from the crypts of Batavia.
Speakers: Mark Mitchell, Rachel Ferguson, and Bill Kauffman
Highlights
2:30 Mark Mitchell — Why Property Matters
3:15 FPR, born in apocalypse
9:00 Plutocrats and socialists, a love story
19:30 What would the Founders do?
22:15 Rachel Ferguson — What’s Wrong with the Roads?
23:30 Housing many things in the Black Church
26:30 Eugenics, red lines, and roads
30:00 Cars explained, Ike appalled
38:00 Neighborhood Stabilization (and its All-Stars)
46:30 “Paid to talk to me” v. the Jesus people
50:00 Bill Kauffman —The View from the Cemetery
51:00 Grave matters with Walt Whitman
54:00 Masons and monuments
58:30 Wings are overrated
1:00 Barry Goldwater and friends
1:04 Ontologically speaking
1:07 Baseball R.I.P.
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the (new!) date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 21, 2023)
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
The penultimate session from the FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods addresses health. Philosopher Adam Smith from the University of Dubuque and medical doctor Brian Volck, author of Attending Others: A Doctor’s Education in Bodies and Words, take on the medical/industrial complex (with assists from Alasdair MacIntyre and Wendell Berry).
Speakers: Adam Smith and Brian Volck
Highlights
2:15 Adam Smith—Medicine After Virtue
3:15 Medicine in the New Dark Ages
5:00 Out of practice
11:30 The medicalization of everything
16:00 Infected with emotivism
20:00 Curing the disease of freedom in 1851
26:00 De-medicalizing birth, death, and more
29:00 Brian Volck — Hospitality, Responsibility, and Presence: Practicing Medicine as if Bodies Actually Mattered
31:00 Bad metaphors and good definitions
33:00 The trouble with trolleys and telemedicine
41:00 Patients in the flesh
45:00 Paleo-Benedictine hospitality
48:15 Stewarding stethoscopes
51:30 Q & A
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 7, 2023)
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
Chris Arnade, the keynote speaker at the After Virtual conference, has traded global finance for skid row photography. Chris discusses his journey from Wall Street board rooms to a booth at McDonald’s and the associated rejection of careerism and self-definition.
Speaker: Chris Arnade—An Address in the Universe of Meaning
Highlights
3:00 Prayer time around the world
6:45 The liberal emancipation project (of destruction)
10:30 Transcendent values first seen in a traffic jam
16:00 “Everything we believed was wrong”
27:00 Place and the giant sucking sound of NAFTA
30:00 Family ties
32:00 The “meaning” address and its replacement
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 21, 2023)
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America
The Substack home of a traveling man
An NPR story on Chris Arnade
Arnade’s work at The Guardianand The Atlantic
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
The second episode from the FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods looks at education. Jeff Polet discusses walking away from Hope. Angel Adams Parham talks about the elementary power of a rapping Homer. Jason Peters goes back to the future of the educational machine.
Speakers: Jeff Polet, Angel Adams Parham, and Jason Peters
Highlights
1:15 Jeff Polet—Why I Left the Academy
2:00 The news from Nineveh
5:30 Signs of declines
8:30 Searching for a pony
16:30 Jargon, gymnasts, adjudications, and generals
23:15 Gerald Ford comes calling
25:00 Angel Adams Parham—Education for Flourishing: K-16 and Beyond
26:30 Cultural canons and tug-of-war
28:15 Classics and community
32:30 Taking creative license with the gods
34:00 Disturbing images of beauty
40:00 Rapping Homer, Reading Frederick Douglas, and Rediscovering Sundiata
45:00 Resources for Learning
47:00 Jason Peters—The Sin Against the Body: For This They Wept Not
48:30 March madness and the managerial class
51:45 Phone sex prophecy
55:00 Would not a storm by any other name smell just the same
58:00 Even better than the real thing?
64:00 1909 all over again
70:00 Truth buoys up
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 7, 2023)
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
For the first of our episodes from September’s FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods, we go to church. Carl Trueman, Gregory Hogg, and Charlie Cotherman share thoughts on technology and embodied worship in a time of pandemic.
Speakers: Carl Trueman, Gregory Hogg, and Charlie Cotherman
Highlights
1:15 Carl Trueman
3:00 Is it all Protestantism’s fault?
4:00 How to take over an empire
6:15 Reformations and technology
11:00 Overlooked revolutionary sausages
13:45 Our age of social acceleration
16:45 A challenge to holy time
19:00 A challenge to community
20:00 Gregory Hogg
20:15 Christians and plagues
23:00 Masks and noble lies
26:00 Vaccines and Canadians
28:00 Virtual worship?
30:00 Body and Church
31:30 Charlie Cotherman
32:00 Elisha’s physical engagement
35:00 Resurrection, proximity, and presence
39:00 Community and COVID tech
42:30 To the statistics
46:00 Invasive species and unholy shortcuts
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 7, 2023)
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class and President of Front Porch Republic, joins the podcast. Mitchell and Murdock discuss the origins of FPR and the importance of widely-held productive private property in an era when the super rich and socialists have formed an odd partnership.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Mark Mitchell
Highlights
1:30 Mark Mitchell, happy at home chopping wood
5:00 FPR, the early days
9:00 How not to change the world
12:00 The messy remainder of reality
13:00 From Richard Weaver to “You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll be Happy”
19:30 Gnostic temptations v. the Incarnation
23:00 The odd couple: plutocracy and socialism
31:30 The not so odd couple: productive property and democratic citizenship
36:00 The myth of maximal emancipation
39:00 Tocqueville’s aristocratic fears
45:00 Prospects for property in a time of chronic crisis
52:45 Friendly pushback on COVID and climate (with a cameo by Roger Scruton)
60:00 If they are for it, we’re against it
64:00 Loving our neighbor to counter a nationalized focus
Resources
Buy the book
Mitchell’s bio at FPR
An excerpt from Plutocratic Socialism
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Matthew Stewart, author of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California, sits down (literally) with host John Murdock to discuss Stegner’s complicated relationship with the American West. A mobile youth left Stegner yearning for deeper roots. In the 1940s, he landed in the hills surrounding San Francisco Bay, an area soon set for expansive growth. Stegner’s interplay with the region and his own personal history led to the Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose, a National Book Award for The Spectator Bird, and his masterful final work Crossing to Safety. Stewart, who received his Ph.D. in history from Syracuse, digs deeply into Stegner’s prose, places, and personal archives to document this quest for home.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Matthew Stewart
Highlights
2:00 Stewart, man of Geneva and Idaho
5:00 Wallace Stegner 101
7:00 “Geography of hope” and other famous phrases
7:45 A sharp dressed man in the eyes of his student, Wendell Berry
9:30 Ranking the novels
11:30 Mary Hallock Foote controversy
14:00 Life story of a Silicon Valley pioneer
16:45 Family’s outlaw life and death
18:30 California here he comes
19:45 Utopian suburban dreams
22:15 Searching for substance in a “formless non-community”
26:00 Anguished questions of the 1960s
30:15 Fan mail from frustrated parents
33:00 Stuck in Vermont
36:00 Edward Abbey sets the scene
38:00 Finding beauty in the places we know
Resources
Buy the book
Stewart’s bio at FPR
Stegner’s Wilderness Letter
Mary Hallock Foote matter still controversial in 2022
A piece on Stegner and his students
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech and the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. Her most recent book is Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Dr. Hayhoe, a Christian, swings by the Porch to discuss faith and science; effective communication on controversial topics; and the role of disinformation in our discussions about global warming. She also shares on her personal encounters with President Barak Obama and Speaker Newt Gingrich, plus gives her opinion on the East Anglia email disclosure and its impact on climate scientists. A shorter written version of the podcast is available on the Plough website.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Charles “Chuck” Marohn
Chuck Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns and author of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, discusses streets, roads, “stroads,” and the perils of the American traffic system. A trained engineer himself, Marohn once imbibed the discipline’s dominant dogmas. Today, he advocates for cities and towns where slower moving cars can get us where we want to go faster.
Highlights
1:15 A boy from Brainerd
3:45 Strong Towns explained
6:30 What’s an engineer good for?
8:45 Breaking through with talking bears
13:15 A need for speed
16:45 So, what’s a “STROAD”?
17:45 The futon of transportation
20:30 Walking to die in the land of Dr. Seuss
27:00 Philando Castile and traffic trolling cops
36:30 I-49, $700M, and the saints of Shreveport
45:30 Lightning Round with Elon Musk, destroyed stop lights, and more
50:00 Wrapping it up, early in the morning
Resources
Strong Towns website
Chuck’s late-night video that goes viral
Steve Martin the barber is here to help
Allendale Strong fights I-49
Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as well as leadership posts in biotech companies. From 2007-2013, he served as the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration.
A.M. Juster has published something like ten books of original and translated poetry and has served as the poetry editor at First Things and now one of my favorite journals, Plough Quarterly.
These two men might sound pretty different, but they are in fact the same person. Over the course of his conversation with Jeff Bilbro, they discuss his tangles with Anthony Fauci, whether poets or civil servants are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," what makes good political verse, the role of humor in poetry, translating Petrarch, and more.
Resources
A.M. Juster's website
His recommendation of a Richard Wilbur poem
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Will Hoyt
Will Hoyt, author of The Seven Ranges, discusses his journey along the Ohio River into the physical, historical and philosophical interior of the strip-mined region where he lives. In the book, Hoyt transforms the area’s colorful past into a lament over the loss of an “integrative center” last seen in feudal Europe. Well read and well spoken, this carpenter joins everything from surveying techniques to Jimmy the Greek into a compelling narrative of despair and hope.
Highlights
2:15 Unhoused Hoyt, Unhoused Ohio
7:00 This book brought to you by Ingram Barge Company
10:00 Big Coal comes to town
14:30 Corporate Power and the 14th Amendment
21:30 Polarization and the destruction of the medieval inheritance
22:30 The Civil War, then and now, explained
27:00 False opposites
32:15 Power chosen over contemplation
33:00 Make America Medieval (Again?)
37:00 Lightning round begins!
37:30 Jimmy the Greek and the Little Las Vegas
39:30 “Play that Funky Music” (almost)
41:00 Camp meeting revival
42:45 Surveying changes the world
44:00 Wendell Berry gets the Incarnation right and wrong
49:00 Wallace Stegner and the American Inklings
50:30 What’s on the cover?
Resources
Buy the book
Preview of The Seven Ranges from FPR
Hoyt’s FPR articles
“Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads
Ingram Barge Company
“Play that Funky Music” by Wild Cherry
And if you need help getting that last song out of your head,
try this very topical one: “Paradise” by John Prine
Also, our thanks as always to Wendell Kimbrough for the use of “The Ballad of Freida the Goose”
Guest Host: Jeff Bilbro
Guest: Joe Loconte
Front Porch Republic editor Jeff Bilbro sits down with Joe Loconte of The King’s College for a spirited discussion of the book-turned-film A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War. Bonded by war and steeled by friendship, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien produced works of fantasy that have guided us back to reality.
Highlights
1:30 Loconte’s Italian immigrant family
4:00 Bleak poet learns to love goodness
7:45 Myth, not just for escapism anymore
9:30 Joe finds Frodo in his 40s
11:30 Lewis finds MacDonald on a train
13:45 Beowulf, Aeneas, and the hero who faces failure
19:00 Pagans love Christian realism
21:00 A letter to Owen Barfield
24:30 Band of Icelandic brothers
27:15 Behind the scenes
33:00 War, friendship, and imagination
36:00 Courage is key
37:15 Creative friendship, pursued deliberately
Resources
Buy the book
See the trailer
Get to know Joe
Thanks as always to Wendell Kimbrough
Canadian radio broadcaster David Cayley pulls up a chair to discuss Ivan Illich, a renegade priest and professor who argued against schools, missionaries, and modern medicine. Cayley, author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, walks listeners through Illich’s thought and its applications to current tests like the pandemic.
Guest Host: Michael Sauter
Highlights
0:30 Murdock asks, “Storied thinker or Tolstoy story?”
2:15 David Cayley, a man of Ideas
3:00 Sauter conversation with Cayley begins
4:00 Cayley on cassette
8:00 Corruption of the best is the worst, the West in a nutshell
10:15 Charles Taylor in the secular amen corner
11:45 Place, Limits, and Liberty (and Illich)
12:45 Freedom and the Wackosphere
13:45 What is enough?
15:45 “Three Dimensions of Public Choice”
18:00 Technologies you can’t put down
21:00 Free-relatedness and dependency on others
22:15 The risk of birth
24:30 Doorways to nowhere
27:00 Computerized people and COVID
29:30 Cayley’s death cult
31:00 Apocalypse and revelation
33:30 Beware an institutionalized Incarnation
35:30 Illich and friends around the table
Resources
Full interview and Sauter review
Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey
davidcayley.com
Obituary in The Lancet
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch
Find Your Way Home
Prolific author and social critic Os Guinness discusses the current challenges for liberty and his hopes for the future. The Chinese-born, English-educated, Irish-rooted scholar who lives in America also shares insights from his time at L’Abri and talks some Arsenal football.
Highlights
2:00 “Home” to Os Guinness
3:30 Beer in his blood
5:15 Under his own vine and fig
7:45 Hospitality lessons from Edith Schaeffer
10:45 The 1960s, Jefferson Airplane and the long march
12:30 The Call, place, and the Jesus Go-Fest
16:00 Soccer Super League
17:15 A quiet voice?
18:45 Civility and respect for words
19:30 Books over tweets
22:00 An intellectual knee on the neck of America
24:00 Freedoms, negative and positive
25:30 The pandemic and liberty
27:00 Respecting others in a free society
28:30 A Magna Carta from Mount Sinai
31:00 Civic education and the value of transmission
32:00 1776 v. 1789
34:00 Approaches to justice and Black Lives Matter
36:45 A post-rights world?
38:00 (Chief Justice) Burger for lunch
39:30 7 year-old revolutionary refugees of the world unite
42:00 Hope in the face of stark realism
Resources
osguinness.com
The Magna Carta for Humanity
L’Abri
The Williamsburg Charter
Find Your Way Home
Summary
Filmmaker John de Graaf pulls up a chair to discuss his 1997 documentary Affluenza; a forthcoming project on Arizona politician and JFK/LBJ’s Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; the politics of beauty; and a whether John Muir should be cancelled. Singer/songwriter Wendell Kimbrough closes out the show with “The Ballad of Freida the Goose” from his album “Find Your Way Home.”
Highlights
0:50 An FPR podcast, really?
2:15 “Home” to John de Graaf
3:15 Vachel Lindsay and the “Gospel of Beauty”
4:45 Gracy Olmstead's Uprooted
6:00 From Berkeley to a frozen Midwestern VISTA to Seattle
7:30 It all started with the film of the year
8:45 Alan Chadwick, master gardener
9:15 “Affluenza” explained
12:30 20 million views, a best-seller, and in the dictionary
15:45 Beloved by BYU
16:45 Take Back Your Time
18:30 French to Fox News?
20:00 Pandemics and “the good life”
25:00 David Brower, Republican
28:00 Floyd Dominy, a dam man
30:45 Stewart Udall, liberal conservative
35:30 LBJ pressures Udall on Vietnam
38:45 Barry Goldwater, Democratic donor
42:00 Politics of Beauty
43:00 GDP as Holy Grail?
46:15 Cancel John Muir?
50:15 Udall as cultural Mormon
51:00 Will beauty save the world?
52:00 Wendell sings “The Ballad of Freida the Goose”
Resources
John Murdock at Front Porch Republic
John de Graaf at Front Porch Republic
Films of John de Graaf
Vachel Lindsay
Gracy Olmstead’s Uprooted (reviewed here and here)
VISTA
David Brower
Stewart Udall
Floyd Dominy
“Find Your Way Home” album by Wendell Kimbrough
The FPR leadership has decided to make a foray into a new medium (for us). And given this transitional moment in American politics, this seems like a good time. We hosted an on-line discussion that, hopefully, provides an interesting and unique take on current events. For years now we have sought to articulate an alternative to the nationalist, globalist, uniformist vision that has so captivated the ruling classes. The Trump presidency is ending in chaos, and the Biden agenda is yet to be implemented. What are the prospects for localism? Does the post-Trump era open up possibilities for a renewal of local affections and attentions? What challenges are likely to arise in the coming months and years? What strategies should localists pursue?
Four long-time Porchers joined us for this conversation: Patrick Deneen, Bill Kauffman, Katherine Dalton, and Jeff Polet.