Category: Attitude

Speaking of Faith

A remarkable program airs on Public Radio in much of the country: Speaking of Faith, with Krista Tippett, from American Public Media. Our local NPR affiliate doesn’t carry it, but it is available as a podcast, too, and I’ve been listening for a few years now.

SOF is not where to go for Orthodoxy, large- or small-O. (If you want an orthodox Christian version, subscribe to Mars Hill Audio.) But in a country where public schools shun religion, even as an academic study, thus tacitly marking it off as singularly unimportant (or at least unworthy of study), it is heartening to have a significant public institution that recognizes, as does SOF, that (1) faith matters are important and (2) faith is not confined to organized religions.

I risk misunderstanding if I don’t digress for a moment:

  • I don’t mean by point 2 to deprecate organized religion. “I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church,” after all. My point is that many ideologies that purport to be secular are in practice part of the same genus as explicit religion. SOF seems to understand that by covering a wide array under its “Faith” umbrella.
  • I am not a fan of “religion” or “organized religion” in any generic sense, anyway. Ask me about a specific religion and I may have an opinion, but not about religion in general. Or even about “atheism.” (“What God don’t you believe in? … Ugh! Good for you! I don’t believe in that one, either.”)

Beyond the two heartening messages enumerated above, I find much at SOF that allows me empathically to understand common human yearnings that that most religions share. (I note that without intending to imply equivalence of religions in satisfying those yearnings.)

SOF programs range from unbearable (e.g., her show on Voodoo lacked any deep yearning I could relate to) to intriguing to delightful. Even the March 4, 2010 show, where Tippett interviews a guy with a bunch of Just-So Stories about the “Evolution of God” included some thought-provoking moments (sometimes a just-so story sounds plausible).

I should mention that the BBC has podcasts that repeatedly take up religious topics and discuss them at a fairly high level – higher that SOF when tends toward the touchy-feely. But I’m still grateful that SOF is on the American airwaves.

Lighting an Economic Candle

If it’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness, Allan Carlson, an Editor at Large over at the Porch (and a pretty major figure is real conservative American thought for decades now), has done a better thing recently, and I the curser of darkness pass it along.

Carlson’s keynote address for a University lecture series starts, necessarily, with a little darkness-cursing to set the stage:

Eighteen months of severe recession have brought to the surface old truths that many chose to forget when times seemed to be good:  the business cycle has not been eliminated; finance capitalism is by its nature unstable; politically-connected corporations commonly escape market discipline; and there is nothing conservative about the “creative destruction” of a capitalist economy.

…As one commentator noted in the mid 1930’s, the label “conservative” had then been thoroughly “discredited,” twisted by the “apostles of plutocracy” into a defense of “gamblers and promoters.”

He then turns to the more illuminating task at hand, noting recent historic

seekers after a “Third Way,” a social and economic system that in important respects would be neither capitalist nor socialist.

In Europe, these seekers included:  Great Britain’s Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, architects of the Distributist program [to which I will return]; the Russian agrarian economist Alexander Chayanov, who crafted a remarkable theory of “the Natural Family Economy”; the Bulgarian peasant leader Alexander Stamboliski, who turned his nation into a model agrarian republic and co-founded the “Green International” in 1923; Nancy Eriksson, a Member of Sweden’s Parliament who defended a curious political movement that might be accurately labeled, “The Desperate Swedish Socialist Housewives”; and Gilbert Dru, Etienne Gilson, and Wilhelm Roepke, architects of a vibrant mid-20thCentury Christian Democracy that aimed to build a Humane Economy.  These episodes effervesced in events of brilliance and excitement, sometimes reaching fruition, only to fade in the face of the two main 20th Century ideological contestants:  capitalism and communism.

Then he summarizes the true core of his talk:

Tonight, I want to tell you about three American writers and activists who also have been part of this quest for a Third Way:  Ralph Borsodi; Herbert Agar; and Wendell Berry.  I will also suggest ways in which their examples and ideas may help us understand the current economic crisis and point toward an alternate Conservatism for the decades ahead, one combining a preferential option for the natural family with a more decentralized, human scale economy and a curtailing of the “national security state.”

There’s enough thereafter to make almost anyone squirm. Anyone who thinks Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are genuine conservatives may go postal upon reading it. But it challenges me, too: can my vision of walkable cities and food co-ops survive except as parasitic of those who live in rural areas and burn fossil fuel to get their edibles to my cozy co-op or picturesque farmers’ market? But what becomes of community and “Front Porch” conversations if everyone’s sitting on their own 40 acres with their mule?

I don’t think I can commend it too highly or excerpt its treasures adequately. My PDF version for my archives is already heavily marked up.  You must read it yourself if you, like I, suspect that we’re toast economically in the short term but hope for a humane life beyond the coming collapse.