Recently in Profound Category
Only Collect « a historian's craft
The work of a young historian: "And the work is: Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You're five years old. Don't presume too much to know what's important and what isn't. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it's just one line saying 'Never read this again'; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship." Who knew there was a professional niche for hoarding evidently useless information? (Via Jollyblogger.)
Service with a Smile - Features - Philanthropy Roundtable
The remarkable story and business philosophy of Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy.
Gen. Barrow's lesson in dying - Crunchy Con
"What I want to tell you is this: you can probably think of an old man or old woman in the periphery of your life, someone who may or may not be as illustrious or as accomplished as Gen. Barrow was, but who still has quite a story to tell. You may have thought to yourself that someday, you'd like to sit down with that person and have a long talk. But everydayness sets in, and you never do get around to it. Suddenly, you're out of days. The moment has passed. There's nothing left but regret."
The New Atlantis » Technology, Culture, and Virtue
"t has been during this short period of industrialization that most of our longstanding cultural forms have attenuated, faded, or gone wholly out of existence. Writing as a farmer, Berry has repeatedly lamented the decline of the family farm as a locus of human community and the embodiment of numberless forms of cultural knowledge and practices. But everywhere we see around us the ruins of once vibrant culture. Most of us know little or nothing of how to produce food. More and more of us cannot build, cannot fix, cannot track, cannot tell time by looking at the sky, cannot locate the constellations, cannot hunt, cannot skin or butcher, cannot cook, cannot can, cannot make wine, cannot play instruments (and if we can, often do not know the songs of our culture by which to entertain a variety of generations), cannot dance (that is, actual dances), cannot remember long passages of poetry, don't know the Bible, cannot spin or knit, cannot sew or darn, cannot chop wood or forage for mushrooms, cannot make a rock wall, cannot tell the kinds of trees by leaves or the kinds of birds by shape of wing--on and on, in a growing catalogue of abandoned inheritance....
"By disconnecting culture from nature and regarding nature as an enemy to be conquered, we have, above all, disconnected ourselves from the most important aspect of culture: the inexorable lessons of the limits of human power and the pitfalls of human efforts at mastery."
Rocks In My Dryer: A Letter To Myself in 1987
Some retro-perspective from a 35-year-old to a 15-year-old: "First of all, Honey, we need to talk about the eye make-up. If God intended you to have electric blue eyelashes, He would've made you a Smurf. Second of all, you're not fat. Look in the mirror and memorize what (have mercy!) 105 pounds looks like, because you will never, NEVER see it again." Read the whole thing.
Conservative Canon « Marty Andrade
A collection of links to lists of must-read books on political philosophy, economics, culture, etc.
Scientist explains conservatism's success - Crunchy Con
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt:
"I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.
"When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label 'elitist.'...
"But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other's selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy."
Urban Review STL: Visiting the Parents & Grandparents
Steve Patterson returns to a small Mennonite cemetery near Corn, Oklahoma, where his grandparents are buried, and reflects on the changes in lifestyle since their time: "In our era of agribusiness we've lost so much -- namely the ability to sustain ourselves individually and as a community. My grandparent's generation lived longer lives than their kids largely, I think, because their diet wasn't composed of overly processed and packaged food. Their diet was mostly organic produce & meats. They didn't call it organic, it just was."
Me and My Girls - The Night of the Gun - David Carr - NYTimes.com
An excerpt from New York Times columnist David Carr's new autobiography. He investigates his past as a junkie and strips away some of the romantic gloss he had put on his past. (Via Alarming News.)
World On the Web: Theologies of work, Part III
Latest in a thought-provoking series on the deficiencies of the evangelical theology of vocation: "It was Frederick Buechner who wrote that your vocation is 'where your deepest joy meets the world's deepest need,' and I think we ought to maintain some of that reverence -- and relevance -- as we consider what work we will do with our hands and minds."
