Dry bones in a valley came together, received sinews and flesh, then breath entered them. What did this valley represent?

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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: February 25, 2006 at 6:19 pm by Eve Tushnet

2006-02-25T18:19:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

HAY UNA DISCOTECA POR AQUI?: Some good snippets from the Crunchy Con blog (which has added Jonah Goldberg, Ross Douthat, and Jesse Walker, yay):

Mitch Muncy:

I suppose I’m thinking of Crunchy Conservatism in the same terms in which Mark Henrie has described [pdf] “traditionalist conservatism”: “It might be said that traditionalist conservatism is not yet a political theory but rather a tradition of social criticism that is working its way to a political philosophy adequate to its deepest moral intuitions.” Mark points out that just as liberalism doesn’t seem to have a satisfactory account of the moral life, traditionalist conservatism doesn’t seem to have an adequate account of politics, so there is, in a real sense, no traditionalist political program.

(link)

Rod Dreher:

At first I am left scratching my head as to why a book by an American written for an American audience has resonance with Europeans. But it does–when I was visiting Fred Gion in Paris in December, he told me (after he finished the galley copy) that the call to political renewal through cultural recommitment was a powerful theme in Europe.

(link)

An anonyreader (man, I hope he’s wrong about this):

In promoting the genuine goods of tradition, community, public beauty, local variety and family integrity on which most conservatives agree, it’s important to disentangle three modes of promoting the perceived Good:

Personal suasion, religious teaching, conversion, appeals to beauty and justice;

Social pressure, the threat of ostracism, moralistic disapproval;

Governmental diktat.
Most of us as Americans are comfortable (as I’ll admit I am) with modes 1) and, oddly enough, mode 3), and deeply resistant to mode 2). As a nation of frontiers, where one may always “light out for the territories,” we have little patience with the intrusive force of the Gemeinshaft; in Switzerland, a former U.S. ambassador to that country informs me, if you litter or jaywalk, little old ladies really will come up and reprimand you. As an anecdote, this is charming; I don’t recommend trying it in New York City. …

Think of how the Temperance movement went from a religious revival to legislative machine imposing Prohibition on the entire country. That’s what happens to ideas in this country–they either remain the preserve of a funky subculture, or they get enacted into law. There is a middle ground, but no American wants to live there. We understand the individual, and we understand the state. We don’t understand society. And perhaps we never will.

(link)

Bruce Frohnen:

Liberalism and its variants are about liberating individuals from the ties that bind. Unfortunately, this not only leaves those individuals lonely, it also leaves them alone when the chips are down and the central government decides it would rather spy on them, put them out of business, or worse.

(link)

Jonah Goldberg:

One of the flaws of the Crunch paradigm as I understand it is that it rejects libertarianism (and hence fusionism) as a useful standard. I’m no libertarian but I think no major government decision should ever be made unless there’s a libertarian in the room explaining to people why he thinks it’s a bad idea. The libertarian won’t always be right, but he’ll be right often enough that he should always be listened to.

(link–I should note, for those following this discussion, that there are lots of libertarians who aren’t individualists–see blogwatch below re “I’m twentysomething and I have too much money”….)

Angelo Matera:

In the end, cultural renewal that doesn’t take into account the new role of freedom is just sentimental. This explains Pope John Paul II’s (and now Pope Benedict XVI’s) relentless emphasis on both faith AND freedom, and why in the end conservative cultural renewal must not fear freedom, but embrace it.

(link)

Dreher:

In my dad’s generation and before, nobody thought much about mobility; you moved back to town because that’s what you did. That’s where your people were, and you made your life work there. That doesn’t happen anymore, and I think this social dynamic, of which I am a part, impoverishes smaller places of the kind of cultural diversity (and perhaps even economic diversity) that they need to thrive. I’m wondering to how the Internet can change that. In the past year in my town, a small independent bookstore has opened. Its owner is a young husband and father my age who relocated there to be near his dad, who retired to the town. He doesn’t have enough business locally to sustain the shop, but he does a big mail-order business over the Internet. Just having a guy like Tommy and his family living in this small town will help make it intellectually and culturally more diverse–and frankly, attractive.

(link)

Small, random thought: People talk about the virtues cultivated by independent farming. And I don’t disagree. (I certainly don’t know enough to disagree.) But from my very limited sense of things, agrarian life also cultivates fatalism and/or a belief in the helplessness of the individual as vs. the weather, the state, etc. Not always, obviously, but as long as we’re talking about tendencies, it seems wrong to ignore the negatives. (And this is apart from other important points about how you feed a fairly huge population, how you get milk cheap, etc. I seem to recall that Hayek had good stuff about population-driven economic change at the end of The Fatal Conceit… but I’m too lazy to go look it up.)

Less-small: Don’t get why “crunchy cons” valorize withdrawal from the mainstream. I didn’t enter the Catholic Church because I liked it, but rather because I believed it was true; but I do, actually, really like the way the Church supports monastic life and also those who get down in the gutter and start punching at the problems. The Church is in the fight. I like that. I got no interest in an insular community (where I would almost certainly be even more alienated and unhelpful than I am now!). …I realize that my phrasing is probably swinging too far in the other direction, here, and I certainly don’t think e.g. moving to a small town is bad! But I really don’t think it’s a good idea for everybody. Actually, as a universal ideal it strikes me as silly (and, potentially, a temptation to ignore those who haven’t attained one’s own level of mobility and choice).

Final thought, not perhaps as snarky as it sounds: Is anything gained by saying “market values” instead of “cupidity,” “greed,” “money-lust” (would that too obviously suggest that the root problem is power-lust, of which money-lust is merely one instance?), or “materialism”? Because to my mind, “market values” is not the name of a sin, but e.g. a theory of pricing (how do we know what the market–alias “people”–values?), and by contrast “spiritual values” is not necessarily the name of a virtue. There seems to be some sort of economic theory being smuggled into a moral critique through this language, and not only have I only a vague idea what that economic theory actually is; not only do I suspect that the more I know about it the more I will disagree!; but it just seems, at base, distracting from specific examples of sin. …Also, if the problem is “market values,” the problem is diffused and located outside ourselves–Gee, Crunchy Con Krupke!–whereas “greed” or “money-lust” are more obviously my fault too.

(I should note, though, that the archaic usage of the word “luxury” [in which it’s not a good thing!] might import enough cultural critique to be satisfying to Rod Dreher as well as to me. Yeah?)

Jane Jacobs, Wendell Berry (hssss!!! fffftttt!!! rrrrr!!!), and others get some play at the blog. Me… I think you can love Dorothy Day, virtue, beauty, and all the rest of it, without signing on to this “crunchy con” thing a’tall. Your comments, as always, very much welcomed.

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