Front Porch Republic

I encourage you to check out a relatively new blog that I've been reading quite a bit lately: Front Porch Republic. Here is a description of FPR and its purpose from the blog's "About" page:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

Though there is plenty we disagree about, and each contributor can be expected to stand by the words of only his or her own posts, the folks gathered here more or less agree with the above assertions. We come from different backgrounds, live in different places, and have divergent interests, but we’re convinced that scale, place, self-government, sustainability, limits, and variety are key terms with which any fruitful debate about our corporate future must contend. We invite you to read along, and perhaps join the discussion.

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For an introduction to the front porch, see these two articles:

A Republic of Front Porches by Patrick Deneen
What Our Hands Have Wrought by Mark T. Mitchell

Currently, the writers at FPR are engaged in a symposium on the book Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford. For Joe Carter's take on Crawford's book at First Thoughts, see his post, "Shop Class Ain’t for Nerds". See also this insightful response to Joe's post by FPR's Caleb Stegall.