The current Friday Feature
duration 35:43
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Latest wisdom from Sound Thinking
- Against hacking babies
Oliver O’Donovan raises questions about IVF and the technologically ordered motive for efficiency - The corruption of the word and the displacement of reality
Josef Pieper on the devastating effects of manipulative speech - In technology, we live and move and have our knowing
George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology - America as the Republic of Entertainment
Neal Gabler on the modern devotion to pleasure - Lex Rex, or Vox Populi Lex, or Rex Lex?
Law professor Li-ann Thio on the theological roots of belief in the rule of law
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Recent Features
Loss of deep engagement
Defined by what we buy
Modernity & the shaping of America
Gratitude & the timid rationalist
Meet one of our Partners
Since March of 2009, Front Porch Republic has published hundreds of pieces on their website, exploring and advancing decentralist and localist ideas, hosting lectures and conferences, and building a unique coalition of writers and thinkers from “left” and “right” to think together about a more humane American future. They’ve even managed quite literally to alter the terms of political and cultural debate: they unwittingly inserted the noun “porcher” into the blogospheric lexicon. FPR aims to bring together thoughtful men and women across America to promote human-scale institutions and the rebirth of community. FPR wants to help people resist the dehumanization that seems to threaten from every quarter, focusing on the overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. Through FPR’s website, books, a semi-annual print journal, an annual conference, and other ventures, they seek to discuss concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future and to bring them back into the public conversation.
On this page, you can browse a listing of readings that Front Porch Republic has made available as Features for Mars Hill Audio members.
A recent Conversation
In her book Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford University Press, 2004), writer and editor Christine Rosen studies the connection between eugenics laws in the early 1900s and current “participatory evolution” practices. While the former were state sponsored and the latter are consumer driven, the same disposition animates both: intoxication with science as the means that will make life better than it is. Rosen explains that during the earlier age of eugenics, science was used to improve the population mainly through forced sterilization. Now, however, it is being used to screen embryos for genetic defects before implantation, thus enabling the disposal of those which test positive for genetic defects. Current eugenics procedures, she states, have the potential to be even more harrowing than those utilized here and in Germany in the early twentieth century because — being market driven — they are regulated and restricted only by the whims of individual consumers. Rosen also explains how and why certain religious leaders and groups were early advocates of eugenics while others argued against it on theological grounds.
The 18 most recent Conversations and Features we’ve released are described here.
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Our most recent Journal
Guests on Volume 163
- ANDREW YOUNGBLOOD, author of Know Thyself: Classical Catholic Education and the Discovery of Self, on the rise of the classical education movement
- R. J SNELL, author of Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope, on living in a chaotic universe
- NICHOLAS DENYSENKO, author of The Church’s Unholy War: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Orthodoxy, on the historical background to Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine
- NIGEL BIGGAR, author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, on the need for a historically informed moral accounting of the British empire
- ROBERT MCNAMARA, author of The Personalism of Edith Stein: A Synthesis of Thomism and Phenomenology, on the deep inner life and penetrating philosophical insights of Edith Stein
- DAVID CAYLEY, author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, on Illich’s understanding of modernity