Wow! This may be the best blog discovery of the year: Front Porch Republic. I found it while looking for articles about NCAA basketball and Tom Izzo, of all things.
The subheadline of this blog is “Place. Limits. Liberty.” Where else do you go to find those three words linked together like that? The “About” page has this paragraph to explain itself:
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.
I was tempted to highlight the words and phrases in that paragraph that push all the right buttons for me, but that would be most of them. I especially like that it links social and political issues to “Place.” That emphasis tempted me to rave about it over at The Spokesrider instead of here.
The only name I recognize in the list of contributing editors and editors-at-large is Rod Dreher — and that’s not someone I’ve paid much attention to.
An article by James Matthew Wilson titled, “Sex, Technocrats, and Technobrats,” suggests that maybe somebody besides myself has actually read Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address. I don’t ordinarily pay much attention to pope-talk, but I’ve read that speech in translation, and have since been amazed at all of the pope’s supporters and enemies who talk as though they’ve read it or heard it but have not. They may have read about it in the newspapers, but they haven’t read what he had to say.
According to this article, the pope has gotten a lot better reception in Africa than on Facebook.
Well, there are probably a lot of other blogs where I can read about pope-things. But this blog ties all these issues to place. If it continues to do that, it’s going to be a keeper.