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Episodes
Thank you for gathering at the Brass Spittoon, the podcast of Front Porch Republic. We chew on issues timeless and timely, with a focus on place, limits, and liberty. Find out more at frontporchrepublic.com.
Episodes
Sunday Sep 24, 2023
Sunday Sep 24, 2023
Bill Kauffman, author of multiple books including Poetry Night at the Ballpark and long the closing speaker at FPR conferences, talks about the origins of Front Porch Republic and his unique life of letters.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Bill Kauffman
Highlights
1:30 Defending the homeland
2:30 The Closer
7:45 Muckdog memories
12:15 Perfectly sized
15:00 First Man and Senate staffer
18:00 Morning drinks and Mormon journeys
22:15 Life on the fringe
24:00 Not a murderer
26:15 Jimmie Foxx found dead
29:30 Paying the bills
31:30 A Barber in the House
34:30 Bucket listless
36:00 See you in Madison, but I digress
Resources
Bill’s work at FPR, TAC, and The Spectator
The Congressional Journal of Barber B. Conable
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Thursday Feb 02, 2023
Thursday Feb 02, 2023
The After Virtual conference podcast series closes with a focus on civics and cemeteries. Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism, talks on, well, plutocrats and socialism (plus the importance of property ownership to maintaining the republic). Rachel Ferguson, author of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, highlights the historic role of roads in undermining minority communities and current efforts at neighborhood stabilization. Regular conference closer Bill Kauffman regales the crowd with tales from the crypts of Batavia.
Speakers: Mark Mitchell, Rachel Ferguson, and Bill Kauffman
Highlights
2:30 Mark Mitchell — Why Property Matters
3:15 FPR, born in apocalypse
9:00 Plutocrats and socialists, a love story
19:30 What would the Founders do?
22:15 Rachel Ferguson — What’s Wrong with the Roads?
23:30 Housing many things in the Black Church
26:30 Eugenics, red lines, and roads
30:00 Cars explained, Ike appalled
38:00 Neighborhood Stabilization (and its All-Stars)
46:30 “Paid to talk to me” v. the Jesus people
50:00 Bill Kauffman —The View from the Cemetery
51:00 Grave matters with Walt Whitman
54:00 Masons and monuments
58:30 Wings are overrated
1:00 Barry Goldwater and friends
1:04 Ontologically speaking
1:07 Baseball R.I.P.
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the (new!) date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 21, 2023)
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
Thursday Jan 12, 2023
Thursday Jan 12, 2023
The penultimate session from the FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods addresses health. Philosopher Adam Smith from the University of Dubuque and medical doctor Brian Volck, author of Attending Others: A Doctor’s Education in Bodies and Words, take on the medical/industrial complex (with assists from Alasdair MacIntyre and Wendell Berry).
Speakers: Adam Smith and Brian Volck
Highlights
2:15 Adam Smith—Medicine After Virtue
3:15 Medicine in the New Dark Ages
5:00 Out of practice
11:30 The medicalization of everything
16:00 Infected with emotivism
20:00 Curing the disease of freedom in 1851
26:00 De-medicalizing birth, death, and more
29:00 Brian Volck — Hospitality, Responsibility, and Presence: Practicing Medicine as if Bodies Actually Mattered
31:00 Bad metaphors and good definitions
33:00 The trouble with trolleys and telemedicine
41:00 Patients in the flesh
45:00 Paleo-Benedictine hospitality
48:15 Stewarding stethoscopes
51:30 Q & A
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 7, 2023)
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
Tuesday Dec 20, 2022
Tuesday Dec 20, 2022
Chris Arnade, the keynote speaker at the After Virtual conference, has traded global finance for skid row photography. Chris discusses his journey from Wall Street board rooms to a booth at McDonald’s and the associated rejection of careerism and self-definition.
Speaker: Chris Arnade—An Address in the Universe of Meaning
Highlights
3:00 Prayer time around the world
6:45 The liberal emancipation project (of destruction)
10:30 Transcendent values first seen in a traffic jam
16:00 “Everything we believed was wrong”
27:00 Place and the giant sucking sound of NAFTA
30:00 Family ties
32:00 The “meaning” address and its replacement
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 21, 2023)
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America
The Substack home of a traveling man
An NPR story on Chris Arnade
Arnade’s work at The Guardian and The Atlantic
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
Tuesday Nov 29, 2022
Tuesday Nov 29, 2022
The second episode from the FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods looks at education. Jeff Polet discusses walking away from Hope. Angel Adams Parham talks about the elementary power of a rapping Homer. Jason Peters goes back to the future of the educational machine.
Speakers: Jeff Polet, Angel Adams Parham, and Jason Peters
Highlights
1:15 Jeff Polet—Why I Left the Academy
2:00 The news from Nineveh
5:30 Signs of declines
8:30 Searching for a pony
16:30 Jargon, gymnasts, adjudications, and generals
23:15 Gerald Ford comes calling
25:00 Angel Adams Parham—Education for Flourishing: K-16 and Beyond
26:30 Cultural canons and tug-of-war
28:15 Classics and community
32:30 Taking creative license with the gods
34:00 Disturbing images of beauty
40:00 Rapping Homer, Reading Frederick Douglas, and Rediscovering Sundiata
45:00 Resources for Learning
47:00 Jason Peters—The Sin Against the Body: For This They Wept Not
48:30 March madness and the managerial class
51:45 Phone sex prophecy
55:00 Would not a storm by any other name smell just the same
58:00 Even better than the real thing?
64:00 1909 all over again
70:00 Truth buoys up
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 7, 2023)
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
Monday Nov 14, 2022
Monday Nov 14, 2022
For the first of our episodes from September’s FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods, we go to church. Carl Trueman, Gregory Hogg, and Charlie Cotherman share thoughts on technology and embodied worship in a time of pandemic.
Speakers: Carl Trueman, Gregory Hogg, and Charlie Cotherman
Highlights
1:15 Carl Trueman
3:00 Is it all Protestantism’s fault?
4:00 How to take over an empire
6:15 Reformations and technology
11:00 Overlooked revolutionary sausages
13:45 Our age of social acceleration
16:45 A challenge to holy time
19:00 A challenge to community
20:00 Gregory Hogg
20:15 Christians and plagues
23:00 Masks and noble lies
26:00 Vaccines and Canadians
28:00 Virtual worship?
30:00 Body and Church
31:30 Charlie Cotherman
32:00 Elisha’s physical engagement
35:00 Resurrection, proximity, and presence
39:00 Community and COVID tech
42:30 To the statistics
46:00 Invasive species and unholy shortcuts
Resources
Speaker bios
Conference videos
Save the date: 2023 Conference in Madison, Wisconsin (October 7, 2023)
Thanks to Wendell Kimbrough for his musical talents
Wednesday Oct 26, 2022
Wednesday Oct 26, 2022
Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class and President of Front Porch Republic, joins the podcast. Mitchell and Murdock discuss the origins of FPR and the importance of widely-held productive private property in an era when the super rich and socialists have formed an odd partnership.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Mark Mitchell
Highlights
1:30 Mark Mitchell, happy at home chopping wood
5:00 FPR, the early days
9:00 How not to change the world
12:00 The messy remainder of reality
13:00 From Richard Weaver to “You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll be Happy”
19:30 Gnostic temptations v. the Incarnation
23:00 The odd couple: plutocracy and socialism
31:30 The not so odd couple: productive property and democratic citizenship
36:00 The myth of maximal emancipation
39:00 Tocqueville’s aristocratic fears
45:00 Prospects for property in a time of chronic crisis
52:45 Friendly pushback on COVID and climate (with a cameo by Roger Scruton)
60:00 If they are for it, we’re against it
64:00 Loving our neighbor to counter a nationalized focus
Resources
Mitchell’s bio at FPR
An excerpt from Plutocratic Socialism
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Tuesday Aug 23, 2022
Tuesday Aug 23, 2022
Matthew Stewart, author of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California, sits down (literally) with host John Murdock to discuss Stegner’s complicated relationship with the American West. A mobile youth left Stegner yearning for deeper roots. In the 1940s, he landed in the hills surrounding San Francisco Bay, an area soon set for expansive growth. Stegner’s interplay with the region and his own personal history led to the Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose, a National Book Award for The Spectator Bird, and his masterful final work Crossing to Safety. Stewart, who received his Ph.D. in history from Syracuse, digs deeply into Stegner’s prose, places, and personal archives to document this quest for home.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Matthew Stewart
Highlights
2:00 Stewart, man of Geneva and Idaho
5:00 Wallace Stegner 101
7:00 “Geography of hope” and other famous phrases
7:45 A sharp dressed man in the eyes of his student, Wendell Berry
9:30 Ranking the novels
11:30 Mary Hallock Foote controversy
14:00 Life story of a Silicon Valley pioneer
16:45 Family’s outlaw life and death
18:30 California here he comes
19:45 Utopian suburban dreams
22:15 Searching for substance in a “formless non-community”
26:00 Anguished questions of the 1960s
30:15 Fan mail from frustrated parents
33:00 Stuck in Vermont
36:00 Edward Abbey sets the scene
38:00 Finding beauty in the places we know
Resources
Stewart’s bio at FPR
Stegner’s Wilderness Letter
Mary Hallock Foote matter still controversial in 2022
A piece on Stegner and his students
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Thursday Jun 30, 2022
Thursday Jun 30, 2022
Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech and the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. Her most recent book is Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Dr. Hayhoe, a Christian, swings by the Porch to discuss faith and science; effective communication on controversial topics; and the role of disinformation in our discussions about global warming. She also shares on her personal encounters with President Barak Obama and Speaker Newt Gingrich, plus gives her opinion on the East Anglia email disclosure and its impact on climate scientists. A shorter written version of the podcast is available on the Plough website.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Katharine Hayhoe
Highlights
1:30 A pine forest smells like home
2:45 The gendered physics of a scientific career
5:45 Friction from the fellow faithful
10:15 Working with Gingrich, Obama, and Trump
15:30 Pelosi and Gingrich were on the couch. So, what went wrong?
20:45 COVID, climate, and the Church of Facebook
24:30 Dr. Fauci, East Anglia emails, and arrogance
28:30 Tree rings, Skeptical Science, and the “trick”
33:30 Nit-picking on emails?
37:00 Al Gore enters the conversation
39:45 Rolling loaded weather dice
41:45 What communicates in a polarized time?
45:45 Dealing with the “dismissives”
49:00 Scriptural models for the overly skeptical
52:00 N.T. Wright and the end of the world as we know it?
55:00 Katharine’s vast media empire explained
Resources
Dr. Hayhoe’s website
PBS Global Weirding series
The latest book: Saving Us
Murdock on Skeptical Science and “hide the decline”
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Chuck Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns and author of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, discusses streets, roads, “stroads,” and the perils of the American traffic system. A trained engineer himself, Marohn once imbibed the discipline’s dominant dogmas. Today, he advocates for cities and towns where slower moving cars can get us where we want to go faster.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Charles “Chuck” Marohn
Highlights
1:15 A boy from Brainerd
3:45 Strong Towns explained
6:30 What’s an engineer good for?
8:45 Breaking through with talking bears
13:15 A need for speed
16:45 So, what’s a “STROAD”?
17:45 The futon of transportation
20:30 Walking to die in the land of Dr. Seuss
27:00 Philando Castile and traffic trolling cops
36:30 I-49, $700M, and the saints of Shreveport
45:30 Lightning Round with Elon Musk, destroyed stop lights, and more
50:00 Wrapping it up, early in the morning
Resources
Strong Towns website
Chuck’s late-night video that goes viral
Steve Martin the barber is here to help
Allendale Strong fights I-49