The Brass Spittoon

After Virtual: Civic Life

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 

After Virtual: Health

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 

After Virtual: Chris Arnade

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 

After Virtual: Education

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 

After Virtual: The Church

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 

Mark Mitchell on Plutocratic Socialism

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 

Buy the book 

Mitchell’s bio at FPR 

An excerpt from Plutocratic Socialism 

Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home 

Matt Stewart on Wallace Stegner

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

Buy the book

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

Katharine Hayhoe Talks Climate Change

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 

Skeptical Science 

Murdock on Skeptical Science and “hide the decline” 

Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home 

Chuck Marohn on the Human Errors of Traffic Engineering

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

 

Poetry and Politics with A.M. Juster

Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as well as leadership posts in biotech companies. From 2007-2013, he served as the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. 

A.M. Juster has published something like ten books of original and translated poetry and has served as the poetry editor at First Things and now one of my favorite journals, Plough Quarterly. 

These two men might sound pretty different, but they are in fact the same person. Over the course of his conversation with Jeff Bilbro, they discuss his tangles with Anthony Fauci, whether poets or civil servants are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," what makes good political verse, the role of humor in poetry, translating Petrarch, and more.

Resources

A.M. Juster's website

His recommendation of a Richard Wilbur poem