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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
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
Monday Nov 22, 2021
Monday Nov 22, 2021
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
His recommendation of a Richard Wilbur poem
Tuesday Nov 02, 2021
Tuesday Nov 02, 2021
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Will Hoyt
Will Hoyt, author of The Seven Ranges, discusses his journey along the Ohio River into the physical, historical and philosophical interior of the strip-mined region where he lives. In the book, Hoyt transforms the area’s colorful past into a lament over the loss of an “integrative center” last seen in feudal Europe. Well read and well spoken, this carpenter joins everything from surveying techniques to Jimmy the Greek into a compelling narrative of despair and hope.
Highlights
2:15 Unhoused Hoyt, Unhoused Ohio
7:00 This book brought to you by Ingram Barge Company
10:00 Big Coal comes to town
14:30 Corporate Power and the 14th Amendment
21:30 Polarization and the destruction of the medieval inheritance
22:30 The Civil War, then and now, explained
27:00 False opposites
32:15 Power chosen over contemplation
33:00 Make America Medieval (Again?)
37:00 Lightning round begins!
37:30 Jimmy the Greek and the Little Las Vegas
39:30 “Play that Funky Music” (almost)
41:00 Camp meeting revival
42:45 Surveying changes the world
44:00 Wendell Berry gets the Incarnation right and wrong
49:00 Wallace Stegner and the American Inklings
50:30 What’s on the cover?
Resources
Preview of The Seven Ranges from FPR
“Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads
“Play that Funky Music” by Wild Cherry
And if you need help getting that last song out of your head,
try this very topical one: “Paradise” by John Prine
Also, our thanks as always to Wendell Kimbrough for the use of “The Ballad of Freida the Goose”
Thursday Sep 23, 2021
Thursday Sep 23, 2021
Guest Host: Jeff Bilbro
Guest: Joe Loconte
Front Porch Republic editor Jeff Bilbro sits down with Joe Loconte of The King’s College for a spirited discussion of the book-turned-film A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War. Bonded by war and steeled by friendship, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien produced works of fantasy that have guided us back to reality.
Highlights
1:30 Loconte’s Italian immigrant family
4:00 Bleak poet learns to love goodness
7:45 Myth, not just for escapism anymore
9:30 Joe finds Frodo in his 40s
11:30 Lewis finds MacDonald on a train
13:45 Beowulf, Aeneas, and the hero who faces failure
19:00 Pagans love Christian realism
21:00 A letter to Owen Barfield
24:30 Band of Icelandic brothers
27:15 Behind the scenes
33:00 War, friendship, and imagination
36:00 Courage is key
37:15 Creative friendship, pursued deliberately
Resources
Thanks as always to Wendell Kimbrough
Monday Jul 05, 2021
Monday Jul 05, 2021
Canadian radio broadcaster David Cayley pulls up a chair to discuss Ivan Illich, a renegade priest and professor who argued against schools, missionaries, and modern medicine. Cayley, author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, walks listeners through Illich’s thought and its applications to current tests like the pandemic.
Guest Host: Michael Sauter
Highlights
0:30 Murdock asks, “Storied thinker or Tolstoy story?”
2:15 David Cayley, a man of Ideas
3:00 Sauter conversation with Cayley begins
4:00 Cayley on cassette
8:00 Corruption of the best is the worst, the West in a nutshell
10:15 Charles Taylor in the secular amen corner
11:45 Place, Limits, and Liberty (and Illich)
12:45 Freedom and the Wackosphere
13:45 What is enough?
15:45 “Three Dimensions of Public Choice”
18:00 Technologies you can’t put down
21:00 Free-relatedness and dependency on others
22:15 The risk of birth
24:30 Doorways to nowhere
27:00 Computerized people and COVID
29:30 Cayley’s death cult
31:00 Apocalypse and revelation
33:30 Beware an institutionalized Incarnation
35:30 Illich and friends around the table
Resources
Full interview and Sauter review
Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey
Obituary in The Lancet
Sunday May 02, 2021
Sunday May 02, 2021
Prolific author and social critic Os Guinness discusses the current challenges for liberty and his hopes for the future. The Chinese-born, English-educated, Irish-rooted scholar who lives in America also shares insights from his time at L’Abri and talks some Arsenal football.
Highlights
2:00 “Home” to Os Guinness
3:30 Beer in his blood
5:15 Under his own vine and fig
7:45 Hospitality lessons from Edith Schaeffer
10:45 The 1960s, Jefferson Airplane and the long march
12:30 The Call, place, and the Jesus Go-Fest
16:00 Soccer Super League
17:15 A quiet voice?
18:45 Civility and respect for words
19:30 Books over tweets
22:00 An intellectual knee on the neck of America
24:00 Freedoms, negative and positive
25:30 The pandemic and liberty
27:00 Respecting others in a free society
28:30 A Magna Carta from Mount Sinai
31:00 Civic education and the value of transmission
32:00 1776 v. 1789
34:00 Approaches to justice and Black Lives Matter
36:45 A post-rights world?
38:00 (Chief Justice) Burger for lunch
39:30 7 year-old revolutionary refugees of the world unite
42:00 Hope in the face of stark realism
Resources
Monday Mar 22, 2021
Monday Mar 22, 2021
Summary
Filmmaker John de Graaf pulls up a chair to discuss his 1997 documentary Affluenza; a forthcoming project on Arizona politician and JFK/LBJ’s Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; the politics of beauty; and a whether John Muir should be cancelled. Singer/songwriter Wendell Kimbrough closes out the show with “The Ballad of Freida the Goose” from his album “Find Your Way Home.”
Highlights
0:50 An FPR podcast, really?
2:15 “Home” to John de Graaf
3:15 Vachel Lindsay and the “Gospel of Beauty”
4:45 Gracy Olmstead's Uprooted
6:00 From Berkeley to a frozen Midwestern VISTA to Seattle
7:30 It all started with the film of the year
8:45 Alan Chadwick, master gardener
9:15 “Affluenza” explained
12:30 20 million views, a best-seller, and in the dictionary
15:45 Beloved by BYU
16:45 Take Back Your Time
18:30 French to Fox News?
20:00 Pandemics and “the good life”
25:00 David Brower, Republican
28:00 Floyd Dominy, a dam man
30:45 Stewart Udall, liberal conservative
35:30 LBJ pressures Udall on Vietnam
38:45 Barry Goldwater, Democratic donor
42:00 Politics of Beauty
43:00 GDP as Holy Grail?
46:15 Cancel John Muir?
50:15 Udall as cultural Mormon
51:00 Will beauty save the world?
52:00 Wendell sings “The Ballad of Freida the Goose”
Resources
John Murdock at Front Porch Republic
John de Graaf at Front Porch Republic
Films of John de Graaf
Gracy Olmstead’s Uprooted (reviewed here and here)
“Find Your Way Home” album by Wendell Kimbrough
Wednesday Jan 27, 2021
Wednesday Jan 27, 2021
The FPR leadership has decided to make a foray into a new medium (for us). And given this transitional moment in American politics, this seems like a good time. We hosted an on-line discussion that, hopefully, provides an interesting and unique take on current events. For years now we have sought to articulate an alternative to the nationalist, globalist, uniformist vision that has so captivated the ruling classes. The Trump presidency is ending in chaos, and the Biden agenda is yet to be implemented. What are the prospects for localism? Does the post-Trump era open up possibilities for a renewal of local affections and attentions? What challenges are likely to arise in the coming months and years? What strategies should localists pursue?
Four long-time Porchers joined us for this conversation: Patrick Deneen, Bill Kauffman, Katherine Dalton, and Jeff Polet.