Our September-October was quite a whirlwind! I had five different trips, totaling 16 days away from home. And lots has been happening here on campus — some critical approvals from the county, our third full-time hire, and becoming a Hillsdale College Curriculum School.
Those are all more important than what I’m posting here. Even so, I am pleased and privileged to say that Touchstone Magazine has published my essay “Jesus the Tekton: Timber Framing, Poetic Knowledge, and the Curse of Sin”:
“We may believe [in the biblical picture of sex difference] in our heads, but in a post-industrial economy such as ours, what we know in our bones is that we are, all of us, interchangeable parts. The human person, like plantation-grown and factory-milled lumber, has been commodified and reduced to uniformity for economic utility. We can remind ourselves that we are not disembodied spirits, that our bodies are created by God and are good in all of their uniqueness. We can remind ourselves that men and women are fundamentally different — even as the things which unite us are deeper and more fundamental than our differences — and that these differences are good. But so long as most of us spend forty hours a week laboring in jobs in which bodily particularity is irrelevant, so long as we spend our free time staring at screens with our bodies immobile if not catatonic, we are fighting an uphill battle. What we will know poetically is that our bodies do not matter.”
Read the rest here. It’s paywalled for non-subscribers at the moment, but it should come out from behind the paywall in a few weeks.
Not incidentally, “Jesus the Tekton” is also the name of a panel we’ll be giving at the Ciceronian Society’s annual conference on the integration of the common arts with the liberal arts and fine arts. Thomas and I are proud to be presenting alongside two wonderful friends: Chris Hall, who (literally) wrote the book on Common Arts education, and Jordan Finch, one of the great living timber framers.
The conference this year is just up the road from us (more or less) in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Register here if you’re interested.
