National Small Business Week

I thought folks might like to know that it's National Small Business Week this week, and find some small way to celebrate the local businesses we know and love. One thing we can all do, is make our needed purchases locally when at all possible. Many times that's harder than it ought to be; but ultimately worth the effort.

Everyone needs food and books, and every so often you need clothes - try searching these sites for locally owned retailers in your area:

Local Harvest

Independent Bookstore Finder

Thrift Store Directory


Those of us called to invest a little more in our communities, might like to check this out:

Big Box Tool Kit

I beseech you, if you do nothing else at all - just make room in your inbox for their newsletter, and keep the practice of shopping local on your radar. However, there are a wealth of tools on their site for taking constructive action to promote local businesses, and defend your community from absentee chain stores.


pax, caritas, et bonum-
(h/t to Nathan Origer)

Read more...

New book on Community Land Trusts

For all the Georgists in the audience, you'll want to know about The Community Land Trust Reader.Recently published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, The CLT Reader is a new collection of essays tracing the roots of the land trust movement; and this is an opportune moment in time for this reflection. In this age of soaring foreclosures, foreclosure rates among CLT homeowners are just under half the rate for market-rate homeowners.

Looks like good reading... I'll have to get back to you after I find a chance to sit down with it. Of course, if you get a chance to read it before I do - I'd love to know what you think.

pax, caritas, et bonum.

Read more...

It's never easy...

I make a good faith effort to buy as locally as I can when it's time to make a purchase. My husband and I recently bought an older home, and we find it is time to make several purchases. The sad thing I encounter, again and again, is just how hard it is to choose a locally produced item. Often, the item is not labeled, and clerks are not clear on the item's provenance. Also, increasingly- there simply is no local alternative. But I've found that the looking can be half the pleasure.

In my searching, I've used this site to find products that are at least USA-made:

Still Made in the USA

Every time I go there, I wind down the most delightful rabbit holes, and often find just what I'm in the market for. She does quite a bit of research, and keeps the site regularly updated with breaking news on industry changes. She blogs here.

(I should probably tell her about the beautiful wood flooring I discovered that is made in Michigan from Michigan wood, by Chelsea Plank Flooring in the lovely small town of Chelsea, MI.)


pax, caritas, et bonum

Read more...

La Grande Illusion

The first rule in motion picture funding is “never use your own money.” Approach potential investors and get what you can from state and local grants. States pour millions into the movie industry each year. Why should Hollywood receive subsidies with worldwide box office receipts and home entertainment sales turning flops into moneymakers, and with 50 of the largest companies accounting for 80 percent of $55 billion in annual estimated returns? The film business is far from going under.

Don’t tell Hollywood. Armed with powerful lobby, top studios habitually complain before Congress about massive financial losses as a result of piracy, often using data from “independent” firms to support their claims. For example, in 2005 the Motion Picture Association of America commissioned a study reporting 44% decline in revenue due to college student piracy. Two years later, the same firm revealed the percentage was erroneous. Losses were closer to 15%. Other analysts say the actual figure is 3%.

Read more...

From Dale Ahlquist

An urgent appeal from Dale Ahlquist, President of American Chesterton Society:

Chestertonians !!

In all of the American Chesterton Society’s good work, one of the most exciting things we have ever gotten involved in is helping to start a new high school. Chesterton Academy is just completing its second year of operations in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We featured a cover story about it in Gilbert Magazine not long ago, but it has received other national press because of its uniquely integrated curriculum, its comprehensive approach to classical learning, its faith-based education, its affordable tuition and the fact that it is a grass roots effort. We are trying to fix what’s wrong with the world, and we’re doing more than sitting around and talking about it.

Read more...

The New "New Liturgy"?

Too funny:

"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

Tip of the hat to Brennan Hartley.

Read more...

Ora Pro Nobis

I have been contacted in the last few days by several people who want me and the loyal readers of this blog to pray for them. I don't even have to tell you the stories, because you already know them—lost jobs, mortgages due, babies on the way, etc. Now, the odd thing about asking me for prayer is that I am not a great prayer. Like a lot of people who fondly imagine themselves to be “intellectual”—usually on very little evidence—I tend to take prayer at entirely the wrong level. (By the way,“intellectual,” in my case at least, is a Latin term meaning, “doesn't like physical labor.”) But I suspect that there are really great prayers among our readers. After all, reading this blog is an act of faith in itself. And it is on these “great prayers” that we call.

The job of a distributist is to build up community, and nothing builds community like shared prayer. Community is always an act of faith in each other and in God, and does not exist without both. And aside from charity, prayer is the ultimate act of faith. The Jews have the concept of the minyan, a quorum necessary for public prayer. It was for this reason that the Eucharistic prayer summons a minyan of saints:

Read more...

Lessons from the Amish

In the Spring 2010 issue of the College of Wooster's alumni magazine, there is a very engaging article about the work of two of their professors- one of sociology and one of anthropology. The two have spent the last seven years interviewing and coming to know their local Amish community in depth; and have just published a book on the subject: "The Amish Paradox" detailing much of what they have learned in their seven years of study.

What I find most intriguing is the Amish value of 'gelassenheit', and how it has preserved their culture, and shaped their economy. This value essentially places G-d first, community second, and leaves self-interests last. It is in effect, a cultural value that orders something very close to a Distributist society, in my view.

But don't take my word for it- please read the article. When you click on the link, it will take you to an online copy of the magazine-you can 'turn' pages of the magazine; the article starts on pages 12/13.

pax, caritas, et bonum.

Read more...

Ford Distributist Writes His Plant Manager

Dear Dale,

I am writing this letter in response to your communique issued April 7, 2010. Like you, we too have a vested interest in the continued success of Ford Motor Company that hangs somewhere in the neighborhood of live or die, in terms of our own families’ economic security. In spite of the wretchedness of life on the assembly line, a life freely chosen, a good number of us simply have no other reasonable options. Therefore, we must deal with our collective situation on whatever terms we can accept as a matter of simple family survival.

Reading of your interest in improving our plant’s culture, specifically in regards to the historically antagonistic relationship between hourly workers and salaried personnel, has given me great hope for our collective future. It is true, Dale, we can no longer afford to engage (read lose) in this brutally competitive, capitalistic model of production. It has failed and will continue to fail and ought to fail on its own merits, as a workable system in the production of goods and services in the modern global economy. National and state treasuries are being looted. Whole generations of worker-citizens have been reduced to mere hosts by money-grubbing, parasitic business interests. In short, I agree, gentlemen, a better way- like the one taking form in the states by the new cooperative Mondragon/United Steelworker initiative, is not only possible, but morally imperative, as we move into the future.

Read more...

Revenge of the Weeds

"“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts."

Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds.


H/T to Grace Potts.

Read more...