hh <—Olivia is helpppppppppppppppppppping my type this blog post.
Every morning I check my email after breakfast. Usually the girls are done too, but not always. On mornings when I get particularly high amounts of email things like this happen:
Olivia is getting bigger
My little teeny tiny one is going to preschool tomorrow. I can’t believe it. Some of you readers were here waiting for her to be born, and now she’s making up stories and learning her letters and wrapped up in the Little House series. Ack! I can’t believe it’s true.
The whole and its parts
Give a listen to this conversation over at Mars Hill Audio Journal between Ken Myers and Patrick Deneen. Deneen teaches political theory at Georgetown University, and he and Myers discuss the philosophy of Wendell Berry, democracy, and the nature of contemporary politics.
Myers observes–with particular poignancy to our current election–that in the early years of this country, the Americans thinking deeply about the nature of governance and legislation were also the ones governing and legislating. In the last hundred years, the particular tasks of politics (and really, the particular tasks that make up all our lives) have been atomized into distinct specializations performed by experts, so that many politicians spend careers focused on the specializations of campaigning and legislating without dealing with communities as a whole.
The philosophy of specialization and the metaphor of the machine have brought a similar fragmentation to every corner of our lives; our daily jobs, families, and our selves.