Download Free Rebuilding The Front Porch Of America Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Rebuilding The Front Porch Of America and write the review.

In the twenty years since this book was first published, our nation's communities - from urban centers to rural and small communities dotting our landscape - have had their foundations rocked to the core. Yet, despite the economic, social, and cultural challenges they have experienced, communities all across our country are showing their resilience by reinventing themselves. This is especially true for many of rural and small communities whose persistence and self-determination show the same creativity, the same grit, the same shared values that brought them into existence. One of the ways these communities are doing this is by engaging in community making through the arts. The arts invite us to tell our story and listen to the story of others. As we work together and celebrate our community creativity, the arts bring people of all ages, genders, races, religions, and economic backgrounds together for the common good of reconnecting with each other and celebrating who we are as individuals and communities. Community arts provide a new gathering place, a cultural and spiritual touchstone that is a source of community revitalization and neighborhood revival. I believe our rural and small communities are creating the map our nation is searching for that will help us navigate the challenges awaiting all of us as we work together rebuilding the front porch of America.
A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.
ROBERT GARD'S TIMELESS BOOK is a moving account of one man's struggle to bring his dream of community-building through creative theater to citizens around the country. He traveled across America -- from New York's Finger Lakes to the prairies of Alberta, Canada, to the backwoods of northern Wisconsin -- discovering and nurturing the folklore, legends, history, and drama of the region. He talked to ballad singers, painters, tellers of tall tales, and farm women, whose poetry and painting reflected the elemental violence of nature and quiet joys of neighborliness. Readers will discover in Grassroots Theater a spiritual autobiography of Robert Gard, a rare chronology of a little-known era in theater history, useful projects for local community groups, and lively discussion of such cultural themes as the role of the arts in American democracy. Grassroots Theater reminds us that an individual's creative vision transcends technology, current events, and changing demographics. Writes Gard, "The knowledge and love of place is a large part of the joy in people's lives. There must be plays that grow from all the countrysides of America, fabricated by the people themselves, born of their happiness and sorrow, born of toiling hands and free minds, born of music and love and reason".
"In 1948, Harry Truman, President of the United States, almost fell through the ceiling of the Blue Room in a bathtub into a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution. A team of the nation's top architects was hastily assembled to inspect the White House, and upon seeing the state the old mansion was in, insisted the First Family be evicted immediately. What followed was the biggest home-improvement job the nation had ever seen"--
The first volume in D.J. Molles's bestselling series, now in a special edition with the bonus novella The Remaining: Faith. In a steel-and-lead encased bunker a Special Forces soldier waits on his final orders. On the surface a bacterium has turned 90% of the population into hyper-aggressive predators. Now Captain Lee Harden must leave the bunker and venture into the wasteland to rekindle a shattered America.
"The bestselling author of Bowling Alone offers [an] ... examination of the American Dream in crisis--how and why opportunities for upward mobility are diminishing, jeopardizing the prospects of an ever larger segment of Americans"--
In the United States the conventional left/right distinction has become increasingly irrelevant, if not harmful. The reigning political, cultural, and economic visions of both the Democrats and the Republicans have reached obvious dead ends. Liberalism, with its hostility to any limits, is collapsing. So-called Conservatism has abandoned all pretense of conserving anything at all. Both dominant parties seem fundamentally incapable of offering coherent solutions for the problems that beset us. In light of this intellectual, cultural, and political stalemate, there is a need for a new vision. Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto assembles thirty-one essays by a variety of scholars and practitioners--associated with Front Porch Republic--seeking to articulate a new vision for a better future. The writers are convinced that human apprehension of the true, the good, and the beautiful is best realized within a dense web of meaningful family, neighborhood, and community relationships. These writers seek to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. In short, Front Porch Republic is dedicated to renewing American culture by fostering the ideals necessary for strong communities.
Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.
What is the similarity between battery chicken, iris scans, Facebook friends, and porn videos? They are all features of a technical system built to satisfy our desires and to suppress our fears. It is a so-called hyperreality, an improved version of natural reality, promising wealth, security, and belonging. However, behind the shiny appearance we can detect a few dangerous mechanisms. Increasingly our tools are controlling us, instead of the other way around, and we are steadily rebuilding the world into a machine with laws we are unable to change. What are the risks of this machine? How can we discern the illusions of hyperreality? With insights derived from René Girard and Jacques Ellul, among others, this book calls for a joyful spiritual life, in the midst of stubborn reality.