The Cult of Efficiency and Saving Our Families

I finally posted the third part of Howard King's exploration of the themes raised in Ralph Borsodi's This Ugly Civilization.

In this third installment, The Efficiency Invasion: How Industrialism Destroyed the Traditional Family, King looks at the effect the cult of efficiency, which was born and honed in the factories, had when it was transferred to other institutions, especially the family.

Turns out I never read this article back when I had first discovered Howard King's writings. Perhaps it was longer than I could quickly digest. But I tell you, I think everyone needs to read this one. Agrarians will find great encouragement concerning the road they are travelling, and others will hopefully have their eyes opened as to the great danger their families are in.

It will take me a while to fully digest and inculcate the suggestions King ends the article with as he addresses "Saving the Family". I would be interested in hearing how others are putting some of these principles into practice in their own families.

Easter, Property Hunting and Next Howard King Article

I wish I had the time to make this post longer, and go into greater detail; but I have two boys who want to play a new game with me (one my youngest made up himself) and I have already taken over an hour posting the next Howard King article. As Herrick Kimball mentions, blogging has a dark side, it takes time away from family.

We spent close to a week over Easter to be with family out in western PA. It was a good time of being with family and seeing our new grand-niece (I'm now an official great uncle!). We also got the opportunity to see a couple Amish homes for sale. We are still looking to the Lord for guidance and provision concerning moving out to be closer to family and to get some land debt-free. This all explains why it has been a while since I've last posted.

I wanted to get the next two parts of Howard King's discussion of Ralph Borsodi's This Ugly Civilization up today, but I'll have to settle to just getting the next part up: Industrialism: Rooted in Greed. Hopefully it won't take me too long to get part three up.

Well, I'm off to play my son's new game. It doesn't have a name, but it has Orcs and other such things and seems to be loosely based on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I think I'm in for it though. My sons have already played this game before and are busily creating new armies. I might have a chance, if only I can get a few Ents.

Happy Birthday and Howard King

As a result of my earlier post, "Whatever Happened to Families?" I ended up renewing my correspondence with Phil Lancaster. Besides the joy of catching up with my distant mentor, I was excited to find out that he was willing to send me the different agrarian articles that were published in Patriarch Magazine by Howard King. I think there are seven all together.

It will take me a while to complete it, but I hope eventually to have a fully searchable website up that will be able to host many different articles on Christian Agrarianism and Christian Manhood, listed by categtories with the ability to interact via comments similar to what we can do today with blogs.

My thought is to use a combination of PHP, MySQL as a database back end, and maybe try and figure out Blogger's API to see if it can handle the interactive comments. I'd sure appreciate any recommendations for handling the comments. I don't want to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to (although the experience would be good for me as I prepare for PHP Certification this year).

As today is my birthday, I thought it would be a good time to finally go public with this project. I posted the first article by Howard King called "Families and Machines" over on a new blog Patriarch Magazine Archives. I hope to add a new one of King's articles each week. That will give us time to read them and interact with them. Interspersed with the article posting will be my regular posts.

I'm pretty excited about all of this, and I hope that posting these articles will be a benefit to others as well!