- Feb 5, 2002
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An article I ran across I thought some of you may be interested in.
’Homesteading,’ whatever exactly it is, runs deep in the American psyche and history. Vast stretches of our nation were settled through it. A great number of our forebears—and here I do not mean only settlers or pioneers but people living for generations in one place—lived, worked, and passed on a holding that is rightly called a homestead.
Today homesteading is much talked of, and indeed we might even call it a movement. This, I think, is a very good and telling reality. Clearly, as a society we are realizing we have lost something we need to recover. The tricky thing is to discern just what it is we’ve lost and then how, and also why, to get it back. Here it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees; or perhaps rather, to miss a certain way of life for the field on which it was once lived, and might, just might, be lived again.
The best proximate reason to homestead is to save our families. I don’t use the word ‘save’ lightly. Yet the reality is that our family life is not just threatened, it’s on life-support or even hospice in many places where it hasn’t already perished. I have seen too much and spoken with too many people to doubt the seriousness of our situation. But there is always a way forward.
I do not imply that ‘homesteading’ is some sort of quick fix. Far from it. Rather, I suggest that homesteading—rediscovered and most often reconfigured—can be a serious step, indeed perhaps the crucial concrete step, toward healing our families and homelife. This will necessarily be a principled and intentional process. The reality is that for the vast majority of us there is no other plausible way to do it. Were there functioning rural communitiesto which to turn the situation would be very different.
In their great book Rural Roads to Security(1939), Msgr. Luigi Liguti and John Rawe, S.J. sounded an alarm and made a clarion call for a return to the land. Their concern for and focus on the family was central:
Continued below.
life-craft.org
’Homesteading,’ whatever exactly it is, runs deep in the American psyche and history. Vast stretches of our nation were settled through it. A great number of our forebears—and here I do not mean only settlers or pioneers but people living for generations in one place—lived, worked, and passed on a holding that is rightly called a homestead.
Today homesteading is much talked of, and indeed we might even call it a movement. This, I think, is a very good and telling reality. Clearly, as a society we are realizing we have lost something we need to recover. The tricky thing is to discern just what it is we’ve lost and then how, and also why, to get it back. Here it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees; or perhaps rather, to miss a certain way of life for the field on which it was once lived, and might, just might, be lived again.
The best proximate reason to homestead is to save our families. I don’t use the word ‘save’ lightly. Yet the reality is that our family life is not just threatened, it’s on life-support or even hospice in many places where it hasn’t already perished. I have seen too much and spoken with too many people to doubt the seriousness of our situation. But there is always a way forward.
I do not imply that ‘homesteading’ is some sort of quick fix. Far from it. Rather, I suggest that homesteading—rediscovered and most often reconfigured—can be a serious step, indeed perhaps the crucial concrete step, toward healing our families and homelife. This will necessarily be a principled and intentional process. The reality is that for the vast majority of us there is no other plausible way to do it. Were there functioning rural communitiesto which to turn the situation would be very different.
In their great book Rural Roads to Security(1939), Msgr. Luigi Liguti and John Rawe, S.J. sounded an alarm and made a clarion call for a return to the land. Their concern for and focus on the family was central:
Continued below.
Why We Need a New Kind of Homesteading - LifeCraft
‘Homesteading,’ whatever exactly it is, runs deep in the American psyche and history. Vast stretches of our nation were settled through it. A great number of our forebears—and here I do not mean only settlers or pioneers but people living for generations in one place—lived, worked, and passed on...
life-craft.org
