Curious About Crunchy Conservatives?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Environment, General Politics, ReligionWell, the Washington Post has a profile of the author of the book that started this discussion.
By day he is a right-leaning pundit and opinion editor at the Dallas Morning News — grappling with his disappointment with how the war in Iraq is turning out. At night he comes home in a used 1993 Mercedes sedan with 109,512 miles on it, to live, like Thoreau at Walden, deliberately . (Oh, to hear him spill apologetically on about the car, how he didn’t mean to wind up driving something so un-crunchy, so perceptibly fat cat, but really, when you compare it value-wise to a used Honda, and anyhow, please note that the AC is always broken . . . roll down your window and feel that? It’s the cool breeze of intentional livin’.)The Dreher family lives in a smallish, 1914 Craftsman bungalow near downtown Dallas — a contradiction to the exurb-centric, sprawly-mall Republican ways of the megalopolis that surrounds them.
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He and his wife, Julie, 31, put up religious art — Orthodox icons, prints of divine old paintings. Days after they moved in, he writes of standing at the kitchen window at morning, “wondering what the peaches and figs would taste like later that summer,” frozen in a prayer of gratitude to the Lord.
It’s going to be interesting if this turns into a full fledged movement. I mean, it makes perfect sense for those who are religious to be concerned with how our actions effect the environment. And one has to wonder, if that becomes a key issue with the religious right, will they start coming over to the Dems’ side?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 and is filed under Environment, General Politics, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 4th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
They might be inclined to come over, except for one thing. See Caitlin Flanagan’s article: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1189224,00.html on the prevelence of ideological purists og the left among the democrats. (Of course, they are present on the right of the Republican Party, too. Merely about 30 years later getting started, but trying hard to catch up in the shoot-oneself-in-the-foot sweepstakes.)
May 4th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
It is truly unfortunate that a complex approach to the world and the business of living in it — i.e., and adult personality — can only be expressed politically as “coming over to the Dems’ side.”
May 5th, 2006 at 11:13 am
the term “crunchy conservatives” sounds like they are conservatives who would be “crunchy”, as opposed to “regular” or “chewy” if you ate them.