by John Francis Nieto
The following paper was read at the conference “The Idea of a Village,” May 2016. A video of the lecture can be found here.
We of the twenty-first century look for the village in legend and folk tale, to some extent in history and there, much more as we look back, less and less as we come forward. This is no accident, for reasons I will go on to point out. This fact and a few others make much of what I am about to say seem ‘abstract’ and ‘ideal’. Yet what I say here about the village is utterly ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’. Man cannot—I propose—have healthy familial life and just political order unless these take root and find support in village life. Continue reading “Nature and Art in the Village”