As Chris Wolfe recently said, Public Discourse has published a memorial series of essays for Peter Lawler, five years after his death in 2017. I bring it to your attention again because I have somehow ended up having something like the last word in the remembrance, with my new essay on Peter’s interest in pop culture & what it might teach us as well—at any rate, what I learned & what I’m trying to do. This is my debut at Public Discourse:
Pop culture & blogging are connected in ways obvious & less obvious. We might say pop culture is little better than the relief of boredom & the satisfaction of often prurient curiosity & that blogging is little more than gossip or the pursuit of vanity. There is much truth to this perhaps contemptuous, censorious view of the matter, & it is certainly more than a little strange that such a well-educated educator as Peter would spend so much time on things in which he seldom found wisdom.
But there is a defense: Peter was a Tocquevillian & a Christian. Both these aspects of his thought led him to take seriously massive social phenomena & the yearnings of the human heart for fulfillment, even if they were crass or at least inelegant, since those might be signs of honesty, of the absence of contrived ideologies. America meant something to him both because it was his country & because he thought the human drama is on display, in evidence in the popular culture, in the statements that artists make.
Nor is our remembrance over: Carl has also started a series of essays on Peter’s thought on moral & political issues that are newly urgent today, for example, Roe, which is about to be overturned.
Enjoy the readings & conversations—& pick up one of Peter’s books!