The Work Begins

An explanation of The Blue Scholar, a brief comment on "why Substack?", some disclaimers, and a vision for the future

If you’ve followed me on Twitter for any amount of time, you probably already know what this is about. But for those that may not, I’ve copied below my introduction post from the Blue Scholar website, written a number of months back, to give you an idea of what you’re getting into. All the cool kids are writing on Substack now and that’s at least part of the reason why I’m doing the same: all the kids I think are cool are doing it and I want to be able to engage directly with their writing. Some more of my thoughts on what I’m doing can be found under the “About” section of my Substack.

With that, here is my explanation for what I hope The Blue Scholar will be:

“I am, by trade, a plumber. I currently serve as a full-time plumbing instructor for my employer’s trade academy, the same employer I began with in June of 2015, long before our academy existed. Through my time in the field as a residential service plumber, my time in our office at various levels of management, and now as someone privileged to pass on knowledge of this trade to those who have quite literally never seen a pair of pliers before, I’ve had opportunities to think about what work means and that pretty much sums up the essence of The Blue Scholar: exploring the meaning of work, primarily and especially (but not exclusively) manual labor.

I’m writing this post from the comfort of a local Irish pub on a computer covered in stickers that read things like “Cubicles Suck”, “Sausage Fingers Club”, and “Dirty Hands, Clean Money”. I don’t think you could have convinced me ten years ago that one day you’d find me either in a pub or with those particular stickers unironically stuck to my laptop, but here we are. There’s a lot about my life that has been unexpected, but perhaps nothing more unexpected than the discovery that plumbing has taken on a meaning for me that is in some way foundational to my identity, a meaning that penetrates – and this is no exaggeration – to every facet of my being. My moral faculties, the way I move through space and time, my emotions, my thought life, my relationship to my neighbors, my ability to support my family, my hopes for the future, my religious sensibilities, my place in the wider community and society, my achy back and the scarred-up hands to which my sausage fingers find themselves attached: nothing in my life remains untouched by labor.

And this inclusive scope, this comprehensive integration of my whole being, this near-exhaustive influence on how I exist in the world, hasn’t yet ceased to fascinate me. I don’t know that it ever will.

A few months ago I found myself looking not just for books on work, but for more formal reviews of those texts. I know that as a plumber who thinks about his work with philosophical, theological, economic, social, and political lenses, I’m a bit of an odd duck, but I had assumed that the internet’s capacity to aggregate those with niche perspectives into networks that would otherwise not exist in the non-digital world due to their rarity in a given geographic radius would have done its work and led to the creation of a website with these kinds of thoughtful reviews. Reviews of books and essays from the perspective of reflective tradespeople must certainly be out there, mustn’t they?!

Apparently not.

“Well,” I thought, “if such a website doesn’t exist, then maybe I should make it. But what to call it?” A number of names presented themselves to me, but most came across as too long, too forgettable, or else almost abhorrently (and unintentionally) elitest. It was my younger brother, a welder, who said to me, “Dude, it’s sitting right in front of us: blue collar scholar.”

“BLUE SCHOLAR,” I responded in all caps. Brilliant. Since “collar” is said when pronouncing “scholar”, I felt I could get away with removing “collar” from between “blue” and “scholar” while still getting the point across in a pithy, poignant way.

I want The Blue Scholar to be a love-letter to manual labor; a network of thoughtful tradespeople contributing not technical how-to manuals or DIY guides, but philosophical and theological reflections on work; a journal producing articles and essays that continue to engage with the question, “What does work mean?”; a collection of resources and reviews of the existing body of literature; a compilation of engagements with the thoughts of writers as ancient as Aristotle and St. Basil the Great, as recent as Richard Sennett and Matthew B. Crawford, and many more in between; and finally, a place where manual labor is not merely touted as a great way to pay the mortgage and the bills, but as a great way to be human.

I make no promises of regularly scheduled content, but I do promise that what is shared will not be slapdash or thoughtless. It will not all be explicitly religious but much of it will be as much of this thinking has happened in religious spheres and I am a religious man.

I hope that, in time, what you come to find here is a robust view of manual labor that commends its practice and maybe, just maybe, inspired to pick up a wrench or a spade or a needle yourself, you find it to be one of the best things to have happened to you.

Truly, the work has just begun.”

So there you have it.

I suspect things are going to develop. Work, economics, vocation, prayer, virtue: there’s a lot to think about. As I find my voice and clarify my thoughts and settle into a niche, my writings will likely be even wider than I’ve indicated above. But I hope that as I wend my way towards something meaningful that you’ll be patient and enjoy the process with me.

This is, after all, a labor, and while it is rarely quick, laboring well is always worth it.