Dreher on Phil Bess, "faith, reason, and urban design."

Catholic "new urbanist" and classical architect Philip Bess is a dear friend and colleague, and I know I've mentioned his work here at Mirror of Justice many times (and, from time to time, vented my friendly frustration with some of the more preening and irritating aspects of some new-urbanist writing).  (Buy his "Til We Have Built Jerusalem" here, after reading my First Things review!)  Here, Rod Dreher interviews Bess and discusses his work.  

Dreher's praise of Bess's work is well-deserved.  That said, in my view, Dreher is a bit too hard on those conservatives who have appropriate reservations about "new urbanist" plans, proposals, and ideology.  So long as "new urbanism" is reasonably seen as travelling moer comfortably with hipster aesthetics and environmental-apocalypse fantasies than with Bess's Aristo-Thomist invocations of the conditions for authentic human flourishing . . . and so long as "new urbanists" appear not-too-keen on large families and relatively uninterested in where the churches and parochial schools fit in to their ideal built environmetns . . . a little skepticism -- even of the friendly kind -- is in order.