America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and Northern Michigan is a central location in that history. | Continue reading
As she engages ultimate questions about human life, Little models the pursuit of virtue and the concomitant wrestling with vice involved in this pursuit. | Continue reading
Despite Trump’s own divisive rhetoric, he makes rural Americans feel heard in ways neither majority party has in decades. Any politician or scholar who actually wants to address the root causes of polarization needs to reckon seriously with this reality. | Continue reading
Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and himself. | Continue reading
We’ve now posted the FPR conference schedule. It’s shaping up to be a great weekend of conversation, and a time to make new acquaintances and renew old friendships. Do consider joining us. “Why I Changed my Mind about Volunteering.” When confronted with large issues like homeless … | Continue reading
If the sky clears above is, we won’t suddenly find ourselves saints. But at least, perhaps, we’ll be able to see the stars. | Continue reading
Russell Kirk, perhaps more than any self-described conservative thinker of the past century, celebrated the virtues of place, limits, and liberty. His ancestral estate in Mecosta, MI has long been a center not only for the downtrodden and oppressed, but for the fomenting of local … | Continue reading
Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. | Continue reading
To gaze upon creation through a sacramental lens is to admit that God is God and we are not; it is an antidote to the poison of Genesis 3. | Continue reading
Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces. | Continue reading
In expressing his love through epistolary lament, it may be that Freud discovered the precise meaning he felt he had lost. | Continue reading
“Captive Users.” Alexander Stern pens a thoughtful review essay that puts Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation in conversation with Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation to try to identify better ways of buil … | Continue reading
Culture is the ever-evolving play that takes place on that stage, as new props come and old props are replaced, even as the theater remains the same. Of course, the play is influenced by the stage and interacts with it. | Continue reading
Jobs in construction, health care, and manufacturing technology need not lead to dead ends... | Continue reading
It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question — whether to have children in this age of climate change — springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world apart, the idea that humans are in charge. | Continue reading
Perhaps in the coming decades we shall have, so to speak, not a straightforward demographic slope downward, but more of a dip and a levelling off in the next century. | Continue reading
“Robert Nisbet for the Present Age.” Kirstin Birkhaug describes the experience of teaching Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age and watching her students respond to his analysis of America’s twinned statism and individualism: “My students do not want to feel rootless. They do not want … | Continue reading
But I wonder: as it strains to get over Christ, will the West survive without noticing all the other beaten horses of the world? Or will it one day break its supposed sanity and collapse back into a foregone pity? | Continue reading
It would be easy to dismiss my argument as a simple platitude: “Trust God.” But it is trust in the infinite that allows us to trust finite beings. | Continue reading
The execution of Marie Antoinette and the treatment of her family is nothing for France to be proud of. Her punishment is the first evidence of a revolution run amok. | Continue reading
But even a novice like me—hobbled by an ignorance of veterinarian science and perennially pulled toward too many projects—found the book interesting and useful. | Continue reading
“‘Your Friend, Wendell’: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry.” To mark Wendell Berry’s 90th birthday, The Library of America published a set of reflections by several of the people he’s influenced over the years. Here’s a taste of Andrew Peterson’s: “the Wendell Berry I’ve e … | Continue reading
...the real artist, for both O’Connor and Ference, is one who sees and expresses gratitude for what is already there, and deals with it in such a way as to reveal aspects of it that may not be visible at first glance. | Continue reading
We cannot give into the temptation of thinking that our times are so different that basic civility must be cast aside. Once we have done that, we are lost. | Continue reading
As the sun rises over the Nile or my daughter’s grave, it occurs to me that the ancient Egyptians may have been onto something. Jess lives on, her soul soars to heaven, yet she returns each day, as close as a whispered web or a patient beetle on my boots. | Continue reading
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate has put “postliberalism” back in the news, assuming it had ever left. Vance’s embrace of postliberalism and the Trumpist cause of “national conservatism” will no doubt con … | Continue reading
Plant biology seems to be revolutionizing our understanding of what a plant is and can be. This is a gift that may help us grow in wisdom, in reverence, and in care for our world. | Continue reading
The way of the puzzler is not about reaching a certain goal. If it were, the perfectly fine image would never have been broken up to begin with. The way of the puzzler is about the puzzling itself. | Continue reading
Modern physicians use Hans Berger’s invention to save lives every day | Continue reading
People often cannot always bridge differing intellectual and political positions, even with people they agree with about most intellectual questions and political issues. | Continue reading
As C.S. Lewis noted in The Abolition of Man, the souls of our youth are not jungles that need pruning but deserts that need irrigation. We could start by getting them to hear music. | Continue reading
Our participation streak brought forward more diversity of opinion and expression in the classroom while forming the students into a team with a shared objective. | Continue reading
To counter dogmatic worldviews, we should read prudently and widely across time periods and cultures and not avoid difficult content because of fear. | Continue reading
A Non-Believer Ponders Life, Death, and Staring into the Abyss | Continue reading
Can the rest of us afford such inaction? Yes—and that’s the point. For the travesty of modernity is its constant demand—from left or right—for action, control, and efficiency. But the first step into an agrarian attitude is to step back from such demands. | Continue reading
Your presence is needed. Hush. Stay. Show your love by letting them grieve. | Continue reading
But I reckon that eÞanðun can mix with Beowulf and Paradise Lost and not feel out of place. | Continue reading
The Chicago Manual of Style is not to blame for any of these trends. The editors’ decision does not shape as much as reflect our culture. | Continue reading
I found it to be profound and moving, the work of an author who is not lost in flights of fancy but who is deeply receptive to the world and its God. | Continue reading
Behind this type of play, though, is a genuine longing for beauty—a desire not only to appreciate the beautiful things one has seen or read or heard, but also to attempt to replicate them somehow. | Continue reading
Yet at times, if only for a moment, I feel the shadow over my days is transformed into pure spirit. Such thoughts give me a surprising sense of quiet joy. | Continue reading
This rural mountain church continues to be good because it continues to do what is necessary. | Continue reading
—it took 40 years for me to begin to realize these words Jim silently put into my hands on that last day of class were a prayer. | Continue reading
Knowing your family’s past fugitives and pretty boys is the kind of localism anyone can aspire toward and practice. | Continue reading
With a clear sky above us, no one restricting our movements, we learned—sometimes flailingly, like chickens with our heads cut off—how to marvel. | Continue reading
I suppose when it comes to discussions of the English language, I prefer sterner stuff. | Continue reading
If you understand that a child’s growth comes from a spark within, just as does the growth of a flower, a crystal, or a mighty oak, you might take a more trusting view of a child’s growth. | Continue reading
There ought not be unnecessary opposition between Indigenous and Christian perspectives. The creative work of caring for our ecology is hard enough; let us not also misunderstand one another. | Continue reading