“Arcs of Life.” Matthew Loftus considers the claim that all suffering is bad and should be eliminated: “Yet taking this dictum and making it into a law is at the root of many evils. What if the pain can’t be fixed? How does the Baconian project bring us to see the suffering it ca … | Continue reading
Ralph's art might never grace the walls of collectors or galleries or museums in his lifetime, but he knows from experience art’s potential to draw crowds that can encounter the gospel. | Continue reading
As we reflect on the importance of this work in ensuring that Homer remains appropriate and enjoyable for future readers, we can surely agree that it is fully worth it. | Continue reading
I continued to stumble on, frequently forgetting my own story, seeking evermore opportunities for dislocated, immortal, heroic freedom from the chains of that finite, particular history. It was only a gradual awakening to a far deeper reality that radically changed the course of … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about Chesterton’s croquet essay a lot during March Madness. Watching games without the specter of a ruined bracket to kill my vibe, I find myself drawn more to basketball itself than to who wins and loses. | Continue reading
“We Must Become Barbarians.” Paul Kingsnorth sketches out possible strategies of resistance to the Machine that evade its systems rather than confronting them directly: “What Scott’s book shows me above all is that the tension between expanding power centres and free peoples is e … | Continue reading
We have wrought a strange and fantastically complicated world for ourselves. But we can know how well we are interfacing with it by its fruits: a terrifyingly effective machinery, but spasms of pain in our arms and backs. | Continue reading
All of parenting is risky because nothing is more important to us than our children. And the decisions we make do matter, sometimes greatly. But if we allow risk to dominate our thinking and practices, we will become unmoored from reality and pass down this paralyzing anxiety to … | Continue reading
Tracksmith makes beautiful things and promotes a beautiful vision of the world. So much the better. It is not fast fashion. It embraces the concepts of tradition and place and community. | Continue reading
The need to reconcile with one’s finitude and live as good a life in light of this was made clear by many of the more successful essays and tallied with my own experience of coming to terms with the limits on my life from my condition, both in an everyday and an ultimate sense. | Continue reading
“Renunciation and Christian Happiness.” In this excerpt from her new book, Zena Hitz probes the paradox at the core of a Christian view of happiness: “Both Aristotle and Paul have radical ideas of the highest good: there is such a thing, and it is worth everything. And yet the hi … | Continue reading
Vodolazkin’s critical vision of the Medieval Russian past is no different in essence from Augustine’s similarly sharp and un-glamorous vision of Roman history. | Continue reading
Fertility rates are low. After going through the pregnancy of our first child, I’m surprised they aren’t lower. Many young people lack the “why” to endure the cultural pessimism around childrearing. | Continue reading
Instead of opposing one religion to another, we need the conscience and that humorous raised eyebrow, which Powys described, with feminine overtones, as “that withdrawn, quizzical look which conscience, that tough customer, regards as an invasion of its preserves,” to rend the ve … | Continue reading
The truth is, the Amish have had to adapt and innovate and negotiate the changing world. The truth is, the Amish are a people of imagination. Perhaps not “imagination” as popularly conceived but imagination nevertheless. | Continue reading
“The Return of the Bison.” In the latest issue of Plough (which is another excellent issue), Nathan Beacom explores how bison continue to hold ecosystems together: “The American bison stands at the crossroads of the animal, plant, and human worlds. It is part of an integrated eco … | Continue reading
We will speak to gatherings of farmers in seventeen different counties throughout southern Georgia. Along the way we will travel 1750 miles. | Continue reading
Eric Twardzik is a regular in such publications as the Robb Report, WM Brown, and Drake’s online. His focus is men’s clothing and the drinks scene. We discuss classic American Ivy Style, its expressions in such places as Italy and Japan, Eric’s visit to Kentucky, and the rise of … | Continue reading
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS. Trevor Latimer’s Small Isn’t Beautiful: The Case Against Localism deeply engaged me, but not in a positive way, at least not initially. As one already inclined to respond defensively to his j’accuse against localism (one which he level … | Continue reading
Consider that here at FPR we are at least as concerned with cultural issues as with political ones. If we are being honest, many of us are probably more concerned with the former than with the latter. | Continue reading
We always have been an unruly people, from the very beginning. It is a fact that gives us hope that our current disagreements and fights are not signs of our democracy’s weakness but its enduring strength. | Continue reading
“The College Board’s Hollow Vision.” Annie Abrams draws attention to the College Board’s self-serving tactics and bureaucratic approach to pedagogy. AP classes really aren’t equivalent to a good college course: “Students, parents, and our K-12 and higher-ed systems have empowered … | Continue reading
The best educators (and the best educational institutions) will neither embrace nor eschew the electronic technologies that commercial forces wish to prevail in higher education; rather they will assess each one, in light of both its assets and its liabilities, employing those th … | Continue reading
At all hours of the day and night in the Mannon house, you’ll find butter in its designated dish on the dinner table and cornmeal in the fridge. I hold strong beliefs about these two points of culinary geography. | Continue reading
We do not need crusades for or against “wokeness”—we need people to read actual legislation and weigh in on it. We do not need centralized authorities to make sweeping, political decisions about classrooms and curriculum. We need engaged communities and parents and subject matter … | Continue reading
While we can’t forever capture in amber all that passes through time, what we can do is hope for the Resurrection and leave mementos of ourselves for those that follow. | Continue reading
Old times there are not forgotten—a trait that cuts both ways. It is good to hang on to good traditions, bad to hang on to bad. | Continue reading
A tended garden inevitably involves some choices, as well as planning which tree species will fruit better with more sunshine. | Continue reading
We speak to connect with ideas and with the Divine. Of all the speeches I have heard in-person and not in a movie, or play, recording, or manuscript, a few have reached the pinnacle of being inspirational. | Continue reading
It’s children that make the neighborhood, and when children are outdoors, you’ll want porches in the front of your houses, so that you can see the streets where they often play, as we did. | Continue reading
“Inside the Dissident Fringe, Where the New Right Meets the Far Left, and Everyone’s Bracing for Apocalypse.” James Pogue goes to the American West to investigate how opposition to globalism has brought together a strange mix of nationalists and localists and preppers, some of wh … | Continue reading
Certainly there is a need for a national conversation and national solutions... But reading The Other Side of Prospect, one is left with the sense that the ultimate authors of Newhallville’s future revitalization, if it is to occur, will be its community members | Continue reading
Thomas’s novel suggests that those who would answer these difficult vocations well must learn to look through the pain and see the light shining through. | Continue reading
We should not reject the good fruits of our modern era, but let us also not neglect the good it does young bodies and minds to run up and down the cliffs, to have a mountain to rest the eyes against, and to sometimes simply be outside without parental interference. | Continue reading
Holly Ordway is the first returning guest on Cultural Debris. Holly and I discuss her most recent book Tales of Faith: A Guide to Sharing the Gospel Through Literature. Holly and I discuss the value of literature, receiving vs using stories, why reading fiction can be a dangerous … | Continue reading
eading Cheap Land Colorado makes you wonder how we can make more space for human flourishing among the poor and on the edges of society? Conover’s approach to the San Luis Valley might offer us a starting point. | Continue reading
“A Wild Christianity.” Paul Kingsnorth considers what we can learn from the cave Christians and their rich legacy: “In a time when the temptation is always toward culture war rather than inner war, I think we could learn something from our spiritual ancestors. What we might learn … | Continue reading
I think, I know, that Washington exemplified a whole-hearted devotion to his students. He was concerned, as I am, to educate the whole person of the student, not merely to train children to someday earn a good salary or support themselves. | Continue reading
As I learn how to be a sticker, I hope to continually see the beauty of Battle Creek, no matter its faults. I want to persist in finding the good in my city, to be motivated by affection and love for it, and to be faithful to the place God’s called me to. | Continue reading
“We seem to be born homesick, and that homesickness is meant to lead us into a life of pilgrimage.” Walker Percy Black Mountain, NC. Where are you going? At its core, an education seeks to answer that question. Where are you going and where do you want to go? Every educational ph … | Continue reading
We should aim to conserve what is deepest and true, not just what happens to have immediately preceded the present. It should be the conservative’s task to reconnect the manner of our lives and the institutions of our civilization—schools, colleges, churches, governments—to the s … | Continue reading
“Creatures That Don’t Conform.” You don’t have to agree with Lucy Jones’s politics or philosophy to share her amazement at slime mold (and don’t miss Barry Webb’s photographs): “They can humble us—with their complexity which is beyond our understanding. We think we have mastered … | Continue reading
Purdy has a palpable affection for what he calls “the preservative work of being together.” Beginning again from that affection might allow Purdy and his readers to find a fuller “response to political nihilism,” to listen for the voice that Two Cheers is wanting. | Continue reading
The success of Wildsam is a reminder that many people want to experience the real. Every day we are marketed generic and homogenous products and destinations, but there is an audience for something different. | Continue reading
Out on the wrinkled sea, the high notes come shimmering over the cold waves, and 72-year-old Dana Gioia says, “Meet me at the Lighthouse.” | Continue reading
Temperamentally and vocationally, I was in the wrong place. Yet I don’t regret a single day I spent there—not only because I met my wife, but because I learned to relish a simple, quiet way of living that many around us seem anxious to exceed. | Continue reading
“Watch the Great Fall.” Paul Kingsnorth acknowledges his own tendencies toward nostalgia and draws on some fine poets to articulate the proper posture toward decline: “The theologies of Zen, Orthodoxy, Mark Anthony and Robinson Jeffers differ wildly, and yet they alight, all of t … | Continue reading
Kevin Gutzman is Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University. He has published half a dozen books on Jefferson, Madison, and the Constitution. His latest book is The Jeffersonians. Cultural Debris Patreon – Support the podcast! Cultural Debris logo by Rachael Sin … | Continue reading