Math is certainly not the best language for every situation, but it is essential for many situations. And once we understand this, and not merely acknowledge it but shift our paradigms to understand it as a very special method of communication, we can use math without fear. | Continue reading
Are dreams only dreams? Or are they God’s gifts of the unconscious which we still fail to know? McCarthy lets these questions remain, and no argument or worldview can answer them. So, we are left waiting for God to say something, anything, as His answer. | Continue reading
“Daughter of Forgottonia.” Liz Schleicher describes a family rooted in a plot of land near where the Illinois River joins the Mississippi. Guided by a matriarch, they have lived well there: “it is extraordinary that a simple farm wife, uneducated, poor, and without power, could b … | Continue reading
Creative fidelity is attuned to, and draws out, the richness in people and things. It calls for awareness and attentive seeing. In the end, Paterson is a film about such creative fidelity to a place and its people. | Continue reading
Hillsborough, NC. The term “care” is used in our times to signify tasks like feeding, changing diapers, bathing, and otherwise maintaining the well-being of those too young, old, or infirmed to do so for themselves. Those services are performed as part of elder care, childcare, a … | Continue reading
Today, many in our society seem to want change for its own sake. I hope a different spirit continues among those neighbors and the street remains a neighborhood as it was while my family lived there. | Continue reading
The second episode from the FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods looks at education. Jeff Polet discusses walking away from Hope. Angel Adams Parham talks about the elementary power of a rapping Homer. Jason Peters goes back to the future of the educ … | Continue reading
As we enter this season of Advent, we would do well to share the skepticism of Mary and her misfit Son about the powers of this age to establish an unshakeable kingdom. | Continue reading
“Who’s Preserving Harlan Hubbard’s Beloved Payne Hollow?” Bob Hill writes a lovely account of the Hubbards’ remarkable life and explains the hopes of the recently formed nonprofit organization Payne Hollow on the Ohio: “The goal is to honor the Hubbards’ place in American history … | Continue reading
Society’s long move from the country to the city may have desacralized their meaning, but for so long has man’s festive calendar been defined by our ecological needs and vulnerabilities that it is hard to imagine us ever dropping our seasonal traditions. Some are embedded remnant … | Continue reading
Brecon, Wales. Stories are a necessary part of healing and wholeness. I don’t just mean a story we may like or we tell ourselves (though they include that), nor do I mean that story we weave from our experiences and think of as our life or our autobiography (though they include t … | Continue reading
“Will the Real Dorothy Day Please Stand Up?” In this review of D.L. Mayfield’s new biography of Dorothy Day, Myles Werntz offers a masterclass in how we ought to befriend the dead. They are irredeemably strange, and rather than appropriate those aspects of a person’s character th … | Continue reading
The various parts—historical and autobiographical, theological and literary—all contribute to the central thread: that we seek wholeness, and that wholeness depends on better understanding ourselves and our damaged, but not lost, chances for community. | Continue reading
It is a terrifying responsibility every single day, for a preschooler’s capacity to find ever creative ways to put herself in danger does not always match up with the parent’s ability to foresee said dangers. And yet, without the wonder of exploration, how could anyone ever truly … | Continue reading
Alan Jacobs is not, to my knowledge, a Porcher, though he ought to be; his insightful reflections upon Christianity, literature, society, and the state are hugely relevant to all sorts of different ways of pondering the struggles facing those who wish to attend to, preserve, or e … | Continue reading
The young pagans band around the picnic table and scrawl inky runes into their hands with cheap pens. Around them, the world falls, and wonders if they will learn to rebuild it. —Betsy K. Brown, “II. Dark Ages” At the still point of the turning world…. Neither from nor towards; a … | Continue reading
For the first of our episodes from September’s FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods, we go to church. Carl Trueman, Gregory Hogg, and Charlie Cotherman share thoughts on technology and embodied worship in a time of pandemic. Speakers: Carl Trueman, … | Continue reading
Why are so many of Uncle Sam’s children so miserable? What is going on? The reasons are one part mystery and one part well-known. It is worth reflecting on them. | Continue reading
“One of Our Most Beloved Environmental Writers Has Taken a Surprising Turn.” I don’t think Berry’s new book is “seething with resentment,” but Daegan Miller’s thoughtful review of Need to Be Whole is definitely worth reading and pondering: “The Need to Be Whole once again conside … | Continue reading
If you’ve ever visited Canyonlands National Park, or hiked the Appalachian Trail, or spent time at over a hundred other similar locations across America’s beautiful and diverse ecosystems and geography, it’s likely that you have Stewart Udall at least partly to thank. | Continue reading
Semiotic tools are inevitable in an American economy that is increasingly segregated between those whose work is dependent on process and those who focus on outcome. | Continue reading
He has never chased the new or tried to be avant-garde. Even in the physical act of writing, he has famously resisted the “advantages” of a personal computer and has opted instead to continue using the older technologies of pencil and paper. Though How It Went is technically a ne … | Continue reading
The mark by which we recognize a rightly ordered way of thinking about politics, it seems to me, is that such a way of thinking should recall us to the fact that we are, and that we receive, gifts. | Continue reading
“The Fourth Revolution.” Paul Kingsnorth’s latest essay is, I believe, out from behind a paywall. As always, he’s worth reading—in this case, on the ways that local, human-scale approaches to big problems get labeled and dismissed. In case you missed the news, we’re looking forwa … | Continue reading
That integration, that coherence of self in two souls resurrected in each other’s presence, is what keeps my place in my community. It’s what makes a home for my grievances, present and redeemed. It’s work, but it’s how we are made whole. | Continue reading
Since having kids, I have come to resent the loss of our pettier freedoms and less complex ways of life the most. I certainly do not want my children to do some of the things that I did in, and with, cars, but I also recognize that there was something instructive in it. Driving a … | Continue reading
A court decision that returns to the people the power to decide the pressing questions of the day could be considered fatal to democracy only in an age as Orwellian as this one, when doublethink routinely masquerades as rational thought. | Continue reading
The spirit of community that arises from festivals such as Halloween is a common good. I suggest that it is also a great time to practice the virtues of shared deliberation at all levels—from organizing in the residence hall floor and the classroom, to planning activities at the … | Continue reading
“This Is Not the Most Important Election of Our Lives.” Here in Pennsylvania, there’s a lot of talk about the upcoming election that will apparently decide “the future of democracy.” Given the two major-party candidates we have to choose from for the US Senate, the prospects for … | Continue reading
I came away from Steubenville, as I came away later from Grove City, with the startling idea that things are possible. Small things; local things; putting two things together, not all things but two things. | Continue reading
Freeing ourselves from the corrosive Consumer identity isn’t an individual task, but a call for system change rings hollow if we are afraid of personal change. How can we imagine a world beyond the Consumer if we can’t talk about our experiences of consuming and acknowledge that … | Continue reading
Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class and President of Front Porch Republic, joins the podcast. Mitchell and Murdock discuss the origins of FPR and the importance of widely-held productive private propert … | Continue reading
Wendell Berry has written endlessly about the goodness of local work; if, for Berry, the goodness of such work is connected to agrarian virtue, while for Jackson it is connected to ecological necessity, does that make much practical difference? | Continue reading
What is the goal of life? Cultural messaging has tricked many of us into thinking it is wealth and status, or career advancement. For us, it is the project of our marriage, our family, friends, and the good we can do in the world. | Continue reading
“Will Lab-Grown Meat Save Us?” Elizabeth Wainwright reads environmentalist George Monbiot’s latest book and considers its arguments in the context of two local communities she knows well, one in Devon and one in southern Zambia. Along the way, she models the kind of sympathetic, … | Continue reading
Scruton, from that day in France until the end, could never situate himself in the fugitive and cloistered comfort of the academic and intellectual orthodoxy. | Continue reading
Annette Kirk was kind enough to sit down with me to talk on a recent visit to Piety Hill in Mecosta, Michigan in the brick Italianate home that she and Russell Kirk built a half century ago. Annette talks about growing up on Long Island, her activist mother, being present in the … | Continue reading
In Untrustworthy, Kristian sets an objective for Christians to be faithful, factual, and fair. In some cases, this must be practiced in a somewhat extreme environment. What do we do when we encounter something like QAnon, which is not factual and often fractures relationships? | Continue reading
If beer and football are just the modern bread and circuses of a declining empire, then these are spectacles best avoided. However, if such gridiron microcosms of the human experience can unite us with our neighbors and point us to the bigger and more real story, then football, f … | Continue reading
To acknowledge the harm that has been inflicted on uncountable human lives is to invite doubt about the underpinnings of our technologically sophisticated world. That is an uncomfortable and lonely place to be. Yet it’s necessary if humans have any hope of reclaiming their birthr … | Continue reading
“American Barn.” In a marvelous essay, Joshua Mabie reflects on the iconic meaning of barns in America: “Attention to barns’ actual history as well as to their cultural value can help us reckon with the complexity of the nation’s agricultural past — and, perhaps, find a better wa … | Continue reading
Not only is this a literary accomplishment, it’s an example that both Rowling and her critics – and, by extension, all of us who wish to live in compassionate community with one another – would do well to pay closer attention to. | Continue reading
We sense that there’s more at stake in a restaurant visit than simply gustatorial or financial gain. Eating out, as Plato might have observed, is a chance to reinforce or undermine the rule of the rational over the appetitive soul. | Continue reading
They know their neighbors; they know their village; they know their land. They have their own vernacular that everyone who lives there understands because their father and mother taught them, just like they were taught by their fathers and mothers. The book is a survey of one man … | Continue reading
To walk a place is to open the door to the possibility that you will grow to love it. With time, you could get to know it in an intimate way. Streets or roads or wild forest paths that we walk for the first time can be the object of wonder, even if sometimes also mingled with fea … | Continue reading
If you weren’t able to join us two weeks ago for our conference, you may want to set aside some time to watch the video recordings of the talks. We’ll also be releasing audio versions via the Brass Spittoon podcast. These recordings don’t convey the delights of in-person conversa … | Continue reading
Berry, with an insistence that defies despair, is still carrying out his calling. He notes the discouraging odds his kind has faced not just now but in the past. Imperial presence in whatever its forms has long imperiled the agrarian ideal. | Continue reading
Berry connects these major themes from The Hidden Wound to other themes from his many works—work, agrarianism, industrialization, citizenship, affection, and place. In so doing, he offers his readers a fuller-orbed view of his thinking than maybe he has ever done previously. In t … | Continue reading