Luke Sheahan of Duquesne University and the newly appointed editor of The University Bookman, a book review journal founded by Russell Kirk and edited by him until his death. Dr. Sheahan steps into the role left vacant by the passing of the great Gerald Russello, someone we all g … | Continue reading
These are not compassionate times—not in the public square, and not in all too much of our increasingly chaotic private life, though I think many people are trying. Mr. Berry knows this very well. And so about halfway through the book, he takes a few pages to acknowledge he was t … | Continue reading
If I attempt to follow Berry’s underwater route too closely, I’m afraid I will drown. Rather than try to summarize it, then, I will instead distill from it a set of guidelines for improving the quality of our language. The shouters who dominate our public discourse are unlikely t … | Continue reading
No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in a community where one knows and is known,” and where its boundaries include soils, waters, plants, and animals. | Continue reading
The FPR conference this weekend was a great delight. The only problem is that I wanted to have long conversations with everyone who came. I was mollified, however, by seeing many lively conversations happening during breaks throughout the day and over drinks in the evening. Among … | Continue reading
Lying on a bed at 2:00 AM idly flipping through a book while texting a friend isn’t likely to be a transformative experience. Treating education as a hoop to jump through to secure a job, make money, and consume leads to practices serving that end. The authors in this book will c … | Continue reading
I worked alongside Dad many times. I have also worked alongside other men and women with a disposition towards work like my father’s. They do their labor with skill, creativity, and energy. They rightly earn trust as one to call upon for help with physical jobs. | Continue reading
What is being outlined here is fundamentally a Wendell Berry conservatism: our solutions are not global in nature. They might not even be national in nature. It asks individuals to get involved at the lowest possible scale, in church and on school boards, to be productive in the … | Continue reading
The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told us at the beginning of the novel, the empty space around Gatsby’s dream is made up of that same dust, those same ashes. | Continue reading
“Labor, Land, and Racism.” Brian Volck reviews Berry’s new book, which comes out next month: “For Berry, there are no autonomous people and no isolated social problems. Thus, while acknowledging that ‘it is obvious that race prejudice or white supremacy is the original and fundam … | Continue reading
Beyond writing about craftmanship and antique furniture, M&T explores ideas about human work in a technological age, work in the context of community, and the relationship between craft and tradition. Regardless of your interest in the nuances of woodworking, many Porchers would … | Continue reading
Jason M. Baxter is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and has a new book from InterVarsity Press titled The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. Dr. Baxter and I discuss the C.S. Lewis few ever talk about, the dangers of presentism, and how the medievals aren’t at all like the c … | Continue reading
Though his recent bestselling books trace the roots of several deeply entrenched beliefs about human nature and our world that have led us into bewildering territory, Trueman concludes both books with a look back into the ancient church and a call to faithful Christian work in lo … | Continue reading
We are the blind, each calling out that which we are so sure we see. No longer aware that the sight we now marvel at is little more than one conceived and praised in our internal darkness... And what becomes of a world under such stewards like me? | Continue reading
“The Work of Mourning.” Roger Scruton probes the necessity and value of mourning with his characteristic range and insight: “Until the work of mourning has been accomplished, Freud argued, new life, new loves, new engagement with the world are all difficult if not impossible.” Re … | Continue reading
“Choose you this day whom you will serve,” the Old Testament leader, Joshua, charged his fellow Jews. And that choice, while crucial, while fundamental, must also be borne out during a lifetime of choices. | Continue reading
Turmoil is present throughout Dick’s world, and this is clearly reflected in each of the three characters discussed here. Tagomi, Wegner, and Childan’s lives are greatly influenced by events precipitated by others, and each responds in a different manner. | Continue reading
Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our region’s creative culture. Our mission is to celebrate the literary culture of the American Mid-Sout … | Continue reading
Have you registered for our fall conference taking place in two weeks at Grove City College? Registration closes on the 17th, so don’t delay! We haven’t held a conference since 2019, and it will be great to see many of you in person for a day of lively discussion. “Property, Prop … | Continue reading
His books are not a diminishment of historic and intellectual Christianity. They are a translation of Aquinas, Barth, Calvin, and the rest into the language we all speak innately but are all too often deaf to: the language of our quotidian lives, in which the undifferentiated mas … | Continue reading
Venus’s love for her sister, and Serena’s recognition of it, has also shown us the transcendent power of family, the possibility of forgetting the accolades and the worldly recognition and the desire for advantage and finding instead deeper connections and possibilities of love. | Continue reading
Do I know by pruning the tree, picking the apples, and eating them? Perhaps, Pickstock proposes, truth is what we find when we act in the world. Our true condition is that we are beings who pick apples and prune trees. | Continue reading
We can increase the aesthetic appeal of our neighborhood by smashing the suburban quasi-monocultures of landscaping plants purchased from big box stores and restoring the rightful biodiversity of our ecosystems...Behind the natural beauty there thrums a glory ancient and ever-new … | Continue reading
“Can Love Take Sides?” The new issue of Plough is full of worthwhile essays, but Porchers will want to start with this essay by Wendell Berry. It’s an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Need to be Whole: “love comes into our civilization – the Gospels being the source best kn … | Continue reading
All education programs enculturate students. There is no neutrality here. The question is not whether education will form our students, but how they will be formed. Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” A … | Continue reading
Baxter articulates two central features of the Medieval Model: the ordered and iconic nature of reality. Reality is not a chaos waiting for us to impose structure on it or make it what we want; it is rather a cosmos with a nature independent of our wishes, demanding us to conform … | Continue reading
Perhaps it’s the nudge you need to reconsider your little actions and the grand narrative which guides and orients them. And, perhaps, you’ll go out to confront the real in all its strange mystery and strain to hear the music and the summons that invite you to re-embed yourself i … | Continue reading
“The Good Death in Psalm 73.” Timothy Kleiser draws out the wisdom regarding mortality and human finitude in Margaret Edson’s moving play Wit with the help of Psalm 73. “Can We Resurrect Expertise?” In this excerpt from her forthcoming book, Bonnie Kristian wrestles with the need … | Continue reading
Are those who question transhumanist progress or Metaverse predictions just knee-jerk Luddites whose visceral reactions are worthy of only a patronizing pat on the head for not seeing their own privilege? As might be expected of a Porcher, I don’t think so. Instead, those who are … | Continue reading
I am not faulting Wirzba for failing to include these examples of more conservative Christians who practice agrarianism. But I would ask whether his theology of agrarianism, written in an academic context, can speak to and challenge the church at large. | Continue reading
Matthew Stewart, author of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California, sits down (literally) with host John Murdock to discuss Stegner’s complicated relationship with the American West. A mobile youth left Stegner yearning for deeper roots. In the 1940s, … | Continue reading
As we approach the new academic year, we, like Sisyphus, are condemned to roll the rock up the hill only for it to roll back down. However, this does not have to be a meaningless task – we can escape the absurdity of our condition. We give ourselves meaning by following either th … | Continue reading
“No More ‘Normal.’ How to Live after the COVID Apocalypse.” I reflect on the themes of our upcoming conference and Chris Arnade’s book in an opinion piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Do make plans to join us next month in Grove City. We’re looking forward to a great day of l … | Continue reading
More to the purpose of this essay, organized youth sports should challenge students to be dissatisfied with amusement or entertainment in their pursuit of excellence. Our culture is soaked in entertainment, the preponderance being of a low quality. While it can be entertaining, s … | Continue reading
In their newest incarnation, American racial preferences are advertised to the public as compensating for prior pro-white discrimination and promoting racial diversity. Problems of definition persist under the new order of things, however. There is still no central race bureau, b … | Continue reading
What if our expectations of politicians whom we mock or despise are simply unrealistic and guided by the standards of this world? The faith of some regular Americans in their ability to achieve social reform already amazed de Tocqueville in the 1830s. But this mindset, flowing so … | Continue reading
“David McCullough, Master Chronicler of American History, Dies at 89.” Glenn Rifkin remembers a remarkable storyteller who made forgotten aspects of American history come to life: “Working for much of his career in a tiny windowed shed behind his farmhouse in West Tisbury, Mass, … | Continue reading
If we can foster a freedom to flourish rather than our modern freedom of choice, and if we can recognize versions of a common good appropriate to different real entities of social order from the family to the town to the nation, integrated with the rest of nature at scales from t … | Continue reading
Back of all this you might hear a rabble-rousing Palestinian Jew from a couple of millennia ago promising that the truth, once known, will set you free - but that poor soul on a collision course with Golgotha was assuming that truth could be disentangled from all the elegant tech … | Continue reading
Michael Possanner is a bespoke tailor in Vienna, Austria. Michael and I discuss the value of bespoke tailoring, his non-traditional journey to learning the ancient trade, his love of American football, and his passion of mixology and collecting vintage cocktail books. Christian A … | Continue reading
Livy asserts that shamelessness led to decadence which, in turn, led to greed and eventually devolved into demagoguery and tyranny. His assertion that Roman liberty and equality were destroyed by the decadence of the civil wars and buried with the emergence of the Augustan regime … | Continue reading
“Hoping for Doomsday.” I’ve been savoring the summer issue of Plough. Peter Mommsen’s opening editorial is, as usual, excellent: “In the interim of the ages, as the universe’s great Sabbath approaches, humankind has work to do. Plant the sapling; tend the earthworms; welcome the … | Continue reading
An imagination like his, fictions like his – born from affection – may not provide us with data or answers but may help us feel “somehow more substantial and less troubled, characters more permanent.” And they may show us how we can help the land we find underfoot become a belove … | Continue reading
Is there a direct causal connection between America’s embrace of succulents and semi-succulents as houseplants-of-choice and the conspicuous mass movement of Americans to states with the least amount of rainfall? Maybe not, but the correlation gives us strong cause to consider. | Continue reading
But the dark events of that afternoon have remained with me and have prompted a question that I have often wrestled with, fruitfully, I think, but never to a clear decision: Lacking a proper foundation in kickball, what sort of culture, if any at all, could flourish in a Newton, … | Continue reading
There is something new in Doestoevsky's insights into the psychology of “the Human Being,” beyond the Church Fathers, or at least that's the case made. If this is true, especially in the light of the complete mental breakdown happening all around us, shouldn't we be redirecting o … | Continue reading
“The Corruption of the Best: On Ivan Illich.” Geoff Shullenberger takes the occasion of David Cayley’s intellectual biography of Ivan Illich to offer a reassessment of Illich’s thought. In particular, Shullenberger explains Illich’s work on gender, which earned him opprobrium in … | Continue reading
There will be a temptation for many to say: “Good. Roe is gone. Now the rest is none of my business.” It would be wise to remember this disinterest in our communities is what enabled a technocratic judiciary to impose Roe. To perfect our nation and its communities, we must balanc … | Continue reading