Andrew Figueiredo describes his family connection to Minderico, a language belonging to the Portuguese town of Minde. Localists must join the fight to save endangered languages, if only because they present us with a way to practice stewardship, rebel against the abstractions of … | Continue reading
Front Porch Republic editor Jeff Bilbro sits down with Joe Loconte of The King’s College for a spirited discussion of the book-turned-film A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War. Bonded by war and steeled by friendship, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien produced works of fantasy that … | Continue reading
In an excerpt from her book The Spacious Life, Ashley Hales redefines limits as an expression of love and a doorway into rest. | Continue reading
When I first started teaching at a community college, I had no idea of the types of non-traditional students I would meet. Their resilience and motivation made me wonder if a non-traditional route is actually better, at least for some. | Continue reading
“Ending America’s Antisocial Contract.” Ron Ivey and Tim Shirk warn that American policies which incentivize hoarding capital contribute to social and economic instability: “If our antisocial contract has led to wealth hoarding, lower productivity growth, and precarious financial … | Continue reading
What all these most profound culture-makers have in common is death-mindedness, which gives them the ability to fully pursue their art, because they don’t pay as much mind to the fleeting: the money, the fame, the critical disapproval. | Continue reading
As a new school year begins, Jon Schaff takes stock of the effects of Covid on education. Learning is relationship, and, if the point of college, as the very term “college” implies, is to come together for the enterprise of learning, that coming together has to be more than a nam … | Continue reading
Last year, when we also had to cancel our fall conference due to COVID restrictions, several Porchers hosted smaller gatherings of local readers. We know that our readers are scattered around the country, but these gatherings provide an opportunity to meet and converse with like- … | Continue reading
John Peters contrasts the traditional telos of education, what John Newman called "a great but ordinary end" with the current emphasis on utility and constant social change. | Continue reading
“Bad News.” Joseph Bernstein scrutinizes the disinformation discourse and argues that its underlying technological determinism and assumptions about human persuadability stand to benefit big tech: “tech companies and select media organizations all stand to gain from the Big Disin … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Stice remembers the impact of the events of 9/11 on college students 20 years ago. Now a college professor, she considers the disillusionment of her own students, and how the Christian meta-narrative allows for hope in a broken world. | Continue reading
Sadly, due to ongoing COVID-related restrictions, we’ve made the difficult decision to cancel the 2021 gathering. We hate to do this as we very much want to move past our enforced reliance on virtual communications and take up the necessary work of recovering lost goods. Those wh … | Continue reading
[Cross-posted to In Media Res] Wichita, KS. That Charles Marohn is a friend to localist movements across the United States and beyond is indisputable. It’s not just that he has said said so, repeatedly; both the whole operating premise of Strong Towns, the organization he has bui … | Continue reading
“If you cannot think of anything appropriate to say, you will please restrict your remarks to the weather.” So says Mrs. Dashwood to her daughter Margaret in the 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility. Although the exact line is not found in the original novel, Jane Austen’s … | Continue reading
“He is Britain’s Famous Shepherd-Author-Influencer. He Wants to Transform Farming to Save the Planet.” William Booth visits James Rebanks’s farm and puts his recent efforts to defend and practice regenerative farming in the context of the post-Brexit agricultural economy. If you … | Continue reading
Hassler and McDonagh conclude their stories with the hope that, in the absence of the clergy, faithful everyday Christians can rebuild the lost soil of local culture through faith and forgiveness. | Continue reading
Corporate rights was not a spontaneous development but the result of a sort of corporate civil-rights movement. Through litigation (generally well-financed) over two centuries, various corporations won decisions by which corporations evolved from government-created artificial per … | Continue reading
Little Diamond, an island bounded by the crisp waters of Casco Bay, is a rare sanctuary from the madness and modern life. Gregory Reynolds takes readers on a journey through the stages of its beauty. | Continue reading
“Back for Good: The Fine Art of Repairing Broken Things.” Katie Treggiden profiles British artists and producers who are working to make mending beautiful in a culture that valorizes the new. These “artists and designers are leading the way in exploring what mending really means. … | Continue reading
As our society considers higher education in the twenty-first century, the best way to decide what universities should be is not to gaze into the future, but to study the past for what universities have been and what they have been able to do. Marsden’s thoughtful and thorough hi … | Continue reading
In her 2010 book, The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana, Verlaine Stoner McDonald resurrects the surprising but largely forgotten episode of agrarian radicalism in Sheridan County, Montana. Over ten years after its publication, McDonald’s stellar … | Continue reading
Though the idea of a legislature banishing undesirable corporations from state boundaries may be a mirage for now, it is certainly a dazzling mirage. If you look carefully enough, it seems more in line with how things should be than the actual desert that is currently beneath. | Continue reading
“The Edgerton Essays.” The American Compass and the Ethics and Public Policy Center have been collaborating on the Edgerton Essays. Editor Patrick Brown describes the project: “First, find working-class Americans, typically without a four-year college degree, who felt distant fro … | Continue reading
I bought myself an iPad in August 2016, and to say that it changed my life would be only a slight overstatement. For several years I had been experiencing increasingly severe hand pain that limited my ability to write by hand for any length of time. Even signing my own name had b … | Continue reading
Simard concludes that all of the natural world is interconnected and her conclusion is particularly poignant as she points out that the hard-won insight of her decades of research is nothing more than a “scientific” stamp of approval on the wisdom of both ancient indigenous pract … | Continue reading
My guest is former Ambassador Alberto Miguel Fernandez. Alberto served as US Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea, and also served in various diplomatic roles around the world including in Afghanistan, Syria, and Sudan. He currently serves as vice president of the Middle East Media Re … | Continue reading
The 2021 FPR conference theme is “After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods.” We’ll gather on October 16 at Middle Tennessee State University. The keynote speaker will be Andrew Bacevich, who recently wrote The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory a … | Continue reading
The Green Knight is a subversive film that recommends the culturally decaying virtues of generosity, courtesy, fellowship, chastity, and piety. It is a true myth worth telling. | Continue reading
“America’s Hidden Crisis of Power and Place.” In a long and important essay, David Fontana delves into “one of the most disconcerting, least-discussed aspects of our national political life: America is experiencing a political crisis rooted partly in the concept of place. Our pol … | Continue reading
Here emerges the stoop as neither an architectural adornment nor a fleeting trend, but as a central social locus for the people of New York. It is here where our neighbors’ joy and laughter and special moments come to light, brightening up the city street and making the neighborh … | Continue reading
Community Land Trusts, at their best, are less about development and more about stewardship, creating just places for the long-term. CLTs are thus the ultimate preservationists, the developer/landowner who never abandons the property. | Continue reading
“Berry Center Journal.” The summer issue of the Berry Center Journal includes several fine pieces. For instance, Jason Peters has an essay on security and locality, and Kate Dalton interviews Wendell Berry about COVID, co-ops, and where to begin doing good work. “Writing in the S … | Continue reading
Bugbee’s thought suggests a defiant confidence that the things themselves can and do reveal themselves to us in their independence, if only we would have the patience to let them. | Continue reading
James Rebanks and Grace Olmstead discuss his book, Wendell Berry, his vision for future farming methodologies, and the conversations surrounding agricultural reform in both the United States and the United Kingdom. | Continue reading
Esther Lightcap Meek on Wendell Berry, Michael Polanyi, and covenant epistemology. | Continue reading
The left is collectivizing, the right falling apart. Can a pragmatic, humanist center hold? | Continue reading
Mark Clavier describes coming to terms with the fact that he is a white Southerner descended from enslaved Africans who subsequently became slave-owners. Reflecting on an ancestry containing triumph and shame, he discovers how closely the commendable and corrupt can be intertwine … | Continue reading
We justify our choices as the price of innovation, of progress, of efficiency. We tell ourselves we can’t afford to do anything else. We even tell ourselves it’s for the children. And so we bankrupt our posterity so we can eat, drink, and be merry. It’s a nice life for those who … | Continue reading
My guest is Father Michael Ward of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford and also of Houston Baptist University. Fr Ward has an enviable trifecta in his academic pedigree—degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and St. Andrews. Fr. Ward is perhaps best known for his book Planet Narnia, which explains … | Continue reading
Porchers might be interested in this two-day gathering that Rory and Becca Groves are hosting at their Minnesota farm. If you were intrigued by Rory’s book Durable Trades and want to learn more, this would be a good opportunity. FPR author C.R. Wiley will be speaking as well, and … | Continue reading
Benjamin Myers reviews Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy. Stacey explores the changing and contested myth of the midwestern small town, particularly in relation to Masters’s famous Spoon River Anthology. In Spoon River a … | Continue reading
By the end of season one of Clarkson's Farm, Clarkson is still not an expert on anything farming related, but he is learning all the time, including about the area where he lives and how to love it well. | Continue reading
Hawley’s book goes some way towards providing a framework for using the threat of a legislative boot to stomp Big Tech back down to size. Whether the Right will listen is another thing altogether. | Continue reading
Ethan Jones explores the harmful ways our culture relates to food, and concludes that food’s purpose is not beautification of the body. Rather, food itself is beauty. Inside and outside the walls of church buildings, itd raws us to God and one another. | Continue reading
Canadian radio broadcaster David Cayley pulls up a chair to discuss Ivan Illich, a renegade priest and professor who argued against schools, missionaries, and modern medicine. Cayley, author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, walks listeners through Illich’s thought and its … | Continue reading
Feeney’s book is a helpful antidote to the “go to college at any cost” mindset. But more importantly, it examines how this mindset can corrupt the forms of association that allow our communities to thrive and the humans within those communities to flourish. | Continue reading
While every people has a right to cultural solidarity and (peaceful and just) defense of their traditions and heritage, every moral person (especially every Christian) is also called to a deep sense of humility, forgiveness, and ultimately love of neighbor—even when that other ra … | Continue reading
Long-time friend of Front Porch Republic, Solidarity Hall‘s Elias Crim, is opening up the final session of their weekly small-group Zoom discussion of the Nathan Schneider’s history of the cooperative economy, Everything for Everyone (discussed in some detail on FPR here), to all … | Continue reading