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
In the book Steak Barbare, Gilles Luneau unravels the industry that depends on promoting a vegan diet and post-animal agriculture. His book sheds light not only on how labs grow protein, but also on the ways investors market a technological ideology. | Continue reading
Doug Sikkema fills in for Jeffrey Bilbro on this week's Water Dipper. | Continue reading
Milton Friesen reviews My Vertical Neighbourhood, Linda’s McGibbon’s xperience as a newcomer to a high-rise condo in Toronto. She actively explores what it means to be a neighbour in the third dimension, and challenges us to acknowledge that mutuality matters. | Continue reading
Jeffrey Bilbro is editor of the The Front Porch Republic. Jeff is a fellow devotee of Wendell Berry, and has written a new book from IVP called Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry Into the News. We discuss setting priorities in a Twitter world with a bit of talk … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Stice reviews Sebastian Junger's new book, Freedom. The new book is a product of a roughly 400-mile hike Junger took with other men processing their war experiences. Junger's approach to freedom is based in reality and, as a result, speaks to real life. | Continue reading
Daniel Ritchie explores how the #MeToo movement affects our reading of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In turn, this comedy with a sad ending offers us a sense of balance for today's sexual politics. | Continue reading
Rebekah Curtis reviews Rory Groves' book Durable Trades through the lens of the novel Growth of the Soil. While sometimes difficult to apply to modern-day life, the trades are not only occupations, but reasons and ways to come back home. | Continue reading
Ed Hagenstein reflects on Makoto Fujimura's metaphor for cultural engagement and suggests that cultural renewal starts with the essential resources all around us. | Continue reading
Learning from Wallace Stegner, Doug Sikkema considers the timeless blessings of his childhood in a letter to his mother. | Continue reading
Popular discourse in the United States today—as well as in many places around the world—hasn’t been so open to alternatives to the liberal capitalist mainstream for close to a century. | Continue reading
This will be my last Water Dipper for a couple of months; I’ll be quite busy with moving and all the accompanying obligations. Doug Sikkema is planning to keep this feature running over the summer on a more or less weekly basis. Matt Stewart will be taking the lead on editing sub … | Continue reading
Robert Sapunarich shares what he learned during pre-dawn workouts with F3: true masculinity is about countering instincts of anxiety, despair, and resentment with courage, hope, and grace. | Continue reading
Paul Krause examines the politics of Latin literature and discovers a desire for peace and joy, a peace and joy found in an intimate environment of beauty which the poets, even theologians, described as a garden. But the race to Arcadia runs through strife, war, and murder. | Continue reading
Casey Spinks muses on zombie shows, Pixar movies, Scorsese films, metaphysical realism, and the philosophical fate of modern culture in her review of Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st-Century Film and Literature, by Anthony Wachs and Jon Schaff. | Continue reading
In the context of the calendars for holidays, feasts, and Sabbath observance in Leviticus, LeFebvre argues that we need to attend to the creation account in Genesis as a calendar for shaping the sacred rhythm of labor and worship. | Continue reading
“Is Self-Help Advice Doomed to Be Conservative?” Rebecca Onion interviews Pete Davis about his new book, and Pete articulates the goods that come with being rooted. “Plough Quarterly No. 28: Creatures: The Nature Issue.” Plough’s new issue is out, and it looks to be a rich one. M … | Continue reading
Rural Rebellion by Ross Benes, examines the changing politics of rural Nebraska from the perspective of a native son living in Brooklyn. Nebraska is a cycle of poems by Kwame Dawes, a Ghanaian-born poet teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Both address the identity cri … | Continue reading
Hendersonville, NC. In 2011 the American Bible Society began examining how Americans relate to the Bible, and their research shows that there has been a steady increase in Americans’ lack of engagement with the Bible. Fewer Americans are going to church and reading the Bible.Thos … | Continue reading
Jared Zimmerer is director of the Word on Fire Institute. Jared is a fellow disciple of Russell Kirk, and currently is pursuing doctoral research on things Kirkian. It should not surprise you that Dr. Kirk is exactly what we talk about, particularly the idea of personalism relate … | Continue reading
Slacker portrays a city and a scene that are delightfully different and offbeat, and the best kinds of places for many emerging creatives today are that way, too. You don’t have to leave the state or run off to the biggest city to do something big: there is a real beauty and oppo … | Continue reading
“The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill.” Megan Molteni tells a fascinating and disturbing story about the complicated ways in which medical research makes its way into public health recommendations. “Science” doesn’t take place in a vacuum but involves messy s … | Continue reading
Lincoln wishes to promote Jeffersonian virtues by Hamiltonian means. In a Jeffersonian vein, Lincoln wants to encourage small, independent operations that free people from dependence on “the man.” | Continue reading
Wendell Berry pleads with us to see that true joy and fulfillment— the very motivations at the heart of Huck Finn and Christopher McCandless—are to be found not in escape and isolation, but in willing membership and participation in community life. | Continue reading
As utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" may seem, that doesn't mean we can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind. | Continue reading
As we’ve been working on projects and making plans, FPR editors and board members decided it would help us if we knew a bit more about you. Who are our readers? What do you value about FPR? We’d be grateful if you took a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. As a small […] | Continue reading
An empathetic approach to the kind of lofty goals named by Princeton’s aspiration to serve “humanity” might empower talented young people to serve their communities rather than selling out for personal financial success. You have to be very smart and very powerful to save the wor … | Continue reading
“In Defense of Jane Austen.” Dwight Lindley III responds to a recent controversy over Austen and suggests that we follow her own example in resisting reductive accounts of other people. “Love in the Marketplace.” In a particularly insightful essay, Mary Harrington narrates the “s … | Continue reading
In a world mediated through technology, the common arts bring us into daily encounters with a material world where we have not made the rules. They orient us to truths outside of ourselves and foster humility as we subject ourselves to realities beyond our control. | Continue reading
Was the experience of “community” in an Ohio town during Ervin’s lifetime fundamentally more compelling and authentic than has been possible after the post-war economic boom? Or should Ervin’s passion for organizing and social service be seen as an attempt to compensate for an ac … | Continue reading