Summary Filmmaker John de Graaf pulls up a chair to discuss his 1997 documentary Affluenza; a forthcoming project on Arizona politician and JFK/LBJ’s Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; the politics of beauty; and a whether John Muir should be cancelled. Singer/songwriter W … | Continue reading
I go forth strangely heartened and even hopeful that I might succeed in my attempt to describe and perhaps even explain the hill country presently looming off our port bow. | Continue reading
“Small-Town Natives Are Moving Back Home.” Gracy Olmstead writes about several college-educated young people choosing to move back to their hometowns, and she points to the work of organizations like Lead for America that are encouraging individuals to do so. “Using Commercial B … | Continue reading
Corrymeela is a dreamscape, a landscape that I marvel at every time I go out there. If conservation consists of loving something—a tract of land, a garden, a wood—then my hope is to love this land even more intensely into its full God-created glory. | Continue reading
Unfortunately, much of what is currently driving the discussion is not reason nor compassion but anger. | Continue reading
Uprooted is partly a memoir of her extended family, partly a paean to a way of life that is both dying and which she never really understood while she grew up in the midst of it (and thus feels the loss of all the more deeply now), and partly a study of the causes of that dying, … | Continue reading
That advocates of year-round DST persist says something about the evolution of American agriculture and how out of touch we collectively have become with the intractable pulse of nature. | Continue reading
“How Local History Can Save America: The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Frederick Douglass.” John W. Miller recommends an essay about the place where Frederick Douglass fought Edward Covey to a standstill. He points to it as an example of the kind of local history that can be pa … | Continue reading
At the heart of Gracy Olmstead's book is the conviction that roots do not just serve the individual person or plant—they also are vital to the health of one’s soil, place, and neighbors. | Continue reading
Even if ‘land’ is less important than actual vote share, this map does point to a very real issue at the heart of American politics: namely that majorities, specifically local majorities, matter very much in our democracy. | Continue reading
Reading the Lutheran Letters today, I cannot help but think about woke capitalism. The fundamental economic and cultural and human issues are obscured by clashes regarding discourse and slight gestures. | Continue reading
It’s time to walk out of our artificially-lit caves and get as close as we possibly can to real presence and real powerlessness, wherever and however these things come into view. | Continue reading
“Arguing with Success.” Rory Groves writes about how his dissatisfaction with the business model of the tech industry led him on a quest for more meaningful work: “Weary (and wary) of the technology industry’s addiction to obsolescence, I began to research more durable ways to wo … | Continue reading
Today I make a COVID resolution: I will learn to be more lamby-like, as Carl would say: to think like a lamb. | Continue reading
As a student of Christian history and an off-and-on conservative, I continue to be confused by the combination of Roman Catholic identity and Front Porch location. The idea of localism is not one that goes readily with the hierarchy of bishops and the universal rule of the papacy … | Continue reading
Minari is haunted by O’Connor, as Chung explores the theme of misfits and “hard to find” good men (and women) that jolt our senses toward who we truly are, including our limitations. | Continue reading
Modest and hopeful, but backed up by a lot of thought and research, Guido Preparata's work is at least a beginning. Surrounded by lies, it’s high-time we started telling another story. | Continue reading
Christian Platonism’s affirmation that we are spiritual beings who will outlive this current life, in one manner or another, lends us powerful impetus to reconsider what it means to spend life here and now in a worthwhile fashion. | Continue reading
Holly Ordway is Cardinal Francis George Fellow of Faith and Culture of the Word on Fire Institute. Her new book, the first from the new Word on Fire Academic imprint, is Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages. It’s an important work, that genuinely breaks n … | Continue reading
The Church provides a sacramental and moral framework as well as an ultimate sense of hope in The Irishman, and it is this sense of hope that is so desperately needed as we enter into the brave new world of the Biden-Harris era. | Continue reading
“Words and Flesh: Pastoring in a Post-truth World.” In this wise essay, Kurt Armstrong begins with Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which narrates the long process by which humans learned to name and narrate cancer. This story has analogu … | Continue reading
Human fertility is not the root of our problems. It is but one symptom of a deeper, more elemental problem. | Continue reading
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self draws on a deep reservoir of erudition rather than the shallow puddle of populism. | Continue reading
The longing created in the reader to want to know Jack is not easily articulated. It is difficult to admit that though we love happy endings, we are inexplicably drawn to misery. | Continue reading
“John Deere Promised Farmers It Would Make Tractors Easy to Repair. It Lied.” Jason Koebler and Matthew Gault investigate to see whether John Deere followed through with its promise to provide farmers diagnostic tools necessary to repair their tractors. It seems they have not don … | Continue reading
The best stories in the volume offer Cather-esque explorations of the links between place and people. The stories are remarkable for their dense layers, for their social, psychological, and emotional intricacies. | Continue reading
When Petrarch uses Augustine to call himself out for being bound and dragged down by the “chains of love and glory,” students are forced to consider what it is they are pursuing, in college and in life. | Continue reading
My guest this episode is Elisabeth Deane, a talented artist living and working in London with her husband Jethro Buck, also an artist. On a trip to India, Elisabeth was exposed to traditional Indian miniature painting, which led her to her life’s work. She pursued studies at the … | Continue reading
Who wins in a contest between Woke Soft Totalitarianism and White Christian Conspiracists? Nobody. But there will be many losers, not least among them Christians who fail to stand for the truth. | Continue reading
“Vermont’s Superpower, Revealed: The Ability to Practice Local Democracy.” Susan Clark writes about the formative role that Vermont’s annual town meetings play in training citizens to practice democracy. (Recommended by John McClaughry.) “Why the U.S. Needs the Romney Family Plan … | Continue reading
Is only the life of the busy and bustling place, the place of mergers and acquisitions, worthy of story and song and canvas? | Continue reading
In an age of knee-jerk innovation, the warnings articulated by Emerson and Dewey are more needed than ever. They advocated for applied knowledge, but they also insisted such technology must serve human ends. | Continue reading
Perhaps, just perhaps, COVID has restored some of the beauty and desirability of the front porch. | Continue reading
We’ve got a cover and table of contents for the spring issue of Local Culture. If you’re a subscriber, you can expect to get your copy in March. If you’re not a subscriber, what are you waiting for? “From Tech Critique to Ways of Living.” Alan Jacobs has an important new essay in … | Continue reading
There is much wisdom contained in English Pastoral for suffering churches. If the last fifty years have shown that innovation and modernization aren’t the solution to our ill-health, they have also made a nostalgic return to yesteryear an impossibility. | Continue reading
Ted Lasso offers a compelling model of a good parish priest: this fictional football coach exemplifies how to lead others with care. | Continue reading
When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting. | Continue reading
“Eric Gill and the Integrity of Work.” In a new preface to an edition of Gill’s writings, Wendell Berry identifies the endemic flaw of industrialized technology: “Under the rule of specialization, people trained to do one thing or one kind of thing produce a technological solutio … | Continue reading
Atlanta, GA. It’s been a rough few years for celebrity evangelicals. In the summer of 2019, Joshua Harris—the Calvinist pastor who became a national sensation in the late ‘90s with the publication of his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye—announced that he was splitting up both with hi … | Continue reading
Jackson, MI. Last week we hosted FPR’s first webinar, and today we’re releasing the recording of that conversation. This recording also serves as the inaugural episode of the Brass Spittoon, a new podcast from the Front Porch Republic. We’ll chew on issues timeless and timely, wi … | Continue reading
As the late historian John Lukacs would insist, all stories as we know them and retell them are remembered. This means they are, inherently, personal. John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship is no exception. | Continue reading
What about Lasch’s analysis of limits? I have in mind two contemporary cultural developments, the rise of technocracy and our extreme aversion to risk, that seem to challenge certain aspects of Lasch’s thinking. | Continue reading
“America’s Biggest Owner Of Farmland Is Now Bill Gates.” Ariel Shapiro writes about the massive consolidation of land ownership. Gates is focusing on farmland, but other billionaires own even more US land. “Everything Is Broken.” Alana Newhouse offers a sweeping diagnosis of a de … | Continue reading
This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life. | Continue reading
J. Mark Bertrand is the author of the Roland March mystery trilogy and the purveyor of the aforementioned Bible Design Blog. But Mark has seemingly been lying low the past few years, and in this podcast you’ll find out why. We explore what Mark has been up to, whether we’ll see a … | Continue reading
The Lincoln that Schaff puts forth cultivated liberal democracy by placing limits and crafting public consensus. In order to see Lincoln in a new light, Schaff applies Aristotle’s ideas of moderation and prudence as his lens. It is not simply that Lincoln knew the good, but, as a … | Continue reading
In a letter he wrote to his grandchildren, Udall challenged them to "Support all endeavors that promise a better life for the inhabitants of our planet. Cherish sunsets, wild creations and wild places. Have a love affair with the wonder and beauty of the earth.” | Continue reading
“Why I Choose Rural.” Benya Kraus explains why she chose to move to rural Minnesota after graduating from college: “Though I spent my childhood summers and winters here on the family farm, my narrative about rural life was colored by the images that dominate our media channels: a … | Continue reading