Intentional community stands as a powerful rebuke to the modern pursuit of the good life: it is not by restlessly seeking to improve our circumstances, but by committing ourselves to a place and people, that joy becomes possible. | Continue reading
Bromfield, like many farmers interested in sustainability, did not desire mere primitivism in cultivation, but a more intelligent way of farming that did not degrade the resources the farm depends upon. | Continue reading
Animal agriculture, we hear over and over, is horrific for the environment and horrific for the livestock involved. Yet most of us can’t or won’t change our ways. There may be a general sense that beef is horrible, but there is a literal sense that steak is delicious. | Continue reading
In some ways Good Husbandry stands as a kind of bildungsroman for Essex Farm and, by extension, the support-your-local-farmer movement. | Continue reading
When enough people recognize their emasculated state and demand change through the political process, then authority and resources will be given back to the local community so that people can again be responsible for their neighbors. | Continue reading
Why does Shakespeare offer us love instead of politics? Love is intimate. Love is about attachment. Love is about beauty. Love is local. | Continue reading
Tempe, AZ. “Why do soldiers miss war?” This is the provocative question at the heart of Scott Beauchamp’s essay collection Did You Kill Anyone?: Reunderstanding My Military Experience as a Crit | Continue reading
In our current moment of social media activism, we must ask ourselves what kind of learning, real learning—the kind that involves your body and takes root in your soul—can take place without embodiment? And what kind of real embodiment takes place without participating in the gri … | Continue reading
Anyone who seeks to live with integrity in a place ought to seek to know it deeply, yet such knowledge carries with it the risk of disillusionment. It is hard, not in principle but in daily experience, to continue to find joy and beauty in a place one knows to be riven by abuse a … | Continue reading
Mayweed is a persistent gift that teaches me how to thrive in unlikely places. | Continue reading
“What is Happening at Spring Arbor University?” I was informed this past week that this year will be my last at Spring Arbor University. I don’t have much to say about that for now, so I’ll l | Continue reading
Like the “good men” that Lincoln noted will give up on free government in the wake of mob rule, Hamilton warns that those who fear their rights are threatened will be prone to accept tyranny. | Continue reading
What Sanders offers might be called the imagination of hope—a means of acting to stem disaster. | Continue reading
Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio on place, the evangelical mind, and classical music. | Continue reading
Civic muscle describes a citizen-centered democracy, where citizens themselves, viewed as agents of change and not mere voters, assume much of the responsibility for the quality of our public life. | Continue reading
Houellebecq describe those aspects of our world that swarm us now, beleaguer us, pen us in. They are the products of a world suffused with technology, and of the attendant detachability of human relations. They condition the warp and woof of our social fabric. | Continue reading
While there are so-called “flyover” states, there is also a “flyover” state of mind. A road trip can help us leave that behind. | Continue reading
Evans, GA. Christian authors have been proclaiming the death of Christendom since at least 1989, when Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon made such an announcement in Resident Aliens. Thirty yea | Continue reading
Drawing from both Baldwin and Berry allows us to see that the racist and imperial policies of the past continue to do immense social, economic, cultural, and ecological damage around the globe. Racial injustice is among other things an ecological issue. | Continue reading
Before I begin to complain about the shortened season, the lack of travel to the usual hubs, the lack of live fanhood, it might be well to remember those who loved baseball with extraordinary intensity, yet for whom no season of major league baseball ever opened up its bounty. | Continue reading
What strikes me overall about The Slumbering Host is the open-heartedness, hopefulness, and steadfastness of the editors’ approach and selection. This is a collection that is true to itself and knows its own mind and plays its own music. | Continue reading
When cut into chunks, tossed with salt and some brown sugar, and then roasted all afternoon in a very low oven, perhaps with a bit of sauce for the last bit, pork belly becomes a gateway to the real. | Continue reading
Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator. | Continue reading
For readers in North America, familiar as most of us are with the history our own agrarian tradition as well as our own “seismic shift in agriculture” from the work of Berry, there emerges much from the work of Hawking as well as Bell of which we should be reminded. | Continue reading
I doubt okra tops many people’s list of garden must-haves, which is a shame since it is such a determined grower. Gardens are only guaranteed to produce one thing year in and year out: humility. | Continue reading
How might we recognize and adopt a vision for the future of agriculture inspired by the beauty and goodness of the ox-cart man? | Continue reading
Jane Kenyon was foremost a poet of place. Not of the State of New Hampshire, though she was its Poet Laureate, but of the much smaller and less abstract corner of it in and around Eagle Pond. | Continue reading
To all FPR readers living in Idaho: join Front Porch regulars John Murdock, Amanda Patchin, and Matt Stewart for light food and drinks and a friendly discussion of the last two issues of Local Cultu | Continue reading
Chris Arnade, Jared Woodard, and Sarah Hamersma on Wall Street versus Main Street. | Continue reading
As Sarah Orne Jewett knew, "everyday tasks” and the celebrations they engender are the condition upon which many other arts rest, including poetry. | Continue reading
The global middle class of Kotkin’s subtitle must unite with the working class for a new Magna Carta for the 21st Century, one that will, in Lincoln’s words, make us “independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” | Continue reading
As I try to do each year, I’ll be taking a break from the internet for a couple of weeks. FPR will continue publishing under the able guidance of Matt Stewart while I’m offline, but these weekly | Continue reading
The contributors to Free America belonged to one another and to the vision of a humane society, one founded on distributed property. Just because this vision has been drowned out by the purveyors of the bigger-is-better and the latest-is-greatest doesn’t mean a decentralist visio … | Continue reading
Hillsdale, Michigan. Which is more surprising? To read that a Great Booksy curriculum—which you, a fairly committed Protestant who tries to keep faith under wraps, happen to teach in—turns Protes | Continue reading
If I can value the inner lives and the outer well-being of animals and plants and rocks and stars, because I can see the inherent beauty and goodness that something simply is, then I can be trusted with believing myself of higher status than animals. I do not have to make myself … | Continue reading
Recently FPR's Bar Jester sat down with the Culinary Plagiarist to discuss a new book by Jason Peters, The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand. | Continue reading
“Verse Lines When the Streets Are on Fire.” James Matthew Wilson offers a stirring defense of poetry in a season of chaos: “Disease, disorder, and riot are reminders to us of the mortality and | Continue reading
Berry wrote in one of his letters to Merton that “you are one of the few whose awareness of what I’m doing here would be of value to me.” He is acknowledging that he and Merton lead lives of similar mission, lives shaped by work and silence. | Continue reading
Women like Tanya bring artistry and honor to everything they touch: the homes they inhabit, the land they steward, the children they raise. These photographs are testimony to the clear, sharp eye of a woman who is herself an artist—and who brings that artistic gaze to every endea … | Continue reading