Roosevelt delivered an oration he entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” but which the world would soon come to call “The Man in the Arena.” Every fresh reading of the speech brings something new into bold relief. | Continue reading
Caleb Stegall was one of the early guiding lights of Front Porch Republic, and his influence on the project, however distant, still endures. I've enjoyed, and learned much from, my opportunities to a | Continue reading
Of course, Amash may well not win, but that really is not the point. The prodigal son had limited hopes when he said goodbye to the pigs, but he had come to himself and he was heading home regardless. | Continue reading
To all FPR readers living in Idaho: mark your calendars to join Front Porch regulars John Murdock, Amanda Patchin, and Matt Stewart for light food and drinks and a friendly discussion of the last two | Continue reading
No man is an island, and everything we do, even in the privacy of our homes, has an effect on our society as a whole, but the past three months have shown us that the same lie that animates the Chinese government has spread and infected the West as well: the State knows best. | Continue reading
“The Great Stagnation—or Decline and Fall?” Patrick Deneen reviews Ross Douthat’s latest book with the help of Henry Adams and suggests our society is not merely decadent and stagnant—it is | Continue reading
Léon Bloy delivers satires that aim to liberate souls from cages they did not even know they occupied | Continue reading
Patrick Deneen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeff Polet respond to J.D. Vance's recent American Mind essay "End the Globalization Gravy Train" and consider the prospects for postliberal conservatism. | Continue reading
Maybe O’Connor’s narrative can teach us that people—and the places they call home, the places that form them—need not be defined by their flaws. | Continue reading
A good rule of thumb is that literature about current events is terrible. I have, however, come across two recent exceptions to this general rule. The first is James Matthew Wilson’s “Quarantine | Continue reading
The poetry in this book captures some of those everyday moments and holds them up in a light that makes possible another kind of clarity, not that of simply worded declarations on a page, but that which concerns our own selves and souls. | Continue reading
Our disregard of tradition and community has left us alienated and estranged compared to more traditional societies that rely on a web of family, community, and religion. | Continue reading
One of the arts of statesmanship is the use of language, of rhetoric, to reshape the architecture of people’s souls and orient them towards political truths. | Continue reading
Two lives, well-lived, in environments well and lovingly (dis)ordered. In the end, whether it be Monty Don walking through his gardens, or the late Umberto Eco walking past his shelves of books, I se | Continue reading
The romantic impulse toward wholeness, or the longing for when things were better—take a few bad turns in that mood, and you find yourself chanting hymns to blood-and-soil. People can start out defending Berry’s proper prejudices and end up celebrating prejudice itself. | Continue reading
“Wendell Berry.” Silas House recounts a day he spent with the Berrys last summer: “It seems to me that joy, sorrow, and affection are the three things always present in a conversation with” W | Continue reading
These are difficult times for everyone, but for some more than others. As you may know, two dams broke in mid-Michigan causing severe flooding. Some people lost their homes. Among them was occasional | Continue reading
On May 20, 1945, days after the end of World War II, my mother’s Aunt Anne was shot in both legs by a Communist gunman in Yugoslavia and left for dead. | Continue reading
Thomas’ cosmological theology was thoroughly enchanted and magical, and it is his enchanted and magical view of the cosmos that we so critically need today. | Continue reading
So long as old Christianity is treated as an aesthetic or an alternative lifestyle or a set of values contending against alienated modernity, it will never be anything more than a therapeutic commodity. But if we allow it to reckon with us, we may find ourselves snared in the gra … | Continue reading
“Christians Need the Liberal Arts Now More Than Ever.” John Fea argues that the value of a liberal arts education has been made particularly apparent by the coronavirus:A nurse can learn how | Continue reading
Front Royal, VA. “Who is the American, this new man?” Crevecoeur famously asked. Since the discovery and settlement of the continent across the Atlantic, European intellectuals have expended much | Continue reading
No matter how fallen or distant from God the world around us may seem, the distance is never absolute. | Continue reading
The whole mode of online education screams that now I must be the source of attraction. But I’m not entertaining. In fact, I’m pretty unentertaining. If you ask most of my students, they may even say I’m boring. | Continue reading
I worry about our ever-expanding cult of safety and nod in agreement with so much of sociologist Frank Furedi’s description of the “Paradox of our Safety Addiction.” He argues that “the zero risk mentality breeds a culture of anxiety and a hunger for authority.” | Continue reading
We have been thrown back into our own small worlds, but these are worlds we are free to shape. Within the household we have considerable power over how our lives our lived, what we make, and how we consume. | Continue reading
Italy’s tragic status as one of the worst-hit nations is a reminder of its predecessor, the Roman Republic, which endured dozens of epidemics in a history that lasted from 509 to 42 BC. Rome’s survival amidst so much death and disease shows how epidemics, both biological and poli … | Continue reading
We’ve been getting reports that the new issue of Local Culture is finally arriving in mailboxes. If your copy hasn’t yet come, there’s now a light at the end of the dark tunnel. We hope reade | Continue reading
It was the reaction I had seen so often in public school classrooms from teacher's pets: Conformity is always the right course. Rocking the boat is disruptive. Teachers and principals know what's best. | Continue reading
Why have we persisted in peeing outdoors well after the advent of outhouses and toilets? | Continue reading
In my elder, more invulnerable years, when the Untied States had finally established a formal E. Unibus Pluram, I was appointed by lot to assume the position of SAT (Self-Actualizing Therapist[1]) at Saint Thinkery University for Unlimited Personalized Execution. | Continue reading
While the futurists and transhumanists and purveyors of educational technologies would have us voluntarily cut off our arms so we can enjoy their fancy new prostheses, our priority should be to avoid dismembering ourselves. | Continue reading
Jay Y. Kim reflects on pastoral care during the pandemic in light of his recent book Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age. | Continue reading
“Sources for Rebuilding.” Anthony Barr reviews Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build and puts it in conversation with a variety of other voices that also celebrate those quotidian but essenti | Continue reading
In times of crisis a common fear can elicit behavior that appears similar to actions born of a commitment to the common good. | Continue reading
True, there is much on offer in the world more exciting than tromping around on the muddy bank of a creek in the middle of nowhere. I’m unlikely to convince naysayers otherwise. Deep in their hearts though, they too remember moments during which the light that shone on me at Suga … | Continue reading
The lengthy drift from family to individual as the primary social unit carries an alluring promise of autonomy and individualism which sounds so good, so freeing, but it comes up lacking in times of crisis. | Continue reading
If a human timescale—privileging our experience and our hopes—is insufficient to understand the forest, then maybe we will be provoked to reconsider both the human and forestal timescale. | Continue reading
“Regeneration.” Plough Quarterly is publishing a special digital issue over the next several weeks with responses from a very promising lineup of authors. One excellent place to start is with B | Continue reading
In Journey Films’ documentary, Dorothy Day: Revolution of the Heart, Day is reintroduced to a new audience, emphasizing Day not as a patron saint of the poor or primarily as a woman of deep Benedictine piety, but as a Christian anarchist. | Continue reading
Being wealthy doesn’t make Chouinard a better representative of the values that he shares with Berry, but recognizing that Berry is not alone and that these values can be brought into the wider world, if imperfectly, makes their embrace of limits and simplicity more compelling an … | Continue reading
Front Porch Republic readers all adhere in some ways to principles that are good and true and beautiful: local authority, productive work, and community involvement. Simply fighting against government action seems to embody none of these attributes in this crisis. | Continue reading
Says here malaria treatments work on COVID-19. | Continue reading
A quick update for subscribers to Local Culture: the printing was delayed a bit by COVID-19-related causes. However, our printer was deemed “essential,” (I’m sure because of their efforts in pr | Continue reading